A collection of essays on early modern digital humanities by leading scholars in the field.
 
This collection of essays focuses on teaching at the intersection of early modern literature, book history, and digital media. It considers how teaching different fields and methods of study can be enhanced and facilitated by digital technologies. The volume provides a snapshot of current thinking on digital pedagogy as practiced by leading scholars in the field and offers a series of models that may be adapted, personalized, and repurposed by future teachers seeking to bring digital methodologies to their classrooms. Supplementary materials for this title are available on the Iter Press website (iterpress.org): see under Books/Supplementary Materials.
 

This book explores early modern Italian women as agents of doubt. While women were often considered prone to doubt as a result of their natural “weakness,” the essays gathered here reverse this view, demonstrating how women were able to embrace doubt as a means to expand their agency. Using doubt to contest both official narratives as well as religious and civil practices, women were able to carve out a space of their own in contemporary culture and society. The volume covers a period from the late fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, offering critical insight into early modern doubt and investigating how doubt, like other categories of thought, could be gendered.
Contributors address the topics of doubt and the Querelle des Femmes, religion, writing, and social networks. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to early modern doubt, combining gender studies with religious history, the history of literature, social history, and the history of science.

A pathbreaking history of early modern education argues that Europe’s oldest university, often seen as a bastion of traditionalism, was in fact a vibrant site of intellectual innovation and cultural exchange.

The University of Bologna was among the premier universities in medieval Europe and an international magnet for students of law. However, a long-standing historiographical tradition holds that Bologna—and Italian university education more broadly—foundered in the early modern period. On this view, Bologna’s curriculum ossified and its prestige crumbled, due at least in part to political and religious pressure from Rome. Meanwhile, new ways of thinking flourished instead in humanist academies, scientific societies, and northern European universities.

David Lines offers a powerful counternarrative. While Bologna did decline as a center for the study of law, he argues, the arts and medicine at the university rose to new heights from 1400 to 1750. Archival records show that the curriculum underwent constant revision to incorporate contemporary research and theories, developed by the likes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton. From the humanities to philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, teaching became more systematic and less tied to canonical texts and authors. Theology, meanwhile, achieved increasing prominence across the university. Although this religious turn reflected the priorities and values of the Catholic Reformation, it did not halt the creation of new scientific chairs or the discussion of new theories and discoveries. To the contrary, science and theology formed a new alliance at Bologna.

The University of Bologna remained a lively hub of cultural exchange in the early modern period, animated by connections not only to local colleges, academies, and libraries, but also to scholars, institutions, and ideas throughout Europe.

Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.