Renaissance Studies

This is a graduate seminar that treats the Renaissance less as a fixed historical period and more as a contested idea — tracing how scholars from Burckhardt through Kristeller, Garin, and Baron built (and then dismantled) the grand narrative of "emergent modernity." You'll work through dense historiography week by week, write a take-home midterm and a term paper, and engage with debates ranging from civic humanism in Florence to Mediterranean court cultures and pre-Reformation theology. It's a reading-heavy seminar aimed at students who already know early modern Europe's basics and want to learn how the field itself was constructed, which is essential groundwork before writing original research on any humanist, ecclesiastical, or aesthetic topic in the period.