Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies examines the transformative period roughly spanning the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, when European thinkers, artists, and political actors began reshaping inherited ideas about humanity, governance, and the natural world. Scholars working on figures like Machiavelli and the Florentine humanists trace how ancient Greek and Roman texts were recovered, reinterpreted, and put to work in the service of new political theories, civic ideals, and artistic programs—most visibly in the city-states of Florence and Venice. Active debates concern how broadly the Renaissance's celebrated achievements were actually shared: who had access to humanist learning, how gender shaped participation in civic and intellectual life, and whether the period's apparent rupture with the medieval past reflects genuine transformation or the selective self-presentation of a literate elite. Understanding this era remains consequential because so many modern assumptions about individuality, secular politics, and the relationship between art and public life trace their origins—however messily—back to it.

Works

217,306

Total citations

214,279

Keywords

Renaissance FlorenceItalian RenaissanceMachiavelliHumanismFlorentine PoliticsArt and Architecture