The Renaissance

The whole of the Oxford Bibliographies Renaissance and Reformation module has grown since its inception to embrace the period 1350–1750. That time span includes the period scholars denote as the “Renaissance” era, as well as the period loosely denoted as “early modern,” reaching beyond the original conception of the Renaissance (and for some scholars encompassing it) and into the Enlightenment era. There are no firm boundaries between the earlier “medieval” period and the subsequent, though overlapping, “Renaissance,” nor between the “Renaissance” and the “early modern.” The contours of those periods fluctuate depending on the topic, the principal figures, the region, the developments under discussion, and the nature of the community of scholars engaged in their study. This bibliography article limits itself to a narrower concept of the Renaissance: the monographs and articles that define it, debate its nature, and challenge its existence; general overviews of some aspects of the Renaissance; textbooks and sourcebooks suitable for classroom use; and journals and reference works useful for exploration of the Renaissance. The concept of the Renaissance needs its own bibliography because its nature is not self-evident. The Renaissance does not have natural boundaries, and Renaissance specialists do not agree on its chronological limits, although 1350 to 1650, or the somewhat longer period from Petrarch to Milton, is a designation with which many agree. Use of the term implies an interpretation of the nature of the Middle Ages, and the notion of a shift after 1300 from the main features of that era in the realms of culture, society, and politics. Most of those who employ the concept of the Renaissance see developments in thought and the arts as critical, but not as the sole elements in that transformation. Many medievalists have denied the existence of a Renaissance altogether, finding the roots of all its characteristic themes in the Middle Ages. Many scholars, especially of the later period (sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries), prefer the term “early modern,” which seems to some more appropriately used when discussing European expansion, gender and sexuality, and even the modern state. But the editors of this Oxford Bibliographies module and most of its contributors find the concept of the Renaissance still to be indispensable, as denoting the era when, for the last time in the history of European civilization, the legacy of the Greco-Roman past was integrated with the firmly established Judeo-Christian one, thus reestablishing, on the threshold of modernity, its dual foundation.

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