Book Launch - 'A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy'

A panel discussion with editor Bianca de Divitiis, Guido Rebecchini (Courtauld), Filippo de Vivo (Oxford), and Jill Kraye (Warburg). Organised in collaboration wih the Instituto Italiano di Cultura di Londra.

A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Brill: The Renaissance Society of America, Volume: 19) offers readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the center of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, this volume paints a rather different picture. The expert-written contributions present a general survey of the most recent research on the centres of southern Italy, as well as insight into ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes from the Angevin and Aragonese Kingdom to the Spanish Viceroyalty. Taken together, they form an essential resource on an important, yet all too often overlooked or misunderstood part of Renaissance Italy.

Guido Rebecchini is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the Courtauld, which he joined in 2013. In 2000 he was awarded his PhD at the Warburg Institute. Since then, he has received fellowships awarded by the British Academy, Villa I Tatti, CASVA, and the Getty, and has published on sixteenth-century Italian art, especially on Mantua, Rome and Florence. His last book is entitled The Rome of Paul III (1534-1549). Art, Ritual and Urban Renewal (Harvey Miller, 2020). He has co-curated exhibitions on Giulio Romano (2019-2020; 2021-2022) and Parmigianino (2022). He will co-curate an exhibition on the Sack of Rome of 1527 at the Scuderie del Quirinale in 2027.

Filippo de Vivo is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford; the author of Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2007), he has written on the history of rhetoric, rumours, pharmacies and walking as well as on the comparative history of archives in late medieval and early modern Italian states. He is currently hoping to finish a book on Venice and Thomas Hobbes. 

Jill Kraye is an Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Philosophy at the University of London and an Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute. Her publications centre on Renaissance humanism and Renaissance philosophy, with a particular focus on the influence of classical thought from the Middle Ages to the early modern era, as shown in the collection of her articles, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy in Renaissance Philosophy (Ashgate, 2002). Most recently, she edited the Renaissance volume of A Cultural History of Ideas (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is one of the editors of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition; and she is a section editor (for the Renaissance and sixteenth century) of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In 2020 she was awarded the Serena Medal by the British Academy for her contributions to the history of Italian philosophy.

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