Renaissance Studies Courses

REN240H1F
The Renaissance in Italy
Professor Jennifer DeSilva

This course investigates the growth of the Renaissance in Italy by focusing on the lives of Renaissance people in courts, cities, and zones of exchange. We will read their works, analyze their art, and examine their possessions. In addition, we will complicate the traditional Renaissance narrative with women, slaves, foreigners, and religious minorities. This course is also an introduction to the early modern scholars and resources at U of T. Together we will visit the maiolica collection at the Gardiner Museum, explore rare books at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, and attend local events.

Exclusion: VIC240Y1, REN240Y0, VIC240Y0
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

REN241H1S
Renaissance Masterworks and Remixes
Professor Paul Stevens

REN245H1F 
Race and Power in the Renaissance
Professor Laura Ingallinella  

This seminar will examine the entangled histories of race, power, and culture in Renaissance Europe (1300–1600) through close engagement with a rich archive of primary sources. It will give students the opportunity to investigate paintings, poems, plays, maps, and trial records, and to understand how early modern Europeans constructed—and contested—ideas of human difference.

REN340H1S 
Travel, Trade and Difference in the Renaissance World
Professor Laura Ingallinella  

This seminar examines cross-cultural encounters in the early modern world (c. 1430–1670) through close engagement with a rich archive of primary sources produced across the globe. Students will work directly with manuscripts—from a fifteenth-century Florentine cosmography to a Nahuatl-Spanish encyclopedia—alongside atlases, paintings, plays, travelogues, and epic poetry from cities ranging from Florence and London to Fez, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Macau.

REN342H1F
Woman and Writing in the Renaissance
Professor Manuela Scarci

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
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

REN343H1F
Sex and Gender
Professor Lee Emrich

Across the term we move between literary studies, art history, the history of cartography, and premodern critical theory, asking how mercantile networks, imperial expansion, and religious mission bound distant regions into a single, contested world—and how those entanglements reshaped ideas of geography, faith, and human difference while producing enduring relations of dominance and appropriation. Assigned activities will include hands-on work on manuscripts and early books and original research on women travelers from the early modern period and their lived experiences.

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

REN346H1S 
The Idea of the Renaissance
Professor Matt Kavaler

REN347H1F
Studies in Renaissance Performance
Professor Shaun Ross

Renaissance drama, especially William Shakespeare's work, looms large in the public imagination to this day. Innovations in the theatre of the period, however, were a part of a much wider explosion of new forms and modes of public performance. In religion, new theologies were turning preachers into major celebrities; in music, staggering new developments in technology and composition radically redirected the course of western music; on the stage, designers, playwrights, and actors collaborated not only to free the theatre from old conventions, but to create totally new genres of performance.

This course will explore the vital connections between different modes of Renaissance performance - drama, religious liturgy, sermons, masques, poetry, and music - considering the legacy these performances still have for us today. This course will also incorporate visits to Toronto-area performances of period related content (such as plays, musical concerts, and a Latin Mass). In order to engage artistically as well as intellectually with the content of this course, students will also be asked to create an original performance of their own. This performance will respond creatively to one or more the artistic forms we consider in class.

Exclusion: VIC347H1
Recommended Preparation: REN240Y1, or another course in Renaissance Studies
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

REN442H1S
The Renaissance Book
Professor Shaun Ross

This seminar will consider the rich intellectual history of Renaissance Europe through hands-on interaction with the rare books collection at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. It will give students the opportunity to handle some of the earliest printed books in European history, and to understand both the technologies and cultures that produced them. This interdisciplinary class will involve guest-lectures from faculty in several disciplines, and consider how the major intellectual movements of the Renaissance - humanism, religious reform, and scientific empiricism - show up in the print culture of the period.  Students in this seminar will also develop practical research skills by pursuing a public-facing research project that includes a physical and a digital exhibition of one or more rare books.

Prerequisite: Completion of 9.0 credits
Exclusion: VIC442H1; VIC449H1 (Advanced Seminar in the Renaissance: Exhibiting the Renaissance Book), offered in Winter 2018 and Winter 2019
Recommended Preparation: REN240Y1, or another course in Renaissance Studies
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)

REN392
Renaissance Studies Independent Study

REN492
Renaissance Studies Independent Study