The Renaissance is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.
The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages, or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual and cultural decline.
Constantin Fasolt, is an influential historian and was the Karl J. Weintraub Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago, who specializes in the development and significance of historical thought.
The Records of Early English Drama (REED) is a performance history research project, based at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1976 by a group of international scholars interested in understanding “the native tradition of English playmaking that apparently flourished in late medieval provincial towns” and formed the context for the development of the English Renaissance theatre, including the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. REED's primary focus is to locate, transcribe, edit, and publish historical documents from England, Wales, and Scotland containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and mimetic ceremony from the late Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London public theatres.
Judith C. Brown is a historian and a Professor Emerita of History at Wesleyan University. A specialist on the Italian Renaissance, she is considered a pioneer in the study of the history of sexuality whose work explored the earliest recorded examples of lesbian relationships in European history.
Kenneth R. Bartlett is a Renaissance historian, author, and professor at the University of Toronto, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1978. He was editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme from 1985 until 1990 and President of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies from 1982 until 1984. Prof. Bartlett was the Founding Director of the University of Toronto Art Centre, and sat on the Board of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art from 2001-2015. He was the Director of Faculty Programs in Arts and Science for 13 years, and in 2002 he was named the first Director of the Office of Teaching Advancement for the University of Toronto, a position he enjoyed until 2009.
A university is an institution of higher education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the designation is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school.
Peter Dendle is a professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, teaching classes on folklore, 20th and 21st century representations of the Middle Ages, Old and Middle English, and the monstrous. Dendle has written books and articles on a number of topics, including cryptozoology, philology, the demonic in literature, zombie movies, and Medieval plants and medicine. His work on zombies was featured by NPR.
Andrew D. M. Pettegree is a British historian and an expert on the European Reformation, the history of the book and media transformations. As of 2022 he holds a professorship at St Andrews University, where he is the director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project. He is the founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute.
Richard A. Muller is an American historical theologian.
The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a database of digitized books from the early modern era. The collected titles are directly linked to full-text versions of the works in question. The bibliography was initially inclined toward Protestant writers from the Reformation and immediate Post-Reformation era. In its current development the project is moving toward being a comprehensive database of early modern theology and philosophy and also includes late medieval and patristic works printed in the early modern period.
Richard Raiswell is an historian at University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Graduate Studies, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. He teaches classes on medieval and Renaissance History, as well as the History of Ideas, specialising, in particular, on premodern geography and exploration, and the antecedents of the Scientific Revolution.
Philip Benedict is an American historian of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, currently holding the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva’s Institute for Reformation History.
Alina Payne is an historian of art and architecture. She serves as Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and the Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Annabel M. Patterson is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.
John William O'Malley was an American academic, Catholic historian, and Jesuit priest. He was a University Professor at Georgetown University, housed in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. O'Malley was a widely published expert on the religious history of Early Modern Europe, with specialities on the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council, and the First Vatican Council.
Eric R. Dursteler is a professor of history at Brigham Young University (BYU) and chair of the BYU history department. He is a lecturer and seminar presenter, and has specialized in the history of early modern Italy, the history of the Mediterranean including the early modern Mediterranean, and the history of food. He has authored, edited or reviewed multiple published works, including scholarly books about medieval and early modern Mediterranean, Venetian history, has authored encyclopedic entries, numerous book chapters, and journal reviews.
Patricia Berrahou Phillippy, FRHistS, is Professor of Material and Cultural Memories and Executive Director of Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities at Coventry University. She is an expert in early modern English literature and culture, particularly early modern formulations of gender and identity.
Maria Rika Maniates was a Canadian musicologist who taught at the University of Toronto. She began her career as a lecturer at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music in 1965 and held various positions in the department, such as associate professor and full professor of musicology. Over the course of her career, Maniates was a member of multiple music councils and music societies and was director-at-large of the American Musicological Society. Following her retirement from the University of Toronto in 1995, she was made professor emerita. Maniates examined music in papers delivered to Canada and the United States and contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as well as various musicological journals.
James Donald Tracy is an American historian. With Heiko A. Oberman, he was co-founder of the Journal of Early Modern History, and editor from 1999 through 2010. He has served as president of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, the Society for Reformation Research, and the American Catholic Historical Association. At the University of Minnesota, he was associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, chaired the Department of History, and held the Union Pacific Chair in Early Modern History from 2001 to 2004. Upon his retirement, Tracy was granted emeritus status. Among early modernists he is known for his contributions to an unusual range of research areas.
