Who Created Florence?
Making a Renaissance City
Webinar
Dr. Nicholas Terpstra
Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies (Interim)
Department of Italian Studies
St. Michael’s College | University of Toronto
Thursday, April 29 | 7:00PM EDT
ZOOM Webinar | Free Event
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE LECTURE ON APRIL 29
Florence stands out for many as embodying the peak of Italian Renaissance creativity. But what made it the artistic centre that we see today? Many Renaissance cities had artists, architects, authors, and musicians, but few have the reputation that Florence continues to enjoy as the place to go in order to immerse yourself in the culture of the Renaissance. To understand why, we have to go beyond the artists themselves and look at those who later collected, conserved, and (re)created the art and architecture we see today. This lecture will move from a fifteenth-century creator to a sixteenth-century collector, an eighteenth-century conservor, and a group of nineteenth-century expatriates in order to answer the question of “who created Florence” as the modern Renaissance capital that we see today.
NICHOLAS TERPSTRA
Nicholas Terpstra’s areas of interest include Renaissance and Early modern Italy and Europe; social and political history; spatial and sensory history; digital mapping.
He is currently working on spatial and sensory history in the early modern period, particularly as regards inter-communal exchange and relations. This arises out of some recent work looking at historical backgrounds to the refugee crisis: Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: 2015), and Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures (Routledge: 2019). It also intersects with a larger project to digitally map social and spatial relations in sixteenth-century Florence, known as the DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) project; see Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City (Routledge: 2016).
Much of his work has been at the intersections of politics, gender, charity, and religion. Books include Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard: 2013) which won the Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association and the Ruth Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America; Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins: 2010); Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Johns Hopkins: 2005); and Lay Confraternities and CivicnReligion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: 1995), which was awarded the Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
I have also edited a number of essay collections including Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History (Brepols: 2021); Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy (Routledge: 2019); Faith’s Boundaries: Laity & Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Brepols: 2012), The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Truman: 2008), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: 2000). A primary source reader: Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe was published with University of Toronto Press in 2019.
Presented by the Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto. Funded by Joe Di Geso, presented jointly with CIMS Ottawa.