Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the last few decades religion and the church have moved from the margins — or, more precisely, the chronological borders — of Italian Renaissance studies to their center. Less than half a century ago it was possible for Étienne Delaruelle and his collaborators on the Renaissance volumes of Fliche and Martin's great Histoire de l'Église to justify excluding from their survey of the emerging "national" churches of the period any consideration of Italy, "it being always subsumed within the history of the papacy." If religion had any place in the Renaissance it was, in the words of Carlo Angeleri, as "a problem."
This survey is a lightly revised version of conference papers delivered at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and of the Renaissance Society of America held in Chicago and Florence on 7 January and 23 March, 2000. It makes no pretence of bibliographic comprehensiveness: items have been (very selectively) cited because they seem seminal or exemplary, or because they provide further avenues into the literature; many choices reflect the author s Florentine orientation. I particularly wish to thank Robert Bireley, Daniel Bornstein, Thomas Brady, Giuseppina De Sandre Gasparini, John Najemy, Duane Osheim, Antonio Rigon, Roberto Rusconi, and Donald Weinstein for their comments and suggestions, and Margaret King for her invitation to publish the piece here. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities made possible research at the Newberry Library in Chicago and at Cornell University's Olin Library.