“Renaissance Humanism and Its Economies” builds on the Seminar’s focus last year on recent scholarship on humanist beliefs and practices and their role in the political, social and cultural worlds of early modern Europe. This year we are concentrating on the ways those worlds can be understood as an economy: a system of production, distribution, and consumption governed by principles of trade and return.

“Renaissance Humanism and Its Economies” has two central goals for the year. Its first, seizing on the literal sense of its title, is to give both faculty and graduate students an opportunity for investigating contacts between Renaissance high culture and the period’s material economies. For instance, how was the humanist enterprise in northern Europe shaped by the emergence of capitalism? By shifting relations of debt and credit? By the global expansion of commerce and trade? By the nascent market for printed books? The second goal is to use the broad signifying range of the term “economy” – its reference to any system of production, distribution, and consumption governed by principles of trade and return – to provide a fresh, generative rubric for understanding a wide range of early modern thought and activity. We are interested in reading and talking about the figurative and metaphoric exchanges that characterized humanist enterprises: between Renaissance Europe and the ancients; between clients and patrons; between competing structures of scientific knowledge; and between participants in changing confessional landscapes. We anticipate that our topic will continue to attract both faculty and graduate students for lively discussion.

Past Seminars