Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies traces the transformation of European thought, politics, and visual culture roughly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular attention to how figures like Machiavelli and Marsilio Ficino reshaped ideas about power, virtue, and the human place in the cosmos. Scholars examine how city-states such as Florence and Venice became laboratories for new forms of civic life, patronage networks, and artistic production, asking how material conditions and intellectual ambition reinforced or undermined each other. Active debates continue around whose voices shaped Renaissance culture — including the often-overlooked contributions of women writers, merchants, and non-elite artisans — and how deeply the period's celebrated individualism was entangled with exclusion and inequality. Researchers are also reassessing how connected this supposedly European phenomenon actually was to Ottoman, Byzantine, and North African intellectual currents, pushing the field toward a more genuinely global account of early modernity.

Works

225,717

Total citations

215,697

Keywords

Renaissance FlorenceItalian RenaissanceMachiavelliHumanismFlorentine PoliticsArt and Architecture