With social historian Nicholas Terpstra, professor at University of Toronto, we go into the problem of drawing out erased voices of the past, a conversation mediated by manuscripts and transposed over time. We focus our attention on the case of a Renaissance orphanage for young girls, The Pieta, where the girls were dying in frighteningly high numbers. That conversation is filled with a panoply of sources from a broad company of figures: women and men, surviving orphans, caretakers, bookkeepers, patricians and tax officials. With writers fulfilling different roles, and spurred on by different motives, the reader of manuscripts has to suss out who is diligent and reliable, and who evasive or silent. Beyond what is expressly said, we learn an attentive reader has to fill in the gaps of manuscripts gone missing (or recycled), and that the physicality of manuscripts can sometimes help elaborate on these questions. Nick, who has spent his career giving voice to the voiceless in history, takes us along these conversations, which became an ongoing back-and-forth between the girls, caretakers, and officials of Renaissance Florence, and himself, his research assistants (like me) and other collaborators today.
Of Nick`s numerous works, we refer to Abandoned Children of the Renaissance, The Art of Executing Well, Lost Girls, Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe and his digital humanities project, DECIMA, which contributed to the suite of smartphone apps (Hidden Cities) that present historical walking tours of early modern cities.
Nick recommends… a novel, a memoir and a popular history: The Children`s Book (2009) by A.S. Byatt, where you`ll get totally transfixed by the interconnections of families in England as the First World War advances; an astonishing memoir of the Holocaust, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (2010); and Vermeer`s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the World (2009), by China historian Tim Brook, who tells the history of global trade, taking off from a painting of Vermeer in each chapter.
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