In collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Villa I Tatti will host a discussion between Prof. Victor...

In 1616, Monteverdi told Alessandro Striggio that he couldn’t imitate winds because they are not human. “Ariadne moved us because she was a woman and similarly Orpheus because he was a man.” But what if Orpheus was not a man driven by his own internal passions and creative instincts but instead was an automaton—an inanimate machine with spontaneous motion and sound creation.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: What if Orfeo was an Automaton?

A model of ‘Civic religion’, understood as municipal attempts to develop legitimacy through sacred language and devotional activities, is now widely used by historians of late medieval and renaissance Europe. In this seminar Andrews will...

Lucrezia Marinella developed an interpretation of Aristotle's claims concerning sexual difference and body temperature, and also elaborated a set of criticisms of those claims.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: The Reception of Aristotle in Lucrezia Marinella's "La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne co'diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini" (Venice, 1601)

The contention that before the late eighteenth century learned opinion held that there was only one sex, famously proposed by Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex (1990), has achieved near-canonical status in the eyes of many historians and literary scholars.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: "Translating Sex: The Long History of the 'One-Sex' Body"

This seminar is an exercise in micro-philology and global history. Through the analysis of a very short manuscript, Pier Mattia Tommasino aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European Orientalists, Italian...

... Read more about 2017 Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance: Lecture 3

... Read more about 2017 Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance: Lecture 2