Bachelor of Arts in Renaissance Studies

Renaissance Studies is an interdisciplinary undergraduate major that offers students an opportunity to study one of the most exciting periods of Western European history, that time when the structures of art, literature, music, religion, and political life underwent profound change.

The boundaries of the Renaissance are difficult to fix, and modern scholarship hesitates to construct a sharp boundary from the late-medieval world, but from some time in the late fifteenth-century to the mid-seventeenth century Europe saw mind-altering changes in the ways people understood their world. The names associated with the Renaissance alone proclaim the significance of the period: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Michelangelo, Raphael, Durer, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Luther, Erasmus, Loyola, the Medici, Francis I, Elizabeth I, Columbus, Magellan, Drake. It was also the age of discovery, and the European encounter with the New World would change decisively, for better or worse, the face of four continents.