Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies examines the period roughly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European—and especially Italian—cities like Florence and Venice became laboratories for new ideas about politics, human dignity, art, and the nature of civic life. Scholars work across disciplines to understand how thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilio Ficino reshaped inherited traditions from classical antiquity, and how those ideas moved through painting, architecture, literature, and institutional practice. Active debates continue over how much the Renaissance represented a genuine rupture with the medieval past versus a gradual transformation, and how its celebrated ideals of humanism and civic virtue were distributed across lines of gender, class, and geography. Understanding this era matters in part because so many modern assumptions about the state, the individual, and the arts trace their genealogy, rightly or wrongly, to arguments first worked out in Florentine council chambers and Venetian academies.

Works

215,927

Total citations

213,556

Keywords

Renaissance FlorenceItalian RenaissanceMachiavelliHumanismFlorentine PoliticsArt and Architecture