East Tennessee State University

Faculty Member, History

Other Affiliations: Northwestern University, History

Arts and Sciences

About

My research focuses on the social and political world of learned men and women during the Italian Renaissance.  I am especially interested in the function of works of cultural production in specific settings and the spread of ideas from authors and translators to broader segments of the population.  My first monograph (under revision for an academic press) seeks to explain the success, size, and shape of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence.  I argue that the humanist movement was largely about reading, study, and oral discussion rather than the creation of original ideas in original writings.  As such, the movement included hundreds and probably thousand of cultivators of humanist letters.  Men and women from a variety of social groups cultivated humanist letters in order to successfully complete key moments of political and other kinds of rituals.  The interest of these people in humanist letters led to an increasing importance attached to the acquisition of a learned reputation.  The pursuit of social capital through learning explains the huge numbers of people pursuing humanist studies by the 1470s.

My next two book-length projects continue to integrate the history of humanism and the humanist movement into the broad historiography on the Italian Renaissance.  First, I am co-editing a book, After Civic Humanism, which seeks to move beyond the Baronian concept of “civic humanism” and establish new ways of investigating the relationships between politics and learning.  Second, my next monograph will examine the contradictory social, political, and learned relationships between Renaissance Florentines through a series of carefully chosen case studies.  One section of the book will look at the Pazzi and Pandolfini families, who lived next door to one another and participated in the same learned circles, but who also cultivated diametrically opposed domestic and international political allies.  A second section will look at the learned friends of Giannozzo Manetti over the last decade of his life.  Manetti’s learned friends encompassed virtually every imaginable political alliance, but these contradictions do not appear to have impeded Manetti and his friends from exchanging letters supporting each other’s learned pursuits.  The final example will look at Leonardo Bruni’s role as mediator between Florence and the pope at well as Florence and Braccio Fortebracci at a time when Braccio and Martin V were continually at war.

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