Center for Renaissance Studies Programs | Newberry

Center for Renaissance Studies Programs

Pentecost

Pentecost. Case MS 185, f. 10

The Center for Renaissance Studies works with an international consortium of universities in North America and Europe. It offers a wide range of scholarly programs and digital and print publications based in the Newberry collections, and provides a locus for a community of scholars who come from all over the world to use the library’s early manuscripts, printed books, and other materials.


Faculty and graduate students from consortium institutions may be eligible to apply for Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grants to travel to the Newberry to attend programs or do research. Through our reciprocal arrangement with the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C., which also works with a consortium of universities, Institute seminar fees are waived for faculty and graduate students at Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies schools upon acceptance of application.


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2022-2023 Programming Brochure

Upcoming Programs

Thursday, September 22, 2022 – Thursday, December 1, 2022
Boethian Abolition
By exploring the potential alignment between a premodern philosophical structure and modern police and prison abolition, this course offers a new way for medieval archives to support racial justice.
Friday, September 30, 2022 – Saturday, October 1, 2022
Attending to Women, 1100-1800: Performance
In 2018, “Attending” asked how Early Modern women’s action and agency shaped their lives and world. In 2022, we will turn to performance, asking how women’s performances of power, gender, and art before 1800 provide powerful paths towards understanding their lives and our own today.
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Center for Renaissance Studies Programs
An Italian Renaissance Diva’s Take on Love, Marriage, and Philosophy
In-person event - register now
Actors from the Shakespeare Project of Chicago will perform excerpts from Andreini’s Lovers’ Debates and Letters. Following the performance, a roundtable discussion with scholars Pamela Allen Brown, Julie Campbell, Paola De Santo, Caterina Mongiat Farina, and Eric Nicholson will explore the recent translation and analysis of Andreini’s work.
Friday, October 7, 2022
Virtual Book Launch: Rivall Friendship
For decades, the Newberry Library has been home for a manuscript copy of a seventeenth-century romance entitled Rivall Friendship. Since it was acquired, the author of this work was unknown. But in a new edition (ACMRS Press, 2021) of the work, supported by a Newberry Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award, Jean R.
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Mexican Futures in a Post-Pandemic World: Religious Visions in Two Colonial Maps
A Processing the Pandemic Virtual Seminar
What visions for the future emerged in the aftermath of the devastating epidemics of the sixteenth century? In this virtual seminar, attendees will explore this question by discussing two colonial maps from Mexico, one Indigenous and one Spanish, that present competing answers.
Friday, October 14, 2022 – Friday, May 12, 2023
2022-2023 Dissertation Seminar: Violence
This seminar provides an interdisciplinary, supportive community for graduate students in the early stages of dissertation preparation who are examining violence and social conflict in the early modern world (ca. 1400-1700).
Friday, October 21, 2022
Uncovering Medieval Manuscripts in Early Modern Books
This workshop will serve as an introduction to the growing field of fragmentology, which explores the stories of medieval manuscript pages and fragments that have been separated from their original context. Participants will consider the presence and function of medieval fragments in the bindings, endleaves, and tabs of early modern books.
Friday, November 4, 2022
Introduction to the Critical Study of Race in the Middle Ages
This workshop introduces participants to the conceptual foundations, recent conversations, and possible futures of the critical study of race in the Middle Ages. The instructors will discuss the development of this burgeoning field through its intellectual genealogies within medieval studies, while also attending to the political commitments that orient its methods and goals.