Education
- PhD, University of Michigan, 1981
- BA, Brown University, 1973
About
Research Interests
- Intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Italy
Courses Taught
- Honors Western Civilization to 1648
- Renaissance Europe
- Reformation Europe
- Nature and the Environment in Western Thought
- Classics and Western Culture I (Homer to Dante) (in University Honors Program)
- Classics and Western Culture II (Machiavelli to Frankl)
- Foundations: I and II (Blount Undergraduate Initiative)
Selected Publications
Books
- Doubting the Divine in Early Modern Europe: The Revival of Momus, the Agnostic God (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
- Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
- Honorable Mention, 2014 Best Book Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
- The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
- Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991; paper, Princeton Legacy Library, 2014).
- Winner, 1991 Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
Journal Articles and Essays
- “Family and Vocation in the Early Italian Renaissance: Boccaccio and Narratives of Filial Freedom,” Journal of Family History, 2024; online pre-publication at doi.org/10.1177/03631990231196784.
- “Apocryphal News and Apocryphal Truths in Early Modern Italy: Girolamo Gigli’s Gazzettino (1712-1713),” Italian Studies 77 (2022): 32-50.
- “Heresy at Play: Academies and the Literary Underground in Counter-Reformation Siena,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1151-1207.
- “Consolation,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis (Harvard, 2010): 234-236.
- “Women and the Politics of Play in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Torquato Tasso’s Theory of Games,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 750-791.
- “The Artes and the Ars moriendi in Late Renaissance Venice: The Professions in Fabio Glissenti’s Discorsi morali contra il dispiacer del morire, detto Athanatophilia (1596),” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 92-127.
- “A Little-Known Renaissance Manual of Consolation: Nicolaus Modrussiensis’ De consolatione (1465-1466)” in Supplementum Festivum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, eds. J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, F. Purnell, Jr. (Binghamton, N.Y., 1987), 247-77.
- “The Art of Mourning: Autobiographical Writings on the Loss of a Son in Italian Humanist Thought (1400-1461),” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 440-75.
- “Healing Eloquence: Petrarch, Salutati, and the Physicians,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985): 317-46.