Oxford Centre for European History Special Annual Lecture 2023: Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto) 'Tracing Paths: Finding Young People in the Early Modern World'

Where do we find youths in the early modern world?  Where did they find themselves?  Often it was on the road or on the seas, in motion from home to some other place or places, and seldom entirely by choice.  As we become more curious about global history and to seeing how early modern Europeans (ie., roughly 16th to 18th centuries) encountered the world and were shaped by it, we’re drawn to the intersections of this mobility with gender and with race.  Much of what was new in early modern experience came first to and through young people, often as the involuntary agents of broader social and economic forces.  In this lecture, I’ll focus first on a few individuals or groups of young people from different parts of the world who demonstrate some of these realities.  I’ll then pull back and ask some broader questions about why it’s hard to capture and understand the experience of young people at that time, and also why looking more closely at these youths might reshape our understanding of the early modern period more generally.

For more information and to book a place see https://oceh.history.ox.ac.uk/event/tracing-paths-finding-young-people-early-modern-world-nicholas-terpstra-university-toronto or email oceh@history.ox.ac.uk

Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto.  He works on Renaissance and early modern social history, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity, above all those that deal with marginalized individuals and groups.  Publications 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 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America and Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins: 2010).  He is currently developing the DECIMA project, an on-line digital map tracking spatial and sensory dimensions of social life in Florence and exploring early modern cross-cultural religious encounters and the experiences of religious refugees.  Recent works include Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: 2015) and the Global Reformations essay collection and sourcebook (Routledge 2019 & 2021).