The Global Renaissance

OVERVIEW

The lecture looks at the Renaissance from the point of view of the global exchanges we have explored in the previous three lectures.

The seminar will include a) a brief discussion of the lecture guided by the 'general questions' below, and b) a quiz covering the content from lectures two to ten of the term.

[To be completed early Sep 2026]

ESSENTIAL READING

There is no essential reading for this seminar, apart from the lectures (and your notes thereupon) for lectures two to ten of this term.

GENERAL QUESTIONS

• why did early modern intellectuals seek a return to ancient wisdom?
• was there one global renaissance or multiple separate renaissances?
• is the renaissance a Eurocentric concept?

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RECOMMENDED READINGS

Blitstein, Pablo Ariel. ‘A Global History of the “Multiple Renaissances”’. The Historical Journal, 2020, 1–23.

Burke, Peter, Luke Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto. ‘The Global Renaissance’. Journal of World History 28, no. 1 (2017): 1–30.

McManus, Stuart Michael. ‘Decolonizing Renaissance Humanism’. The American Historical Review 127, no. 3 (2022): 1131–61.

FURTHER READINGS

Bauer, Stefan, and Simon Ditchfield. A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered. Liverpool University Press, 2022.

Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Burke, Peter. ‘Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances’. Theory, Culture & Society 26 (February 2010): 16–31.

Burke, Peter. The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Making of Europe): Centers and Peripheries. Wiley-Blackwell, 1998.

Burke, Peter. ‘The Jesuits and the Globalization of the Renaissance’. Cultural History 9, no. 2 (2020): 156–70.

Campbell, Stephen J., and Stephanie Porras. The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art. Taylor & Francis, 2024.

Goody, Jack. Renaissances: The One or the Many? Cambridge University Press, 2009.

McManus, Stuart M. Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Ideas in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Pennock, Caroline Dodds, and Amanda Power. ‘Globalizing Cosmologies’. Past & Present 238, no. suppl_13 (2018): 88–115.

Poskett, James. Horizons: A Global History of Science. Penguin, 2022.

Ruggiero, Guido. A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

Singh, Jyotsna G. A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Standaert, Nicolas. ‘The Transmission of Renaissance Culture in Seventeenth-Century China’. Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 367–91.

Tiangang, Li. ‘Chinese Renaissance: The Role of Early Jesuits in China’. In China and Christianity. Routledge, 2001.

Treadgold, Warren. Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Stanford University Press, 1984.