THE CENTER FOR RENAISSANCE STUDIES (CRS) at the Newberry Library in Chicago is celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2019. The center was founded in 1979 by Counter-Reformation historian John Tedeschi in order to promote research and scholarly activities at the library, whose rich holdings in medieval and Renaissance studies had already been inspiring scholars since the arrival on staff in 1949 of noted historian Hans Baron. The CRS has always aimed to provide a place for students and faculty to take classes, work with sources, and enjoy collaborations that would not have been possible at their institutions or on an individual basis. Over the years and thanks to subsequent directors and acting directors (Mary Beth Rose, Clark Hulse, Raymond Clemens, Carla Zecher, and Karen Christianson), the center grew to include some fifty universities in its consortium throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. Each year the center now hosts three or four symposia, a graduate student conference, numerous workshops and courses, lectures, scholarly seminars, and vernacular paleography institutes. The center also develops and supports digital humanities projects and the Newberry’s fellowship program. What the CRS has accomplished over the years is largely due to the Newberry’s enthusiastic community and the growth of its other research centers, now under the umbrella of the Newberry’s Institute for Research and Education. As I enter my fourth year as director of the center, I am poised to reflect on the future of the field of Renaissance studies as seen through the activities at the library and the center. I should note that by “Renaissance studies” I mean “premodern studies,” since our center encompasses medieval, Renaissance, baroque, colonial, and early
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PONDERING WHAT TO WRITE for this special cluster, I was jump-started by reminiscences from rather an unlikely quarter. Niall Ferguson’s June 23, 2019, Sunday Times obituary of the maverick historian Norman Stone, in which Ferguson recounted the reasoning behind his choice of German twentieth-century history as the subject area for his dissertation at Oxford in the mid-1980s, claimed there were three language choices for budding historians wanting to study European history: Russian (for the Cold War), Italian (for the Renaissance), and German. And the reason he gave for not learning Italian was: “I knew there was no future in the Renaissance.” In terms of academic jobs in England, Ferguson was right. Famously, the last academic job in Italian Renaissance history for over thirty years was advertised in 1978. Oxford—never a center for Italian Renaissance studies—also suffered historically from a surfeit of masculinity, and way before academic positions dried up, male students were steered away from Renaissance subjects. Denys Hay, a historian of Renaissance Italy, famously recalled that when, in 1936, he said he wanted to take the Italian Renaissance special subject, his tutor said “that only girls did that: I was to concentrate on the manly Middle Ages.” Sandwiched between the more acceptable Middle Ages and the more job-oriented twentieth century, the Renaissance was relegated to the bloody-minded and determined, who had to make their way upstream against this choppy current as best they could. Choosing to work on Italian Renaissance history effectively entailed extra dollops ofwhat would nowbe termed anxiety-inducing disappointments and failures. Interview panels at every job interview I have ever had for positions on three continents have tried to force me to say that the Renaissance was finished and I was really an early modernist—and I always refused.
{"title":"Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Future of Italian Renaissance History","authors":"K. Lowe","doi":"10.1086/705469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705469","url":null,"abstract":"PONDERING WHAT TO WRITE for this special cluster, I was jump-started by reminiscences from rather an unlikely quarter. Niall Ferguson’s June 23, 2019, Sunday Times obituary of the maverick historian Norman Stone, in which Ferguson recounted the reasoning behind his choice of German twentieth-century history as the subject area for his dissertation at Oxford in the mid-1980s, claimed there were three language choices for budding historians wanting to study European history: Russian (for the Cold War), Italian (for the Renaissance), and German. And the reason he gave for not learning Italian was: “I knew there was no future in the Renaissance.” In terms of academic jobs in England, Ferguson was right. Famously, the last academic job in Italian Renaissance history for over thirty years was advertised in 1978. Oxford—never a center for Italian Renaissance studies—also suffered historically from a surfeit of masculinity, and way before academic positions dried up, male students were steered away from Renaissance subjects. Denys Hay, a historian of Renaissance Italy, famously recalled that when, in 1936, he said he wanted to take the Italian Renaissance special subject, his tutor said “that only girls did that: I was to concentrate on the manly Middle Ages.” Sandwiched between the more acceptable Middle Ages and the more job-oriented twentieth century, the Renaissance was relegated to the bloody-minded and determined, who had to make their way upstream against this choppy current as best they could. Choosing to work on Italian Renaissance history effectively entailed extra dollops ofwhat would nowbe termed anxiety-inducing disappointments and failures. Interview panels at every job interview I have ever had for positions on three continents have tried to force me to say that the Renaissance was finished and I was really an early modernist—and I always refused.","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":"58 1","pages":"319 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90285696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IN A BRIEF, SATIRICAL PIECE published in 2009—“Old Debates Recycled”— Edward Muir imagined a bleak future for the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies. In the year 2049, the history department of the fictional SocratoConfucian University ignores the impassioned urging of the last specialist in the field to replace him upon his retirement, in preference for hiring a historian of fusion music. One implication of this thought experiment was that the field of fifteenthand sixteenth-century European history, while actually having important lessons to teach a world riven by sectarian and partisan divides, seems increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the twenty-first-century university. Concern about the relevance of the history of the Renaissance was hardly new, as the title of Muir’s piece acknowledged in its doubled meaning. Forty years ago, William Bouwsma pronounced a public obituary on old arguments for its significance in the form of the American Historical Association’s 1978 presidential address, as well (although this seems more readily forgotten) as proposing new ones. Bouwsma’s suggestion for the continuing relevance of the Renaissance lay in his assertion that the period was defined by recognition of the contingency and plurality of human culture. While he expressed bewilderment at the concept of postmodernity, his claim has strong affinities with Randolph Starn’s articulation of a “Postmodern Renaissance” some thirty years later. Starn proposed that postmodernism offered a clear opportunity to scholars of the Renaissance—which was itself defined by pluralism, fragmentation,
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FOR GIAMBATTISTA VICO in his Principi di scienza nuova (1744), academies represented the culmination of human civilization. His view has not always been shared, but, especially since the new millennium, academies have attracted growing international scholarly interest as cultural and sociopolitical hubs central to forming knowledge across all disciplines of the arts and sciences. Their study as a scholarly field in their own right was given new impetus around 1980 by Amedeo Quondam, Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Laetitia Boehm, Ezio Raimondi, and Gino Benzoni, and in the Anglosphere by Frances Yates and Eric Cochrane. This coincided with a growing sociohistorical interest in associative and relational culture, setting aside Burckhardtian concerns for the individual. More recently, the field has diversified considerably to include interest in cultural mobilities and transnational networks, while the availability of digital resources offers new research possibilities. The groundwork for studying these rather loosely defined institutions that proliferated in the Italian peninsula and beyond from around the turn of the sixteenth century was first laid out with Michele Maylender’s multivolume compendium Storia delle accademie d’Italia (published posthumously, 1926–30). This documents over two thousand academies of varying constitutions formed at various dates but
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Trivellato, Francesca, “Economic and Business History as Cultural History: Pitfalls and Possibilities,” in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 22, no. 2 (2019): 402-410.
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TO ASK ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD of Renaissance studies is, now, to ask whether it will have one, not because of any characteristics inherent to the field itself, but because we face the question of whether human beings and the ecologies we live and work in have a future. As I write, the temperature in southern France this week is expected to reach 457C (1137F). Unprecedented quantities of rain in the midwestern United States have made it impossible for farmers to get their crops into the ground. Extreme weather events are becoming ever more common, repeatedly taking a huge human and material toll. As a result—to name just one effect on our field—the Renaissance Society of America meeting was moved this year from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Toronto. As Renaissance scholars we cannot look away much longer, as rising sea levels threaten Venice and other historic sites. Meanwhile, drought renders other regions uninhabitable, and wars are fought over ever scarcer natural resources. I write this essay, therefore, not to suggest the best way to chase methodological trends, not to provide readers with an obligatory syllabus that you’ll have to race to keep up with in order to stay or become “cutting edge.”What we needmight actually be a little less of the cutting edge (it’s been suggested that a shorter work week would help slow carbon emissions). I write this essay as a plea: we need to be in climate crisis mode. That means we need to refashion our relationship to our work and systems of knowledge not only to reduce individual consumption of carbon fuels or to accommodate change as it
{"title":"What Future?","authors":"R. Zorach","doi":"10.1086/705436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705436","url":null,"abstract":"TO ASK ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD of Renaissance studies is, now, to ask whether it will have one, not because of any characteristics inherent to the field itself, but because we face the question of whether human beings and the ecologies we live and work in have a future. As I write, the temperature in southern France this week is expected to reach 457C (1137F). Unprecedented quantities of rain in the midwestern United States have made it impossible for farmers to get their crops into the ground. Extreme weather events are becoming ever more common, repeatedly taking a huge human and material toll. As a result—to name just one effect on our field—the Renaissance Society of America meeting was moved this year from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Toronto. As Renaissance scholars we cannot look away much longer, as rising sea levels threaten Venice and other historic sites. Meanwhile, drought renders other regions uninhabitable, and wars are fought over ever scarcer natural resources. I write this essay, therefore, not to suggest the best way to chase methodological trends, not to provide readers with an obligatory syllabus that you’ll have to race to keep up with in order to stay or become “cutting edge.”What we needmight actually be a little less of the cutting edge (it’s been suggested that a shorter work week would help slow carbon emissions). I write this essay as a plea: we need to be in climate crisis mode. That means we need to refashion our relationship to our work and systems of knowledge not only to reduce individual consumption of carbon fuels or to accommodate change as it","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"421 - 428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78682551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Al di là dei confini","authors":"L. Bolzoni","doi":"10.1086/705504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705504","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":"279 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75591714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EXHIB IT ING MICHELANGELO Until 1849, the Parisian Museum of the Renaissance presented Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave (1513–15)—the two almost finished captives created for Pope Julius II’s famously unfinished tomb—as the centerpiece of a carefully curated selection of French and Italian sculpture, culminating in the work of Napoleon’s favorite neoclassical sculptor, the recently deceased Venetian artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822). The two sculptures arrived in the museum in 1793, confiscated from the widow of Cardinal Richelieu’s descendant, as the Louvre opened its doors to the nation. Michelangelo called the two captives “prisoners” (prigioni). After their migration to France in themid-sixteenth century, theywere described in 1624 as “Michelangelo’s
{"title":"The Museum’s Renaissance Revisited: Histories, Objects, Exhibits","authors":"P. Findlen","doi":"10.1086/705517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705517","url":null,"abstract":"EXHIB IT ING MICHELANGELO Until 1849, the Parisian Museum of the Renaissance presented Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave (1513–15)—the two almost finished captives created for Pope Julius II’s famously unfinished tomb—as the centerpiece of a carefully curated selection of French and Italian sculpture, culminating in the work of Napoleon’s favorite neoclassical sculptor, the recently deceased Venetian artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822). The two sculptures arrived in the museum in 1793, confiscated from the widow of Cardinal Richelieu’s descendant, as the Louvre opened its doors to the nation. Michelangelo called the two captives “prisoners” (prigioni). After their migration to France in themid-sixteenth century, theywere described in 1624 as “Michelangelo’s","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"295 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88249318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WHAT DID CHRIST LOOK LIKE? Nowhere does the Bible describe his physical features. Silence conceals his appearance. To supplement scripture, miraculously created images of him emerged early on and, alongside them, written records with purported eyewitness authority. Carried by legend through the centuries, these testimonials have, ironically, turned the Bible’s invisible man into the figure most frequently portrayed and widely recognized in all Christendom. One such witness is the so-called “Letter from Lentulus,” believed to have been sent by a contemporary of Christ in Judea to the Roman Senate, so they could know what the remarkable prophet looked like. That apocryphal missive, probably dating from eighthcentury Byzantium, came to enjoy enormous popularity in medieval and Renaissance Europe, preserved in countless manuscripts and print editions, both Latin and vernacular. To enhance the simple text, most often in prose, devout Christians adapted it into rhyme, an artistic expression of veneration. Among them was the
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