Faculty Member, History
Professor of History
Victoria College
About
My work deals with the intersection of religion, politics, and charity in Renaissance and early modern Italy, with a focus on the institutional forms of civil society. A lot of it ends up dealing with people on the margins or the underside of society (orphans, abandoned children, widows, criminals, exiles, etc.) and looking both at how they negotiated their situations in urban society, and how those urban societies aimed to deal with them. Recent books include Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (2010) and Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (2005). An earlier book, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (1995), was awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
I've also edited a few books, including The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (2008), and The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (2000).
Contact Information
| Telephone: |
416-585-4428 |
