Session Abstract

Environmental history has recently become a major concern of historians working in the Renaissance period, and the work goes beyond the theoretical ideas about "nature" that preoccupied an earlier generation of scholars. The new work incorporates epidemiology, public health, animal studies, and cultural studies. These three papers integrate the new approaches and cover a broad geographical range, Italy, Spain, and England. The task of the session will be to explore how these new approaches might lead to a reinterpretation of some of the long-held assumptions about Renaissance and early modern European culture.