"What's Killing the Girls of the Pietà: The Lost Girls of Renaissance Florence" is the topic of a public lecture by Nicholas Terpstra, chair of history at the University of Toronto, at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 3, at Coastal Carolina University.

The public lecture will be held in Room 136 of the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts. A reception will follow in the Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery.

A shelter for abandoned girls opens in Florence in 1554, and within months dozens of girls are entering. Yet dozens of girls are also dying -- over the next 15 years, hundreds of adolescent girls will die at the Casa della Pietà (House of Compassion). What kind of compassion leads to this number of deaths?

Terpstra, editor of Renaissance Quarterly, explores the lives of orphaned and abandoned children, criminals, prostitutes, widows and the poor in the cities of renaissance Italy. What place did they have in civil society, and how did they survive -- or not? His most recent book, "Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy" (Harvard University Press: 2013) won the American Historical Association's Marraro Prize and the Renaissance Society of America's Goodhart Gordan Prize. He has also published books on executions, care of abandoned children, confraternities, social capital and civil society.

His forthcoming book, "Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation," (Cambridge University Press) explores why the religious refugee emerged as a mass phenomenon in the 15th and 16th centuries, and how much the refugee experience shaped early modern culture generally.

Terpsta's talk is sponsored by the Lawrence B. and Jane P. Clark Endowed Chair in History and CCU's Department of Visual Arts. For more information call Eliza Glaze at 843-234-3462.