Asking the question of when the Renaissance ended, the Conclusion proposes it to be the early seventeenth century, with the advent of the Baroque as a literary and artistic movement. This shift was accompanied by a sharp change in gender attitudes, with the sixteenth century elites’ general stance of supportiveness to women’s cultural ambitions being displaced by a born-again misogyny, which began to abate only at the end of the seventeenth century. Postdating the end of the Renaissance to the early seventeenth century produces a more coherent narrative than traditional periodizations that regard the advent of the Counter-Reformation as a cultural end point. It also helps to challenge widely adopted but questionable constructions of European cultural history which posit a translatio imperii et studii from southern to northern Europe dating to the Protestant Reformation. The book concludes with a call for further work on the neglected Late Renaissance moment of the late sixteenth century with the aim of ‘reintegrating’ the Renaissance and enabling a better understanding of the full arc of the movement.

This chapter starts from Jacob Burkchardt’s famous contention that Renaissance Italy saw the birth of the modern individual. While acknowledging the limitations of this thesis, the chapter argues that a reconfigured notion of individualism can still have value in capturing aspects of Italian Renaissance culture. Renaissance Italians invested considerable energies in crafting attractive and distinctive social selves, and practices of self-fashioning, ranging from verbal and visual self-portraiture to dress and material culture, attained a high degree of sophistication. This phenomenon has generally been studied within elite contexts, but evidence is emerging that, by the Late Renaissance, such practices extended into lower strata of society. Case studies considered in the chapter range from famous elite self-fashioners such as Isabella d’Este and Pietro Bembo, to the disruptive, socially mobile figure of Pietro Aretino, born the son of a shoemaker, to actual shoemakers, tailors, and woodcarvers of the mid to late sixteenth century, whose material possessions, recorded in inventories, give evidence of intriguingly sophisticated and culturally aspirational selves.

This chapter considers Renaissance Italy and its culture from the perspective of its relations with the European and extra-European world. From an initial focus on religious and ethnic diversity within Italy with discussion of Greek, Jewish, and Ethiopian diaspora cultures, the chapter moves to consider the diffusion of the cultural innovations of the Italian Renaissance beyond the Alps. This is examined first within Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then within Europe’s colonial and missionary ‘contact zones’ in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The next section of the chapter focuses on a particularly rich intersection between Renaissance culture and extra-European transcultural exchange in the form of the work of Italian Jesuit missionaries in China, India, and Japan. A final section explores similarities between missionary practices of ‘accommodation’ and cultural outreach and those adopted by secular figures such as the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti and the traveller, diplomat, and early scholar of Persian Giovanni Battista Vecchietti.

Late medieval Christians had constructed a complex method for the discernment of spirits through which mystical encounters could be experienced, scrutinized, and censured. This chapter explores how two famous Counter-Reformation mystics – Teresa of Ávila and Caterina de’ Ricci – successfully articulated their experiences of the divine, setting out their own advice for discernment in the face of growing ecclesiastical hostility.