Renaissance Studies Courses

REN240Y1Y
The Civilization of Renaissance Europe
Professor Ken Bartlett
T 11-1

REN 240Y is an introduction to the culture of Renaissance Europe. The course will begin in Italy at the time of Petrarch (d.1374) and the invention of the modern concept of the autonomous individual capable of self-creation. This idea arose from the recovery and ancient Latin and later Greek texts whose content was then applied to the problems of 14th and 15th century Italy. From this, Humanism arose, a set of secular ideas which became the animating force, the “energizing myth”, of the Renaissance. The rich and cosmopolitan Republic of Florence adopted these ideas as a collective elite ideology, making it the “cradle” of the Italian Renaissance. Our course will then follow these ideas throughout Italy, from Venice, to the small despotisms to papal Rome, to illustrate how these flexible concepts could animate an entire culture. In the second term we will follow these developments north of the Alps in the 16th century where Humanism assumed a distinctly Christian and monarchical character. But the fundamental principles of the value of pagan antiquity, language, human agency, naturalism in art, and individual creativity remained constant. The Renaissance was the foundation of the modern Western world and REN240 will investigate why and how it flourished.

Exclusion: VIC240Y1, REN240Y0, VIC240Y0
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1), Society and its Institutions (3)

REN241H1F
Renaissance Masterworks and Remixes
Professor Paul Stevens
T 1-2, R 1-3

Everyone, from Vladimir Putin to Greta Thunberg, wants to talk about the West, but it’s not clear that many people really understand what the West means. The West is the culture that we, you and I, live in. It has a very specific identity, and its norms shape the everyday way we think and act. If you want to understand the West, if you want to get a handle on its cultural DNA, you need to access its discursive codes. Those codes are contained in two sets of texts called Scripture and the Classics, and if you want to understand the long and complex reach of these texts, especially at the point where the West goes global and begins to turn into what we now call modernity, you need to read Milton’s Paradise Lost. Now, whether you think such a study is a journey to the heart of darkness or to the gates of paradise, it doesn’t really matter, because Milton, like his Archangel Raphael, will show you things you thought “Unimaginable.” And it is in that “unimaginableness,” that inventiveness or creativity, that you’ll catch glimpses of what the future might be.

In other words, Paradise Lost is the single most influential poem in the English language, the language which now serves as the world’s principal means of global communication. On the one hand, the poem is redolent with memories of the Classics and their inspired Renaissance imitations from Dante to Shakespeare, and, on the other, its influence is pervasive in modern Anglophone world literature from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Malcolm X. It offers insight into so many of our current pre-occupations, including nationalism, colonialism, gender fluidity, secular humanism, and the intractable banality of evil.

The course has three principal aims. (1) Its general aim is to introduce students to the literary culture of the West through the fictions of John Milton by means of a concise intertextual study of Paradise Lost and Scripture. (2) Its specific aim is to provide students with a coherent understanding of both Scripture and Milton’s epic attempt to re-imagine and re-write it, that is, to write back to and re-invent divine revelation. (3) Its third or formal aim is to help students develop their skills in close reading and constructing both written and oral arguments.

TEXTS:

John Milton: The Major Works. Ed. Orgel & Goldberg. (Oxford UP)
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford UP); and / or any copy of the King James (AV) Bible of 1611
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (Oxford UP)

Exclusion: VIC241H1, VIC241Y1
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

REN242H1S
Scientific Worldviews of the Renaissance
Professor Hakob Barseghyan
F 11-1

REN338H1S
Renaissance in the City
Professor Jennifer DeSilva
M, W 11-12

Cities were a stage on which power, wealth, and piety paraded, alongside everyone else. In this course we will investigate why rituals and ceremonies were so important in the early modern world and how they impacted the city through the traces they left behind. We will examine texts, images, maps, and artifacts from cities across the globe to draw social, political and cultural conclusions about identity and display in urban communities.

REN340H1F
The Global Renaissance
Professor Laura Ingallinella 
W 1-3

REN342H1F
Woman and Writing in the Renaissance
Professor Manuela Scarci
W 10-12

Focusing on writers from various geographical areas, the course examines a variety of texts by early modern women (for example, treatises, letters, and poetry) so as to explore the female experience in a literate society, with particular attention to how women constructed a gendered identity for themselves against the backdrop of the cultural debates of the time.

Exclusion: VIC342H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

REN343H1S
Sex and Gender
Professor Andrea Walkden
W 1-3

Our course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the workings and representation of gender and sexuality in early modern Europe. Our range of topics will include courtly love, marriage, same-sex friendship and intimacy, cross-gender identification and performance, hermaphroditism, and the contested or “monstrous” body. To explore these topics, we will be reading works by Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Castiglione, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Marlowe, Isabella Whitney, John Lyly, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Margaret Cavendish, although our archive will also include anatomy treatises, conduct books, popular pamphlet literature, map illustrations, works of art, travel narratives, and ethnographic writing. Throughout the term, we will be considering Renaissance understandings of sex and gender in relation to the conceptual frameworks offered by recent scholars of feminism, queerness, disability, and the history of sexuality.

Exclusion: VIC343H1, VIC343Y1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)

REN346H1S 
The Idea of the Renaissance
Professor Matt Kavaler
W 10-12

REN440H1F
Florence and the Renaissance
Professor Ken Bartlett
T 2-4

This course is an interdisciplinary seminar on Florence in the 15th century. Using mostly primary sources, we will investigate the humanist republic, emphasizing topics such as Humanist rhetoric, culture and society, the rise of the Medici, Florentine Neoplatonism, artistic patronage, the role of women, and the influence of Savonarola. The focus will be on the dynamic relationship between Humanism and the ideal of republican liberty as defined by Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini and others. Students will be encouraged to follow their individual interests in defining a seminar presentation and final paper, as well as engaging in broad discussions of the interaction between ideas and society before and after the Medici rose to power.

REN442H1F
The Renaissance Book
Professor Shaun Ross
R 11-1

REN392
Renaissance Studies Independent Study

REN492
Renaissance Studies Independent Study