Speaker: Nick Terpstra, History, U of T; Provost, Trinity College., Wednesday Talk: March 25, 2026, 2pm-4pm, Faculty Club and Zoom – hybrid
March 25 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Speaker: Nick Terpstra, History, U of T; Provost, Trinity College.
Title: “Moving Targets: Young People in the Early Modern World”
Abstract: 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.
Bio: I’m Professor of History and Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. I work on early modern social history, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity, above all those dealing with the experience of people at the margins, like orphans, abandoned children, youths, widows, criminals, refugees, and the poor. I’m currently exploring how a focus on global dynamics and the experiences of migrants and refugees can give us a different view of periods or movements like the Renaissance and Reformation, how space and sense intersected in early modern (roughly 1500-1800) cities, and how people in that period tried to live with neighbours that they really didn’t like.
Some publications in these areas include Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard: 2013) which won the Howard R Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association and the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America; Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins: 2010); Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: 2015); and Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: 2024).
I’m also involved in digitally mapping the spatial and sensory dimensions of social life through the DECIMA project, an on-line digital map that tracks occupation, gender, and wealth in Renaissance Florence. We’re working to produce a map that conveys what it was like to walk around the city, hearing its sounds and moving through its spaces. See: N. Terpstra & C. Rose (ed), Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City (Routledge, 2016).
The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/EcZvXHzXUP
The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Linda Hutcheon at l.hutcheon@utoronto.ca.
