The transatlantic slave trade and the plantation complex are well-studied subjects, but scholars have rightly pointed out that we do not clearly understand the earliest phases, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. ... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Economic Institutions and Networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The Genoese Trading Diaspora (ca. 1450-1530)”

From Tupinambá anthropophagi to ‘bloodthirsty Aztecs’ or ‘child-killing Incas’, American (human) sacrifices flooded the European imagination in the sixteenth century. In Europe, these images interacted with a heated debate about salvation, the Eucharist, and the role of sacrifice within Christianity.... Read more about Sacrifice and Conversion between Europe and the New World

In 1982, a priest working on the records from the Galileo trial in the archive of the Roman Inquisition accidentally landed upon a file devoted to Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa of Pescara.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “In the Archives of the Inquisition: The Case of Vittoria Colonna”

... Read more about Del Mar Del Mundo: Francesco Durante and the Neapolitan School in the Hispanic Colonies of America

... Read more about Istanbul - Dimitrie Cantemir

... Read more about Dolci Miei Sospiri: Tra Ferrara e Venezia

Asian and American (and sometimes African) toponyms, peoples, terrain, flora, fauna, atmospheres, and cultural productions mingled in the European consciousness long after Columbus, and even as the Pacific was being regularly traversed by European galleons.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “The Amerasian extension in the European imaginary, 1492-1700”

Renaissance doctors, philosophers, theologians, poets, and musicians understood that all sensible experiences of time and space were linked, to a certain extent, to the cosmic order by a universal harmony, an astral-magic rhythm that influenced everything from the rotation of the planets down to the musicality of the pulse.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Titian and the Skies of Tomorrow”

Boccaccio’s tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope is justly celebrated as a masterful reflection on art and illusion. In this seminar, Justin Steinberg will explore the political dimension of this reflection.... Read more about Thursday Seminar "The Artist and the Police: Decameron 8.3"

Bramante is widely credited for having pioneered a new and assertively antique architectural style in Rome at almost the very start of the sixteenth century, as is supposedly demonstrated by his Tempietto which is almost universally agreed to date from around 1502.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Bramante and the untidy unfolding of the ‘High Renaissance’”

The origin of the madrigal is a recurring topic in musicology. Did it evolve out of the frottola (Einstein 1949), the chanson and motet (Fenlon and Haar 1988) or the carnival song (A. Cummings 2004)?... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Revisiting the origins of the madrigal”