Lost Girls

Nicholas Terpstra uses the puzzling deaths of teenaged girls in a Florentine asylum for the poor to take us into many surprising corners in the life of working people, and especially women, in that sixteenth-century city-sexual, medical, religious, and more. A fascinating Renaissance mystery story and a wonderful read! -- Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre This is history with a decidedly human face. The author's vivid descriptions of urban life and its material realities are unsurpassed. It's no exaggeration to say that this book makes the streets of Renaissance Florence come alive like no other. -- Sharon T. Strocchia, author of Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence

Terpstra's meticulous investigation not only uncovers the sad fate of the lost girls of the Casa della Pieta but explores broader themes, including gender relations, public health, church politics, and the challenges girls and adolescent women faced in Renaissance Florence.In 1554, a group of idealistic laywomen founded a home for homeless and orphaned adolescent girls in one of the worst neighborhoods in Florence. Of the 526 girls who lived in the home during its fourteen-year tenure, only 202 left there alive. Struck by the unusually high mortality rate, Nicholas Terpstra sets out to determine what killed the lost girls of the House of Compassion shelter (Casa della Pieta). Reaching deep into the archives' letters, ledgers, and records from both inside and outside the home, he slowly pieces together the tragic story. The Casa welcomed girls in bad health and with little future, hoping to save them from an almost certain life of poverty and drudgery. Yet this "safe" house was cruelly dangerous. Victims of Renaissance Florence's sexual politics, these young women were at the disposal of the city's elite men, who treated them as property meant for their personal pleasure. With scholarly precision and journalistic style, Terpstra uncovers and chronicles a series of disturbing leads that point to possible reasons so many girls died: hints of routine abortions, basic medical care for sexually transmitted diseases, and appalling conditions in the textile factories where the girls worked. Church authorities eventually took the Casa della Pieta away from the women who had founded it and moved it to a better part of Florence. Its sordid past was hidden, until now, in an official history that bore little resemblance to the orphanage's true origins. Terpstra's meticulous investigation not only uncovers the sad fate of the lost girls of the Casa della Pieta but also explores broader themes, including gender relations, public health, church politics, and the challenges girls and adolescent women faced in Renaissance Florence.