At the start of the new year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight some of the fantastic work being done in the field of Renaissance Studies by looking back at the books published with the Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge book series in 2024. We will also give a sneak preview of up-coming work which will be published in 2025.
These authors cover a wide range of intellectual, religious, print, and political history across the Renaissance period, and links to all of the books mentioned here can be found via the Routledge website.
2024 Book Round-Up
Selected Essays on George Gascoigne, ed. Gillian Austen (Routledge, 2024)
This collection of essays situates George Gascoigne in context as the pre-eminent writer of the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His ceaseless experimentation was hugely influential on those later Elizabethans – including Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare – who represent the great flowering of the English literary renaissance. Gascoigne rarely returned to a genre, writing prose fiction, blank verse, plays, sonnets, narrative verse, courtly entertainments, satire and many other literary forms, and the later Elizabethans were fully aware of his significance. These essays are organised into three main sections: influences upon Gascoigne, such as Skelton; Gascoigne’s influence on others, including Spenser; and finally a reassessment of his critical neglect and the story behind his marginalised status in the English literary canon. As only the second multi-authored essay collection on Gascoigne, this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this important and often misunderstood writer.
Lucinda Byatt, Niccolò Ridolfi and the Cardinal’s Court: Politics, Patronage and Service in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Routledge, 2024)
Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–50), was a Florentine cardinal, nephew and cousin to the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, and he owed his status and wealth to their patronage. He remained actively engaged in Florentine politics, above all during the years of crisis that saw the Florentine state change from republic to duchy. A widely respected patron and scholar throughout his life, his sudden death during the conclave of 1549–50 led to allegations of poison that an autopsy appears to confirm. This book examines Cardinal Ridolfi and his court in order to understand the extent to which cardinalate courts played a key part in Rome’s resurgence and acted as hubs of knowledge located on the fault lines of politics and reform in church and state, hospitable spaces that can be analysed in the context of entanglements in Florentine and Roman cultural and political patronage, and intersections between the princely court and a more professional and complex knowledge and practice of household management in the consumer and service economy of early modern Rome. Based on an array of archival sources and on three treatises whose authors were closely linked to Ridolfi’s court, this monograph explores these multidisciplinary intersections to allow the more traditional fields of church and political history to be approached from different angles. Niccolò Ridolfi and the Cardinal’s Court will appeal to all those interested in the organisation of these elite establishments and their place in sixteenth-century Roman society, the life and patronage of Niccolò Ridolfi in the context of the Florentine exiles who desired a return to republicanism, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Patrick Murray, Intellectual and Imaginative Cartographies in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2024)
Taking as its focus an age of transformational development in cartographic history, namely the two centuries between Columbus’s arrival in the New World and the emergence of the Scientific Revolution, this study examines how maps were employed as physical and symbolic objects by thinkers, writers and artists. It surveys how early modern people used the map as an object, whether for enjoyment or political campaigning, colonial invasion or teaching in the classroom. Exploring a wide range of literature, from educational manifestoes to the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, it suggests that the early modern map was as diverse and various as the rich culture from which it emerged, and was imbued with a whole range of political, social, literary and personal impulses. Intellectual and Imaginative Cartographies in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 will appeal to all those interested in the History of Cartography.
Franciscans and Scotists on War: John Duns Scotus’s Theology, Anti-Judaism, and Holy War in Early Modernity, eds. Ian Campbell and Todd Rester (Routledge, 2024)
Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now. The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around the theology of John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308), and this book presents a wide selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotist writings on politics, warfare, and empire in English for the first time. Beginning with Scotus’s own doctrine on the forced baptism of Jews, this collection translates John Mair (1467–1550) on European imperialism and holy war, Alfonso de Castro (1495–1558) on the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, Juan Focher (1497–1572) on the war against the Chichimeca Indians of Mexico, and John Punch on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s. The availability of these primary sources for teaching and research will clarify the connection between religion, politics, and imperialism in the early modern world.
Anglo-Dutch Connections in the Early Modern World, eds. Sjoerd Levelt, Esther van Raamsdonk, Michael D. Rose (Routledge, 2024)
This ground-breaking collection reveals the networks of interrelation between Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic. As people, ideas and goods moved back and forth across the North Sea – or spread further afield in the vanguard of globalisation and empire – Anglo-Dutch relations shaped all aspects of life, with profound implications still relevant today. A diverse range of expert scholars share new research in their discipline, ranging across technology, trade, politics, religion and the arts. Different aspects of this history of competition, alliance, migration and conflict are taken up by each chapter, providing the reader with detailed case studies as well as the broader background and its historical roots. Anglo-Dutch Connections in the Early Modern World aims to be both accessible and innovative. It will be essential to students and researchers interested in European politics, intellectual history, and shared Anglo-Dutch society, while showcasing current research in multiple facets of the Early Modern World.
Nil Ö. Palabıyık, Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe, 1544–1669 (Routledge, 2024)
Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, the book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull moments: the reader will encounter many larger-than-life figures, including an armchair expert who turned his alleged captivity under the Ottomans into bestselling books; a drunken dragoman who preferred enjoying the fruits of the vine to his duties at the Sublime Porte; and a curmudgeonly German physician whose pugnacious pamphlets led to the erasure of his name from history. Taking its title from the celebrated humanist Joseph Scaliger’s comment that books from the Muslim world are ‘silent teachers’ and need to be explained orally to be understood, this study gives voice to the many and varied Turkish-language books that circulated in early modern Europe and proposes a paradigm-shift in our understanding of early modern erudite culture.
Forthcoming to be published in 2025
Vincenzo Ferrone, The World of the Enlightenment (Routledge, 2025)
The Enlightenment was a laboratory of modernity that changed the history of the Western world, helping to bring about globalisation and the rise of a powerful intellectual class. It gave the scientific revolution new methods and a new purpose by ushering in the sciences of man. At the same time, it constantly interrogated these new sciences, wary of the possibility that they might lead to discrimination rather than emancipation. The late Enlightenment, the most mature and productive period, developed its values and political ideals, such as the concept of liberty and of a constitutional and “republican” government, through its confrontation with the ancien régime, the slave trade and imperial colonialism, and the betrayal of the revolutionary ideals in the Americas. The World of the Enlightenment is a wide-ranging discussion of one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern era. It covers topics from the scientific (such as the approaches of empiricism and humanism), the political (the rights of man, slavery, and colonial independence), and the artistic (modern art and public opinion). The author discusses these topics thematically in ten chapters. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike studying the Enlightenment and the history of intellectualism, as well as all those interested in the history of modern science, politics, and culture.
Edward Holberton, Atlantic Circulations Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750 (Routledge, 2025)
Atlantic Circulations investigates literary conversations about empire in the British Atlantic world, c.1650-1750. Reading texts by Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, as well as writing by overlooked authors who deserve more attention, such as the Quaker anti-slavery activist Benjamin Lay, and the Black classicist Francis Williams, it asks how literary culture interacted with transatlantic debates about law, enslavement, economics and religious freedom. This study explores the relationship between literature and empire by joining up disciplinary areas – Early Modern English Literature and Early American Literature – which are often considered apart. It develops insights and analytical frameworks from recent British and ‘Atlantic World’ history to argue that the transatlantic reception of literary texts was often shaped by ‘archipelagic’ dynamics: political and religious tensions between and within England and Wales, and Scotland and Ireland. Atlantic Circulations examines several previously-unknown manuscripts and archives which throw new light on the circulation of literary texts in colonial culture, and reconstructs key Anglophone transatlantic cultural debates during a crucial phase of European expansion in the Atlantic world. This book will appeal to advanced students and academic researchers of early modern and eighteenth-century English literature and British cultural history, especially readers with an interest in literature’s relationships with empire, colonialism and travel, and scholars of early American literature and history.
Information about all our books is available on the Routledge website and we will be posting updates on these as well as brief interviews with various authors in the coming months. In the meantime, Happy New Year from the Society for Renaissance Studies!