Voices from the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook

The Italian Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformations when the ancient world was being rediscovered and a New World had been literally discovered. Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, traditional beliefs were being challenged as people across the Italian Peninsula explored new ways of thinking about religion, politics, and society and introduced startling innovations in the arts.

This book contains more than hundred selections of primary sources―the historian’s raw material in the form of memoirs, letters, treatises, sermons, stories, poems, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Here are eyewitness accounts of cold-blooded murders, lavish court pageants, the Sack of Rome, and the Black Death; first views of Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes and glimpses of the surface of the moon through Galileo’s telescope. These sources bring the reader into direct contact with the creators of the great Renaissance works of art, literature, philosophy, and science, as well as lesser-known people, who in their own words express emotions of love, loss, and spiritual yearning.

Selected to accompany and supplement A Short History of Renaissance Italy, the primary sources in this book make it an ideal course reader for students of history or art history. Yet this volume can be equally read well on its own; each selection is clearly introduced, annotated, and provided with references for further reading. These sources reach out to an audience beyond the classroom―the general reader, or the traveler to Italy―anyone curious to learn more about the Italian Renaissance will find themselves swept into conversation with these vibrant voices from the past.

Lisa Kaborycha holds a Ph.D. in medieval and early modern European history from the University of California, Berkeley and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship with the Medici Archive Project, and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Fellowship in Italian Renaissance Studies. In addition to A Short History of Renaissance Italy (2023), she is the author of A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650 (2016). For years, Kaborycha taught courses in Renaissance history for the University of California and currently works as adjunct professor at the University of New Haven Tuscany Campus and lecturer at the British Institute of Florence.