Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to History

The 28th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, held on 21-22 October 1994 at Binghamton University, featured 33 panel sessions and approximately 150 presentations. The ten essays in this volume consist of the five plenary speakers - leaders in their field - and five panel essays, each of which was reviewed for this volume. The volume comprises a body of work organised around a governing theme - modes of historicisation. Each of the essays demonstrates the practice of or a commentary upon a distinctive historicised criticism. By 'historicised' as contrasted with 'historical' criticism, it is meant that these essays problematicise, stretch or reconceive traditional historical practices. Challenging the notion that the production of paintings, dramatic texts or even conduct books can be read against a stable historical ground, they show that paintings, works of literature, and treatises not only participate in history but are exemplars of textual instability. The very content of these texts can be shown, in various editions, to change over time - and yet each bears a single, determinate title. In such ways the contributions gathered here all show that they have been affected by 'the new history'.