The case study essay outlines a student project using orphanage records from early modern France in a manner that helps students to frame historical questions and make preliminary conclusions about how these silent masses of children lived at the margins of society during the period. echo [more]

Much of early modern Europe saw increasing numbers of abandoned children, and new institutions designed to care for them. Published notarial documents, such as the two excerpted here, allow a glimpse into the fortunes of individual orphaned children… [more]