The Center for Renaissance Studies promotes the use of the Newberry collection by graduate students and postgraduate scholars in the fields of late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern studies (ca. 1300 – ca. 1750), making available programs that may not be feasible for individual institutions to mount alone.
Founded in 1979, the Center works with an international consortium of universities in North America and the United Kingdom. It offers a wide range of scholarly programs and digital and print publications based in the Newberry collection, 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.
The center also maintains a list of important resources in the study of Paleography. Learn more about upcoming Programs, and keep up with the Center by following our Blog.
Interested researchers should consult the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies core collection details for an introduction to navigating the Newberry’s extensive Renaissance and early modern collections.
Funding for the Center is provided in part by the Bernard P. McElroy Fund in Renaissance Studies.
News and announcements
- Monday, October 7, is the application deadline for our fall Research Methods Workshop for Early Career Graduate Students, to be held November 1. The topic will be Early Modernity in Global Perspective, directed by Ellen McClure and Laura Hostetler.
- Tuesday, October 15, is the submission deadline for proposals for our 2014 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, which will be held January 23-25. See the Call for Papers.
Current Projects
- The five-year Gannon Initiative will make the Newberry one of the nation’s premier centers for research on early modern religion, individually cataloging more than 8,000 items in our collections.
- Explore our experimental online monograph, Humanism for Sale: Making and Marketing Schoolbooks in Italy, 1450-1650, by Paul F. Gehl, and learn about using the site as an interactive text in the classroom.
- The Newberry has recently completed a project to catalog 22,000 early modern French pamphlets. See the catalogers’ blog, French Pamphlet Collections at the Newberry, for updates on what they have discovered, and also this collection description, with tips for searching the catalog for these materials.
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Contact the Center Staff for more information.