The Renaissance
Last update: 03 Jun 2026 09:39First version: Apparently between 1 April and 2 May 2003
An inadequate placeholder, on a topic where I am in no way qualified to have opinions. (And thereby differing from the rest of these notebooks, how, exactly?)
- See also:
- Demonology
- Early Modern Europe [a superset of the Renaissance]
- Erasmus
- Lucretius
- Ottoman Empire
- Magic
- Reception and Appropriations of Classical Culture
- the Scientific Revolution
- The Witch Craze
- Recommended, big picture:
- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
- John R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance [Pun, and play on Burckhardt, not only intended but appropriate]
- Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy
- Recommended, close-ups (rather misc.):
- Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance
- Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1450--1630
- Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past
- Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250--1600
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
- S. A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 These (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems
- Walter Ferguson et al., The Renaissance: Six Essays
- Anthony Grafton
- John R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450--1620
- Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
- Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance [More a collection of examples illustrating the rise of "bravura consumerism," and how it tied in to all the other fun stuff, than a really new history]
- Jay A. Levenson (ed.), Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration [Wonderful survey of world art in the Renaissance, worth the price just for the pictures]
- Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought
- Robert Mandrou, From Human to Science, 1480--1700
- Oystein Ore, Cardano, the Gambling Scholar
- John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400--1434", [American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1259--1319
- Ada Palmer, "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance", Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 395--416 [Interview with Palmer by my friend and co-author Henry Farrell]
- Erwin Panofsky, Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer
- Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery
- George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance [author's self-presentation]
- Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns
- H. R. Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays
- Ruldof and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution
- Recommended, not seriously:
- Sergio Rinaldi, "Laura and Petrarch: An Intruiging Case of Cyclical Love Dynamics," SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics 58 (1998): 1205--1221
- Recommended, primary sources:
- Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
- Sir Thomas Browne
- Religio Medici
- Urn Burial
- Garden of of Cyrus
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostickes & severall cures of it. In three Partitions, with their severall Sections, members & subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically opened & cut-up by Democritus Junior. With a Satyricall Preface conducing to the following Discourse
- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discoures on Livy [I recommend the translation by Wootton]
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays
- To read, primary:
- Nicholas Cusanus, De Docta Ignorantia [Translation currently in print as Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance]
- Tasso
- To read, secondary:
- Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Durer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist
- Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
- Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy
- Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1450--1630
- William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550--1640
- Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
- Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence
- Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods
- Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy
- Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning
- Rosalie L. Colle, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox
- Brian P. Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory
- Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth
- Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance
- Brendan Dooley, Morandi's Last Prophecy and the End of Renaissance Politics
- Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution
- Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art
- Paolo Galluzzi, The Italian Renaissance of Machines
- A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic
- Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance
- Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300--1600
- Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many?
- Anthony Grafton
- Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation
- Defenders of the Text
- Forgers and Critics
- Leon Battista Alberti
- and Nancy Sirasi (eds.), Natural Particulars
- Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance
- Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West
- Robert S. Kinsman (ed.), The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason
- Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy
- Kristeller, Marsilio Ficino
- Katherine Crawford Luber, Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance
- Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300--1600
- Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life
- Armando Maggi
- John Martin, Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City
- Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for Renaissance Florence
- George T. Matthews (ed.), News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe: The Fugger Newsletters
- H. C. Erik Midelfort, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany
- Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera
- Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
- Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen (eds.), Difference & Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser, The Patron's Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art
- Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy
- Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
- Erwin Panofsky
- Perspective as Symbolic Form
- Renaissance and Reanscences in Western Art
- Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in Art
- Walter Pater, The Renaissance
- Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
- Todd W. Reeser, Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance
- Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England
- Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome
- Deborah K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture
- Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Reanissance Humanism and Art
- Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine
- J. K. J. Thomson, Decline in History: The European Experience
- Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy
- Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance = De præstigiis dæmonum
- Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature
- Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition