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.
Join our Mailing List and visit our Facebook page to learn more about our current activities and programs.
Upcoming Programs
Friday, October 4, 2019 – Friday, May 1, 2020
Renaissance Graduate Programs
Meeting four times over the year, this seminar aims to form an interdisciplinary community of graduate students in the early stages of writing their dissertations, with an eye toward examining
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Center for Renaissance Studies Programs
Shakespeare Project of Chicago
Free and open to all. Reserve your free tickets now.
A story of greed, ambition, and ruthlessness, Shakespeare’s Richard III tells the story of its eponymous antihero’s rise and fall from power.
Thursday, January 16, 2020 – Thursday, April 2, 2020
Renaissance Graduate Programs
This seminar examines early modern European modes of knowledge-production by zeroing in on the idea of the “elemental.” From geometry to medicine and alchemy, almanacs and handbooks of prognostication to natural history (including colonial natural history), the Newberry’s collection includes books that deploy the notion of an “element” (and the “elemental” or even the “elementary”) in many diff
Friday, February 7, 2020
Seminar in European Art
Lithic Images, Jacopo Ligozzi, and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612), Bronwen Wilson
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Milton Seminar
Details to be announced.
Friday, February 21, 2020
Premodern Studies Seminar
Literature and Knowledge in Late Medieval England: A Codicological Perspective
Michael Johnston, Purdue University
Respondent: Nicole Clifton, Northern Illinois University
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Center for Renaissance Studies Programs
Shakespeare Project of Chicago
Free and open to all. Reserve your free ticket starting Jan. 2.
Shakespeare’s drama of feuding families and star-crossed lovers established the template for romantic tragedy.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Eighteenth-Century Seminar
Ghostly Light: How Criminal Corpses Animated the Italian Enlightenment, Rebecca Messbarger
Friday, March 6, 2020
Renaissance Graduate Programs
The aims of this proposed workshop are two-fold: to provide an introduction and overview of a growing scholarly engagement with Anglo-Muslim relations from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries as represented in a selected body of English texts: plays, travel texts, histories, religious and propaganda pamphlets, Atlases, and maps; and more specifically to guide a close micro-readi
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Center for Renaissance Studies Programs
The Chicago Map Society's April Meeting
Please join us for a special joint presentation between the Chicago Map Society and The Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry. The Newberry Library owns a copy of the 1550 edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia. This book is a groundbreaking description of the world that was published in Basel from 1544 to 1628 by Münster’s stepson Heinrich Petri and his sons.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Renaissance Graduate Programs
In conjunction with Professor Walter Melion’s lecture at the Newberry, “Meditating the Unbearable in a Customized Fifteenth-Century Prayerbook,” and a conference at Emory University, this workshop will explore the phenomenon of hybrid and composite books in the medieval and early modern periods.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Eighteenth-Century Seminar
Anti-race, 1550–1760, Roxann Wheeler
Friday, May 1, 2020
Premodern Studies Seminar
“I await the financial recovery of France”: Funding Archaeological Fieldwork in the Age of Enlightenment
Jennifer Westerfeld, University of Louisville
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Milton Seminar
“Like Consort”: Raphael and Adam’s Other Self, Gregory Chaplin
Friday, May 22, 2020
Seminar in European Art
Nothing is the Matter: Locating God in the Cosmic Void, Elina Gertsman
Thursday, June 18, 2020 – Saturday, June 20, 2020
The study and performance of early music (pre-1700) requires us to recreate and represent past musical practices through consulting a variety of sources available to us today. The theme of the conference seeks to encourage an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which we engage with these sources of and for early music and the degrees of mediation intrinsic to them.