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Why Study the Renaissance at Warwick?

What is distinctive about studying the Renaissance with us? The entre for the Study of the Renaissance (CSR) provides the opportunity to study with people from the largest community of its kind in the UK, with a significant variety of approaches and expertise, within a very globally-connected environment. Our offerings have a strong appeal to students who wish to transcend the restrictions of individual disciplines and combine, for instance, the approaches of history and literature, or art history and theatre. Our degrees are internationally recognized for their rigour and the opportunities they afford to build up a global profile. Indeed, the CSR is regularly cited as 'the best place to do Renaissance Studies in the UK'. The CSR promotes the study of the period stretching from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century on three levels:

-undergraduate (Honours-level modules on Renaissance Europe)

-postgraduate (through both MA courses and PhD study)

-non-credit-bearing courses for people in the community

Staff who teach for the Centre are drawn from the departments of Classics, English, History, History of Art, Liberal Arts, and Modern Languages (French, Hispanic Studies, and Italian). Their research interests and expertise are highly varied (see research), with particular strengths in English and Italian culture, but also significant expertise in France, the Hispanic world, the wider Mediterranean, the Low Countries, and German-speaking territories. Some of their specialist topics are listed below:

• history of the book and reading practices
• religious art, polemics, thought, and literature
• the classical tradition (including neo-Latin and vernacular cultures; Plato; Aristotle)
• Renaissance thought and practices (including science and medicine, ethics and politics)
• theatre and performance (especially in England)
• gender (especially in literature)
• society and power
• court and civic culture
• learned culture (including humanist circles, academies, universities)
• popular culture
• visual culture and debates on the arts
• Venetian economy, art and culture
• travel, colonialism and the New World

Warwick is well-placed to offer teaching and research programmes in Renaissance Studies, both because of its own staffing resources and library provisions (which include excellent electronic resources such as ITER , BIHR, Early English Books Online and The Making of the Modern World; others listed here), and because of its proximity to major research collections at Oxford, Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon and London. In addition, it has well-established links with other prestigious centres of Renaissance excellence, including the Warburg Institute in London and the Newberry Library in Chicago. Many members of the CSR are leaders in their field and are in high demand at conferences and learned societies around the globe. Furthermore, the CSR has a world-leading programme of skills-building in areas such as languages (classical and modern), palaeography (English, Italian, Latin), grant-writing, organization of conferences, and – through placements – in the heritage sector.

The University campus is 750 acres of world-class academic departments, serene lakes and leafy woodland. Warwick provides a brilliant social, sports and arts scene for its members and visitors, and the campus is a diverse and exciting community in its own right.

"Warwick’s Renaissance MA continues to be one of the most exciting and compelling programmes of this kind in the UK, and beyond...Students taking this MA not only have the opportunity to study canonical texts and authors, but are enabled to explore very widely into the territories of Renaissance knowledge and scholarship."

Dr Dario Tessicini, (previous external examiner)