The Renaissance Studies article prize 2023 has been awarded to two outstanding authors:
Angelo Lo Conte, ‘A Visual Testament by Luca Riva, a Deaf and Mute Pupil of the Procaccini’, Vol. 36 No. 2, pages 222-51, April 2022. DOI 10.1111/rest.12730
This article takes an impressively interdisciplinary approach to a remarkable source that provides a uniquely intimate encounter with the life, experiences and communicative strategies of a deaf and mute artist, Luca Riva. It is a study that sparks the imagination, skilfully blending art historical techniques with scholarly approaches to legal history in order to approach the source material from multiple angles. In doing so, it deftly reconstructs Luca Riva’s world in order to offer a fresh perspective on the Italian renaissance and on how our understanding of it can be transformed through the lens of disability studies.
Katherine Hunt, ‘What did Didactic Literature Teach? Change-Ringing Manuals, Printed Miscellanies and Forms of Active Reading’, Vol. 36 No. 5, pages 686-704, November 2022. DOI 10.1111/rest.12827
This article insightfully offers new perspectives on didactic literature through imaginatively opening up some relatively inaccessible source material on change-ringing manuals in a manner that situates their purpose and usage within historical communities of practice. This is an impressive example of scholarship that combines scientific approaches with the methodologies and theoretical perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, it is a wonderful demonstration of how to breathe life into arcane sources in a manner that has obvious implications not merely for other scholars of didactic literature, but also for renaissance scholars concerned with the importance of practice for considerations of audience and readership.