Past Programs
“But that your lips were sacred, my lord/You would profane the holy name of love.”
In the last thirty years, the study of early modern religious, especially women, has flourished. No longer reserved to historians of religion and spirituality, the field attracts scholars in multiple disciplines: women’s and gender studies, literature, history of art and music, social history, etc.—so much so, in fact, that we lose sight of its full interdisciplinary potential.
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Diuerse lingue: Thomas Morley and the Problem of National Language in Renaissance Music
We are pleased to announce that the 2013 annual conference of the Illinois Medieval Association, co-sponsored by Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, will take place at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
“Oh God, Oh God! That it were possible to undo things done; to call back yesterday!”
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
This symposium will bring together scholars interested in topics related to Anglo-Dutch relations; English and Dutch colonial efforts; or Native and Indigenous studies as inflected by English and Dutch colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Poetry of the Stars, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
A staged reading by professional actors from The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, directed by Barbara Zahora. An informative talk begins fifteen minutes before the performance, which is followed by a question-and-answer session with the director and cast.
A staged reading by professional actors from The Shakespeare Project of Chicago of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. An informative talk begins fifteen minutes before the performance, which is followed by a question-and-answer session with the director and cast.
A staged reading by professional actors from The Shakespeare Project of Chicago of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
1812 proved a momentous year. In Europe, Great Britain battled the French armies of Napoleon, who also launched his ill-fated invasion of Russia that year. Ramifications of this conflict sparked the War of 1812, pitting the United States against Britain and against an American Indian alliance that hoped to block American expansion into the Northwest Territories.
Richard II
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Peter Garino
With the resurgence of interest in the history of sovereignty, the study of the early modern period has gained a new resonance in contemporary critical and political debates.
A Conference in Honor of Sister Ann Ida Gannon, BVM
Transmission, Scale, and Interaction in the Arts and Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean, 1000 to 1500
Organized by Heather E. Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Alicia Walker, Washington University in St. Louis
Rebellion and Submission in Late Medieval London
Barbara Hanawalt, Ohio State University, emerita
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A (Belated) Celebration of Milton’s 400th Birthday
John Milton’s Life
Stephen Fallon, University of Notre Dame
Session 1: Disability in the Middle Ages
The Center for Renaissance Studies was established in 1979 as a consortium of five Chicago-area universities, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Thirty years later the consortium has grown to fifty member institutions.
Shakespeare and the History of Philosophy
Montaigne-Shakespeare: Biographical and Editorial Crossroads
Re(con)figuring Association and the Impact of European Expansion, 1500-1700
Calculating Engines: Minds, Bodies, Sex, and Machines on the Eve of the Enlightenment
Jonathan Sawday, University of Strathclyde (currently at Saint Louis University)
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Hybridity, mimickry, negotiation, Orientalism, alterity, and the “middleground,” are only a handful of concepts that have redefined the terrain of cultural studies. Building upon this theoretical legacy, this symposium challenged participants to reassess familiar concepts such as the nation-state and to question existing interpretive models.
Sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University
Welcome
Leah S. Marcus, Vanderbilt University
Holly Tucker, Vanderbilt University
The Merchant of Venice and the Venice of Merchants
Session 1: The Venice of Merchants
This cross-disciplinary conference investigated the enduring significance of space and place in scholarship of the early Americas against the backdrop of the Newberry Library’s world-class cartographic holdings.
Conference on Political Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1750
Sponsored by the University of Aberdeen, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, through Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium funding, and the Research Institute for Irish & Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
The Cult of Christ’s Blood in the 15th Century: The Case of Wilsnack
Caroline Walker Bynum, Princeton University
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A Symposium in Honor of Sandra Hindman
This event celebrated the career of Sandra Hindman and the publication of Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences - Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman, ed. David Areford and Nina Rowe (Ashgate Press, 2004)
This symposium aimed to provide a forum for scholars from a variety of fields to reflect critically on the benefits as well as the costs of comparative work, a discussion that has been surprisingly absent from the current drive for more hemispheric and inclusive approaches to the colonial Americas under the rubric of American Studies or Atlantic Studies.
The England of Elizabeth was a time of great cultural development as England sought to find its national identity in a radically changing world. In a time known for explorations, expanded trade, and brilliant literature, at the margins of society lived those who were left out of England’s prosperous white Protestant identity.
Cultural, Political, and Historical Connections between Spain and England, 1554-1604
American Colonies, Scottish Entrepeneurs, and British State Formation, 1603-1707
Allan Macinnes, University of Aberdeen (currently at the University of Strathclyde
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Distance and Memory: American Scenes on a Silver Beaker, Antwerp, c. 1530
Carlo Ginzburg, University of California, Los Angeles
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Sponsored by Wayne State University, Miami University, and Kent State University, with additional support from Ohio State University; and organized by Ronald Corthell, Kent State University; Frances E. Dolan, Miami University; Christopher Haley, Ohio State University; and Arthur Marotti, Wayne State University.
Responsabilite scientifique: Dominique de Courcelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CERPHl-ENS Lyon.Co-organisateurs: Marcel Tetel, Emeritus, Duke University; Paul Saenger et Carla Zecher, Newberry Library.
Directed by Consuelo Varela, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla.
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The Unique Texts and Images in the Colonial Andean Manuscripts of Martin de Murúa and Guaman Poma de Ayala
Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, and the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies and D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History.
This conference was made possible through major funding by the Women’s Board of the University of Chicago, and co-sponsorsed by the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Committee on South Asian Studies, the Department of Music, the Humanities Division, and the Weiss Brown Fund, all of the University of Chicago; and the Newberry Center for Renaissance
Sponsored by the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, The Evelyn Dunbar Memorial Early Music Festival, the Northwestern University School of Music, and the Northwestern University Program in the Study of Imagination. The Evelyn Dunbar Memorial Early Music Festivals have been made possible through the generous support of Northwestern alumni Ruth Dunbar Davee and her late husband, Ken M.
Lecture: Bloody Good: The Chivalric Heritage of the Great War
Workshop: Heroic Masculinity, Gender, and the Reconceptualization of Chivalry
Directed by Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli.
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Ancient Lives: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Genre of Biography in Greece and Rome
Richard P. Saller, University of Chicago (currently at Stanford University)
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Sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago; the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies; the Humanities Visiting Committee Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities; the Gertrude and Meyer Kestenbaum Cultural Activities Fund of the Humanities Division; the Chicago Group on Modern
The colony of New France began with settlements in the St. Lawrence valley in present-day Quebec, then spread to the Upper Midwest, including Illinois. As a French colony, New France was administratively unified. As a region, however, it was far from demographically and culturally homogenous.
Lecture: Sappho on the Arno: A Literary Portrait of Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati
Workshop: How Shall We Restore the Ladies to Mainstream Literary History? Documents from the Battiferra File
Lecture: Menstruation and Monstrous Births: Women’s Blood and Medieval Fictions
Workshop: The History of Gender: Pleasures, Passions, and Pedagogy
Sponsored by the University of Chicago; and by the Department of French and Italian, the Anonymous Fund, the Institute of Research in the Humanities, and the Humanities Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Friday, September 22, at the Newberry Library
Roundtable Discussion: Women and Religion
The Life of Magister Arnulphus—alias Arnoul Greban, Arnolfo Giliardi, and , perhaps, Arnolfo de San Gilleno—Theologian, Singer, Organist, Composer, and Pedagogue
Darwin Smith, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
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Lecture: Bewitching the President: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Power in Late-17th-Century Guatemala
Workshop: Identifying Women’s Cultural Networks through Inquisition Records
Martha Few, University of Miami (now at University of Arizona)
Lecture: Women and the Law in Late Medieval Europe
Maria Teresa Guerra Medici, University of Rome, now at Università degli Studi di Camerino
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Lecture: Prostitutes, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: The Case of Tullia d’Aragona
Diana Robin, University of New Mexico, now emerita
Sponsored by the Academy of American Franciscan Historians, the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago, the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Franke Institute for the Humanities, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago.
Seville, 1540, to Paris, 1552: de la ‘Silva de varia leccion’ de Pedra Mexia aux ‘Diverse lecons de Pierre messie’ par Claude Gruget
Dominique de Courcelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Ecole Nationale des Chartes
La polemique religieuse a la Renaissance: un genre litteraire
Dominique de Courcelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Ecole Nationale des Chartes
Lecture: Literally Old Maids: Singlewomen and the Life-Cycle in Early Modern England
Workshop: How to Identify Never-Married Women in Records of the Past
Amy Froide, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga (now at University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Un amour ambigu: l’amour naturel de Guillaume de Saint-Thierry aux derniers troubadours
Michel Zink, College de France
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Directed by Timothy Graham, Western Michigan University (now at University of New Mexico).
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
Sponsored by Wayne State University, and organized by Michael Giordano, Wayne State University.
Friday, May 15
Welcome
Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago and organized by Peggy McCracken, University of Illinois at Chicago (now at University of Michigan)
Friday, March 6
Welcome and introducton
The Family, Property, and the State
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Literature, Social Structure, and Nationhood in England, 1580-1780
Nigel Smith, University of Oxford
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Participants attended a Shakespeare Repertory production of Hamlet on Friday, November 15, then took part in a series of workshops at the Newberry Library the next day.
Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and organized by Michael Shapiro, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Part of “Teaching Gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” a series of lectures open to the public, and related workshops open by application to faculty from the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.
Participants attended a Shakespeare Repertory production of Othello on Friday, November 3, then took part in a series of workshops at the Newberry Library the next day.
Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and organized by Michael Shapiro, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This conference explored the complex reception of Montaigne in European and non-European cultures from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. It combined a focus on the conceptual aspects of his reception—how he has been interpreted and understood—with the material history of his reception—the ways in which his works have been printed, translated, edited, and excepted—since 1595.
In the context of the centenary anniversaries of the deaths of Boiardo (d. 1494) and Tasso (d. 1595), this conference considered the evolution of Ferrarese culture in the dramatic period between the late fifteenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries.
Publications of chronicles describing the lives of the rich and famous were a characteristic feature of the early modern period. This conference explored connections between high and low culture by focusing on a celebrated example, the Mémoires Secrets de Bachaumont.
Directed by Diana Greenway, University of London, and Jane Sayers, University College, London.
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
By acknowledging the alterity of medieval constructions of sexuality, scholars are beginning to redefine the way we read medieval culture. What connections exist between sexuality and other cultural practices? What specific ideologies inform medieval sexuality?
Directed by Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli.
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
Focusing on the ramifications of theories of memory for literary theory and practice, art and architecture, historiography, philosophy, and the performing arts, this symposium offered new and diverse perspectives on future directions for studies of the ars memorandi in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Speakers: Albert Ascoli, Northwestern University (now at University of California, Berkeley); JoAnn Cavallo, Columbia University; Lawrence Rhu, University of South...
This conference sought to examine the prominent place of reason, or rational argumentation, in the literature of early modern France and Italy. Topics covered the aesthetics of polemical writing; reasoning and the formation of subjectivities; resistance to the rhetoric of persuasian; and the rationality of literary pleasure.
This symposium provided both a broad overview of the Newberry Library Special Collections and a detailed exposition of the library’s strengths in medieval and Renaissance materials.
Sponsored by the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Introduction and welcome
This continued a program initiated in 1988-89 with the goal of integrating music into teaching of other medieval and Renaissance subjects. Teams of faculty from diverse disciplines at selected consortium campuses collaborated to design on-campus symposia to demonstrate points of intersection or parallels between music and other disciplines in the medieval and early modern periods.
Rhetoric and Personal Expression in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
The romances with lyric insertions that first appeared in early thirteenth-century France immediately achieved widespread popularity. This interdisciplinary conference investigated conceptions governing their production and reception.
Directed by Bernard Barbiche, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris.
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Women and Gender in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Culture of Flowers
Jack Goody, University of Cambridge
Directed by Diana Greenway, University of London, and Jane Sayers, University College, London.
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This conference took the decade marking the end of the twentieth century as the context for examining the future of the study of medieval French literature. Participants discussed what the Middle Ages will look like from the perspective of the 1990s and what paradigms will influence criticism of medieval French literature as we move toward the twenty-first century.
This symposium was designed to provide both a broad overview of the Newberry Library Special Collections and a detailed exposition of some of the library’s strengths.
Friday, February 2
Directed by Vicenta Cortés Alonso, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
This conference considered the background of late Renaissance humanism, scholasticism, and skepticism in which the thought of Descartes developed and changed. Speakers from the disciplines of history, philosophy, and literature explored the historical context of Descartes’ thought.
Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance
Thomas M. Greene, Yale University
Directed by Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli.
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This conference focused on issues and methodologies important to the late Eric Cochrane.
Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
R. Howard Bloch, University of Calfornia, Berkeley
Caroline Walker Bynum, University of Washington (now at Columbia University)
Tuesday, April 5: The Theology of the Body in the Thirteenth Century
Quentin Skinner, University of Cambridge (now at Queen Mary, University of London)
The focus of this workshop was the fourteenth-century fresco cycle known as the Buon Governo by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.
This conference focused on one of the key literary works of the late Middle Ages, theRomance of the Rose, from a variety of literary and art historical perspectives.
Directed by Howard Mayer Brown, University of Chicago; Benito Rivera, Indiana University (now emeritus); and Mary Springfels, Newberry Library (now emerita)....
E. Jennifer Ashworth, University of Waterloo (now emerita)
Grammar
W. Keith Percival, University of Montana (currently at University of Kansas)
Audrey Lumsden Kouvel, University of Illinois at Chicago, now emerita
This eight-week seminar, led by David Wagner, Northern Illinois University, provided a general survey of the liberal arts during the Renaissance, asking specifically how the Renaissance tradition differs from those of the medieval and modern periods.
Directed by Henri-Jean Martin, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris.
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Anatomy of a Vendetta in Renaissance Italy
Edward W. Muir, Jr., Syracuse University (now at Northwestern University)
Rembrandt: A Master in the Studio
Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley
Session 1: Life in the Studio
Session 2: The Real Thing
This conference focused on the interaction between aspects of law and the humanities.
Sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University with support from the American Bar Foundation and the American Society for Legal History and organized by Sue Sheridan Walker, Northeastern Illinois University.
Thursday, April 4
Directed by Mark Girouard
Ritual Pillages in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy
Carlo Ginzburg, University of Bologna
This conference considered the Inquisition from the perspectives of comparative legal and institutional history. A related exhibit, Faith, Law, and Dissent: The Inquisition in the Early Modern World was on display at the Newberry Library from October 7 to December 7, 1985.
Directed by Diana Greenway, University of London
Popular Print Culture in Early Modern Societies
Roger Chartier, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, now at the University of Pennsylvania
Directed by Lawrence Stone, Princeton University
Session 1, Tuesday, March 19: The Programs and the Documentation
Session 2, Wednesday, March 20: Money, Sex, and Murder—A Case Study and Its Meaning
Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Directed by Lionel Gossman, Princeton University (now emeritus)
This conference was held in conjunction with a series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies during the 1983-84 academic year, that focused on methodology and training in the techniques needed to conduct research with original sources in Renaissance studies.
Directed by Jean-Claude Margolin, University of Tours
This was one of a series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies during the 1983-84 academic year, that focused on methodology and training in the techniques needed to conduct research with original sources in Renaissance studies.
This working conference was designed to assess the present state of French Renaissance literary studies.
Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and organized by Marcel Tetel, Duke University.
Thursday, April 12
This conference centered around the question of how chivalry as an ideal could have exerted such influence on literature and the arts, long after it had disappeared as a social reality. All sessions were held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.
Directed by Marc Fumaroli, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Session 1, March 15. Introduction to Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Rhetorical Culture
Directed by D. P. Walker, Warburg Institute, University of London, emeritus
Two workshops: November 29 and December 6
Directed by Lilian Randall, Curator of Manuscripts, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore
This was one of a series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies during the 1983-84 academic year, that focused on methodology and training in the techniques needed to conduct research with original sources in Renaissance studies.
Directed by Theo Bögels, University of Leiden
This was one of a series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies during the 1983-84 academic year, that focused on methodology and training in the techniques needed to conduct research with original sources in Renaissance studies.
Directed by Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli.
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
Organized by Mary Beth Rose, Center for Renaissance Studies (now at University of Illinois at Chicago)
Friday, May 20
Session 1
Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for the Humanities and organized by Michael Lieb, University of Illinois at Chicago
Friday, April 22, at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Welcome
Robert Remini, UIC Institute for the Humanities
Richard Brown, The Newberry Library
Directed by Martin Steinmann, Basel University Library.
This institute was intended to improve participants’ ability to conduct original research involving the use of German manuscripts dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and covered these principal areas:
Organized by Ian Thomson, Indiana University (now emeritus)
Friday, April 23
Welcome
Lawrence W. Towner, President and Librarian
Directed by Anthony G. Petti, University of Calgary.
This institute’s course of instruction was twofold, consisting of intensive paleographical exercises that focused on vernacular materials of the period 1400 to 1700, and lectures in which Professor Petti provided an introduction to the organization of English archives, libraries, and manuscript collections.
Keynote speaker
Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (now emeritus)
Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.
Directed by Bernard Barbiche, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris.
Organized by W. Brown Patterson, Davidson College.
Welcome
Richard Brown, The Newberry Library
Session 1
Olivares and the Europe of the Thirty Years War
J. H. Elliott, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (now emeritus)
The Renaissance Conference was held annually at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by Raymond Waddington, University of Wisconsin-Madison (now at University of California, Davis)
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by Anthony Molho, Brown University
Friday, April 8
Welcome
Lawrence W. Taylor, Newberry Library
Anthony Molho, Brown University
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by Hanns Gross, Loyola University Chicago, and Robert Bireley, Loyola University Chicago.
Welcome
Richard Brown, Newberry Library
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by Julius Kirshner, University of Chicago.
Welcome
Richard Brown, Newberry Library
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by Aldo Scaglione, University of North Carolina.
Welcome
Lawrence W. Towner, Newberry Library
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by John Wallace, University of Chicago.
Session 1
Form and Value in the Shakespearean History Play
David Kastan, University of Chicago
The Renaissance Conference was held at the Newberry Library for many years prior to the founding of the Center for Renaissance Studies in 1979.
Organized by William Schutte, Lawrence University.
Session 1
Asia in the Language and Literature of the Cinquecento
Donald Lach, University of Chicago