Renaissance Aesthetics & the triumph of the individual in the machine age

Ready to take your next journey of Discovery? The Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery at BRLSI is a yearlong programme of talks and events exploring the many joys, revelations and something of the broader cultural legacy of a movement still making waves in the 21st century.  Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hieronymus Bosch, if you love culture then you’ll love our new talks series!

So how did the shake up of the political and social fabric during the Renaissance influence the world to come? The Industrial Revolution of the “long” nineteenth century saw the emergence of the first “shock cities” of modernity in the manufacturing heartlands of central and northern England. The seismic impact of these changes on the fabric of the nation resulted in a plethora of conflicting visions of social and political order proposed by numerous reformist movements.

This talk seeks to trace the ways in which radicals and reformers variously mobilised Italy’s pre-modern symbolic repertory to both critique and reimagine the emerging “modern” world through recourse to the cultural world of late medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Professor Stephen J Milner is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester, former Director of the British School at Rome and a Trustee of the Cooperative Heritage Trust. He is a cultural historian who works across the fields of modern languages, literary studies, communication studies, political thought and urban/architectural history. He is currently working on the implication of late medieval and Renaissance Italian cultural forms and authors in the multiple discourses that emerged with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, seeking to recover the radicalism of such translations in the specific regional context of North West England during the long nineteenth century.

 Publications include the edited and co-edited volumes Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (2004); At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (2005); The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Middle Ages (2008); The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (2015); and the Everyman edition of Machiavelli’s Prince and Other Political Writings (1995).

To learn more about the Renaissance and our exciting year long programme, don’t forget to follow our Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery webpage:

https://www.brlsi.org/renaissance/