Center for Renaissance Studies
About the Center
Founded in 1979 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies serves scholars through the use of the library’s internationally renowned collections in the late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods in Europe and the Americas. The Center is organized as an international consortium of 49 universities that contribute to its administration and oversee planning of programs through a Representative Council. The Center aims to integrate the resources of the Newberry into the educational process and to make available programs that are not feasible for individual institutions to mount alone.
The Center offers a wide range of programs in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern studies at the graduate and postdoctoral levels, including lecture series, multidisciplinary seminars, graduate seminars for which students may receive academic credit, workshops, conferences, symposia, and intensive training in the techniques essential for primary research in these fields, including paleography, bibliography, codicology, and textual editing. Additionally, the Center provides a locus for a lively community of scholars who come from all over the world to use the Newberry’s collections of manuscripts and printed books from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic period. Collection areas of special strength in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern studies comprise humanism, education, and rhetoric; maps, travel, and exploration; printing and book arts; religion; the colonial Americas; and early music. Other strong subjects and genres include French political pamphlets; British local history and heraldry; British political pamphlets, broadsides, and prints; eighteenth-century periodicals (especially British and French); historiography; neo-Latin literature; language studies; biographies; women writers in all genres; Gypsy lore and Arthuriana; and archival materials for Italy, Portugal, and the Spanish Empire.
The Center for Renaissance Studies collaborates with the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C., itself a consortium of 40 institutions. By a reciprocal arrangement, faculty members and graduate students from either consortium are eligible to participate in programs offered by the other.
Funds are generally available for faculty and graduate students at consortium schools to participate in Center programs.
Funding for the Center is provided in part by the Bernard P. McElroy Fund in Renaissance Studies.
Directors of the Center for Renaissance Studies
Carla Zecher, Director, 1999 – present
Raymond Clemens, Acting Director, 1997 – 1999
Clark Hulse, Interim Director, 1986 and 1995
Mary Beth Rose, Acting Director, 1984 – 1985, Director, 1985 – 1997
John Tedeschi, Founding Director, 1979 – 1984
CRS Consortium
Current Programs
Past Programs