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How do we understand the awful violence of the gospel story of the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2: 16-18)? Why did plays, paintings, and stories depicting the slaughter of Bethlehem’s babies by King Herod’s soldiers multiply across Europe in the fifteenth century, often conveyed with an extraordinary brutality that still takes our breath away? Some saw the deaths of these children as a betrayal by rulers, governments, fathers, and even by God. We’ll explore how their anger and anxiety shifted from medieval into the early modern period and how it continues to resonate today.
The Division of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies' 37th Annual Town and Gown Lecture will host Nicholas Terpstra, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and President of the Renaissance Society of America. Terpstra works on intersections of politics, gender, religion, and charity in early modern social history and particularly on the experience of people at the margins, like orphans, abandoned children, youths, widows, criminals, refugees, and the poor.