Center for Renaissance Studies

2009-2010: Thirtieth Anniversary Year

The Newberry Library holds internationally renowned collections encompassing the history, literature, music, political theory, and cartography of the late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern period in Europe and the Atlantic world. Scholars travel from around the United States and the world to use these materials, and the Newberry has long sponsored special programs in connection with them. In 1979, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies was established, organized as a consortium of five local universities. In addition to membership dues, each consortium member contributed to a travel fund to be used by faculty and graduate students doing research or attending programs at the Newberry.

That first year the Center hosted a Summer Institute in the Archival Sciences on early modern French paleography and research techniques; a graduate seminar taught at the Newberry on “The Origins of English Humanism”; and a one-day Renaissance Conference, with six scholars from across the United States presenting papers. The Center also initated two collaborative programs: an annual exchange fellowship with the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris that sent an American student to study there; and a reciprocal agreement with the Folger Institute in Washington, DC, under which consortium members could use their fellowship funds to participate in Folger programs.

As we mark our thirtieth anniversary, the Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium has grown to include fifty universities located throughout the Midwest, Southeast, and Western United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our 2009-2010 schedule of programs will include an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on the topic of early modern music books; four for-credit graduate seminars taught at the Newberry; eighteen scholars presenting papers as part of six regular lecture or seminar series; three day-long conferences, on Disease and Disability in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Comparative Early Modern Legal History; and Cervantes, respectively; an expanded three-day Graduate Student Conference; and staged readings of three Shakespeare plays by a professional theater company.

Current programs overseen by the Center but held elsewhere include an ongoing collaboration of seminars with the University of Warwick and a four-year series of Mellon Summer Institutes in Vernacular Paleography. In addition, our collaborations with the École Nationale des Chartes and the Folger Institute continue.

Directors of the Center for Renaissance Studies

John Tedeschi, Founding Director, 1979 – 1984

Mary Beth Rose, Acting Director, 1984 – 1985, Director, 1985 – 1997

Clark Hulse, Interim Director, 1986 and 1995

Raymond Clemens, Acting Director, 1997 – 1999

Carla Zecher, Director, 1999 – present