Dorinda Outram

A Review of “A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment”

As Terpstra’s narrative unwinds, more and more of the hazards faced by these girls and young women are revealed. Many of the Pietà’s residents arrived already malnourished and ill. They found the hospice to be crowded and the work onerous. The Pietà could not fully protect them from the threats they had faced on the streets of Florence, including rape, pregnancy, and syphilis; treatments for the latter appear in a recipe book tucked in amongst hospice accounts. He concludes that, together, all of these elements were to blame for the hospice’s shocking level of mortality: “The Pietà had a high death rate because it welcomed the dying—girls in bad health and with little future” (173). Terpstra’s study of this unique and tragic institution, founded and run by women affiliated with the Savonarolan reform movement, provides him with a departure point for a broader examination of the urban social ills of prostitution, unwanted pregnancy, and disease. This work is accessible to the general Renaissance student, and it responds to and enhances recent scholarship on a dizzying range of topics, including women’s work in textiles (especially silk), prostitution and sexuality, and the history of disease and medicine, especially recent texts on syphilis in Venice and Germany by Laura McGough (Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Claudia Stein (Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany; Ashgate, 2009), respectively. The author’s employ of modern jargon such as “john” and “red light district” may strike some readers as jarring and anachronistic. However, such terminology serves to highlight the chilling parallel between his tale of poverty, work, disease, and the sexual exploitation of lower class Renaissance women and the gamut run by all too many women of the contemporary working global poor who surrender their pride, bodies, and lives to sweatshops and the sex trade.

An enlightenment view of school health

THIS 18TH-CENTURY COPPER engraving by Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki was published in Methodenbuch fur Vater und Mutter der Familien und Volker (Textbook for Fathers and Mothers of Families and Others) in 1770. The book was written by Johann Bernard Basedow, one of a new breed of professional educators during the European Enlightenment whose ranks also included Pestalozzi and Rousseau.1 These Enlightenment educators gained their authority not only from their innovative ideas, but from producing and selling educational books, tutoring political leaders, and, above all, by setting up institutions that embodied their new educational ideals. One such institution was Philanthropins, established by Basedow in eastern Germany in 1774 for the purpose of educating students from all over Europe in an atmosphere of religious tolerance.