List of illustrations
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Introduction: The Renaissance Question
William Caferro
Part I: Disciplines and Boundaries
1 - The ‘Economic’ Thought of the Renaissance
Germano Maifredi
2 - A Makeshift Renaissance: North India in the "Long" Fifteenth Century
Samira Sheikh (Vanderbilt University)
3 - ‘By Imitating Our Nurses:’ Latin and Vernacular in the Renaissance
Eugenio Refini
4 - Individualism and the Separation of Fields of Study
William Caferro
5 - Riddles of Renaissance Philosophy and Humanism
Timothy Kircher
Part II: Encounters and Transformations
6 - Raw Materials and Object Lessons
Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts
7 - Imagination and the Remains of Roman Antiquity
Will Stenhouse
8 - Sporus in the Renaissance, or The Eunuch as Straight Man
Katherine Crawford
9 - Heritable Identity Markers, Nations and Physiognomy
Carina Johnson
10 - Biondo Flavio on Ethiopia: Processes of Knowledge Production in the Renaissance
Samantha Kelly
11 - Traditions of Byzantine Astrolabes in Renaissance Europe
Darin Hayton
12 - Reading Machiavelli in Sixteenth Century Florence
Ann Moyer
Part III: Society and Environment
13 - Why Visit the Shops: Taking up Shopping as a Pastime
Susan Stuard
14 - Throwing Aristotle from the Train: Women and Humanism
Sarah Ross
15 - Mechanisms for Unity: Plagues and Saints
Biography
William Caferro is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His research has focused primarily on economy and violence in medieval and Renaissance Italy, and most recently on Dante and Empire. His latest book, Contesting The Renaissance (2011), traces the meaning and use of the term "Renaissance" in the major debates of the historiography. He is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) and is foreign fellow of the Deputazione di Storia Patria di Toscana and l'Associazione di Studi Storici Elio Conti.
"William Caferro has assembled an excellent field of scholars representing a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives in the The Routledge History of the Renaissance. Focusing on the disciplinary origins of Renaissance practices, encounters and transformations, social histories of various stripes, and the articulation of power, the volume is at once a summing up of some of the best recent work in the field and a stimulus to further thinking and scholarship. It should be an essential tool for anyone working or teaching in the field of Renaissance and early modern culture broadly conceived."
Christopher S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University, USA
"This imaginatively structured book is a work of outstanding originality. Scholars of all generations have contributed to a compendium which ranges across disciplines and approaches – an exemplary kaleidoscope of current scholarship. From novices to veterans, all students of the Renaissance who read this marvellous work will emerge with their horizons broadened and their understanding deepened."
Peter Denley, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
"This mosaic of essays uncovers the diversity of issues, cultures, polities, and economies that continue to make the study of the Renaissance a fascinating and contentious category in early modern studies. Scholars and newcomers to the field will discover excursions that guide them to new vantage points on the Renaissance in a global context."
Caroline Castiglione, Brown University, USA
