The Elements in the Renaissance series showcases cutting-edge scholarship in Renaissance Studies by leading academics in the field. Designed as a reference resource for students, researchers and general readers, the volumes are organized thematically, rather than by discipline or geographic region, taking multi-disciplinary and transnational approaches towards the key questions in current research. Each author develops a particular theme, based on original research and a wide knowledge of current scholarship, updatable annually. The series explores the conceptual, material, and cultural frameworks that structured Renaissance experience, encompassing new perspectives on themes such as concepts of time and place, social practices in urban and non-urban environments, cultural production and reception, international exchange, gender studies, science and medicine. Timely, concise, and authoritative, Elements in the Renaissance  will serve to make the latest Renaissance scholarship accessible to a wider public, exploring the most exciting and productive theoretical developments, methods, and research questions.

About the Editors

John Henderson is Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. His recent publications include Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (2019), and Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (2019), and Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and Jonathan K. Nelson (2021). He is also the author of Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (1994); The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, with Jon Arrizabalaga and Roger French (1997); and The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (2006). 

Jonathan K. Nelson teaches Italian Renaissance Art at Syracuse University Florence and is a research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School. His books include Filippino Lippi (2004, with Patrizia Zambrano); Leonardo e la reinvenzione della figura femminile (2007), Filippino Lippi (2022), and two books co-authored with Richard J. Zeckhauser: The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art (2008), and Risks in Renaissance Art: Production, Purchase, and Reception (2024, a Cambridge Element). He co-curated museum exhibitions dedicated to Michelangelo (2002), Botticelli and Filippino (2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (2009), and Marcello Guasti (2019), and two online exhibitions about Bernard Berenson (2012, 2015). 

Assistant Editor

Sarah McBryde, Birkbeck, University of London 

Editorial Board

Wendy Heller, Scheide Professor of Music History, Princeton University

Giorgio Riello, Chair of Early Modern Global History, European University Institute, Florence 

Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern History, St Johns College, University of Cambridge 

Jane Tylus, Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University