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 and early modern periods. The Center is organized as an international consortium of 47 universities that contribute to its administration and oversee the planning of programs through representatives on the Executive Committee. The aims of the Center are 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 post-doctoral levels, including intensive training in the techniques essential for primary research in these fields (i.e., paleography, bibliography, codicology, textual editing), interdisciplinary seminars, graduate seminars (for which graduate students may receive academic credit), workshops, and conferences. 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. Special strengths of the collections include theology, the earliest critical historiography, the history of learning and scholarship, the history of the book and printing, and the course of European expansion into the Americas.
The Center for Renaissance Studies collaborates with the Folger Institute in Washington, D. C., itself a consortium of 43 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.