Historians working today on the centuries spanning the so-called “Renaissance” bear little if any resemblance to Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) lay many of the foundations for this field. Indeed, Burckhardt’s vision of the statecraft, visual art, and literature of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the birth of triumphant modernity has receded so far from our own convictions that most studies no longer even bother with disavowals! Yet our articles and book titles still frequently resort to the term “Renaissance,” even if only as a chronological tag or lure for readers. At a minimum, The Renaissance (and particularly Italian Renaissance) remains a genial ghost in the Google search engine. Beyond that, however, some conviction in the historical significance of this epoch also lingers in our conceptual machinery. This panel showcases the current research of early modernists focused on Italy who necessarily remain in some form of conversation with “the Renaissance” while also — and following generations of scholars between Burckhardt and our own time — continuing to pose innovative questions and test new methods to craft ever-more complex and interesting histories of this epoch and to consider the lessons it might hold for the (post)modern scholar and their readers.

This panel brings together four outstanding historians asking a broad range of innovative and fascinating questions about the seemingly familiar old Renaissance. These papers variously bring new evidence and theoretically-attuned attention to animals as protagonists of the past and not merely as figures in human discourse, the dynamics of emergent global capitalism, the centrality of enslavement in the Renaissance world (and the long scholarly resistance to interrogating this reality), and the increasing commercialization of medical practices. Accordingly, the panel should be of interest to early modernists at large as well as to modernists interested in exploring points of origin for pressing questions and concerns of more recent eras.