About the series

Timely, concise, and authoritative, Elements in the Renaissance showcases cutting-edge scholarship by both emerging and established authors. Designed to introduce students, instructors, and specialists to new and key questions in current research, the volumes explore the conceptual, material, and cultural frameworks that structured the Renaissance experience. Focusing on the period between roughly 1350 and 1650, Elements apply an interdisciplinary approach to any aspect of history with a European component. Though some focus on one country or geographical area, all consider the impact of, or differences in another region. The series encompasses 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.

About the Editors

John Henderson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. His books include Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (2019); 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). Most recently he has published The French Disease in Renaissance Italy. Representation and Experience (2024); and Medical Theory and Practice in Early Modern Italy, co-edited with Sandra Cavallo (2025).

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, Independent Researcher

Editorial Board

Kevin Killeen, Professor of English and Related Literature, University of York

Lia Markey, Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library, Chicago

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

Nicholas Terpstra, Professor of History and Provost, Trinity College, University of Toronto 

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