2025-26, Term 1: Renaissance Europe

Week 1: Introduction to Renaissance Ecologies –Anca-Delia Moldovan

This session will introduce students to notions of ecology and environment in the Early Modern period. It aims to touch on the main ideas governing the relationship between humans and nature in the Early Modern period (through selected passages from Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Bernard Palissy'sThe admirable discourse(1580)). We will also address the importance of an interdisciplinary approach that looks at both textual and visual sources.

Week 2: Renaissance Mysticism and the Natural World: The Case of Saint John of the Cross –Maria Czepiel

St John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and reformer, as well as one of the most important mystics in early modern Spain. This class will introduce you to the mystical tradition and St John’s spirituality in particular, focusing on his attitude to the natural world.

Week 3: Decoding Recipes: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medical History – Erin Connelly

This lecture will explore how modern technology allows for new insights and applications of historical medical recipes through the lens of select texts (15th-16th centuries) and ingredients which have inspired present day collaborations across disciplines. The lecture will provide an overview of how this relates to understanding historical medical texts from new perspectives, and applications of natural product ingredients from historical recipes to present day questions of ethnopharmacology and antimicrobial efficacy.

Week 4: Debates on Ecology and Renaissance Hunting– Ingrid De Smet

The aim of this class is to understand hunting cultures and human attitudes towards the natural world from a deep historical perspective.

Week 5: Animals as Victims and Agents of Cruelty in Renaissance Ritual and Entertainment – Sophie Hartles

Week 6: Reading Week - No Class

Week 7: Inns as Microcosms in Renaissance Society – Beat Kümin

This session engages with a prominent feature of the built environment. By the late Middle Ages, a fairly comprehensive network of public houses had emerged throughout Europe. The flagship establishments were inns, whose keepers offered patrons meals, accommodation and stabling on top of alcoholic beverages. As the only secular meeting places in many towns and villages, they became local communication hubs and stages for all sorts of social exchange as well as cultural activities. Alongside, inns facilitated long-distance mobility, providing indispensable nodal points in the emerging postal system and thus the early modern ‘communication’ revolution (Wolfgang Behringer).

Week 8: The Rediscovery of the Countryside in Renaissance Italy – Anca-Delia Moldovan

This session explores the countryside surrounding the Renaissance city of Florence as a key site of major environmental, economic, and socio-cultural transformations. Between the 15th and the 16th century, city dwellers started to invest their profits into these territories. Governing authorities also recognised the politico-economic value of the countryside, carrying out land reclamation projects to clear up more space for cultivation. These agricultural endeavours were promoted in the name of the public good and presented as strategies to bolster the state’s economic stability.

These socio-economic trends were accompanied by a renewed interest in classical writings on agricultural economy. From the middle of the 16th century, a novel body of specialised literature addressed the new patrons of villas. These works portrayed agriculture as a noble endeavour, providing both personal delight and economic profit.

Week 9: Art Imitating Nature: Glass Production and Consumption in Renaissance Venice – Maialen Maugars

This session will examine glass production and consumption in Renaissance Venice and address how Venetians exploited the natural world around them to produce luxury art objects seen as surpassing Nature’s beauty. It will first focus on the raw materials and techniques which led Venetian glassmakers to perfect their craft and develop new artistic styles and designs from the fifteenth century onwards. It will also shed light on the glass industry’s global connections, from the transfer of knowledge and raw materials across the Mediterranean to the trade of Venetian glass along the Silk Road.

Secondly, the cultural value of glass will be studied in relation to Venice’s socio-economic context and the increased consumption of luxury goods during the period. Patrons appreciated glass’s aesthetic qualities as well as the skills and technology required to produce it. Cristallo glass, in particular, was prized due to its transparency which rivalled natural rock-crystal. As such, luxury glass objects appealed as much as, if not more than, precious stones and metals to patrons. The study of Venetian glassmaking therefore offers another insight into Renaissance people’s attitude to the natural world, which in this case was both a resource and a source of inspiration for the production of luxury art object

Week 10: The Nature of Gems in the Renaissance – Michael Bycroft

Gemstones were both old and new in the European Renaissance. They had a long history in Scripture, natural history, and medicine, yet they were encountered in new places in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Emeralds were found in Colombia, pearls fished from the Caribbean Sea, turquoise imported in large volumes from Persia. These new gems were bound up with conquest, enslavement, and global commerce. They were displayed at Renaissance courts, scrutinised by naturalists, and ranked and graded by traders. They are a window onto the splendours and miseries of Renaissance culture.