Standing at a busy crossroads, at rush hour, I looked up at the towering magnificence of Genoa’s Medieval Porta Soprana. This  fleeting glimpse, before the traffic lights changed and the roar of the contemporary city struck up again, impressed me with a sense  of the power, protection and wealth of this Republic, dubbed ‘the Proud’….

One striking development in Renaissance studies over the last five years has been the surge of interest in the theory and practice of translation. This has been evident not just in the number of conferences and books on the subject, including the publication of volume 2 (1550-1660) in the admirable Oxford History of Literary Translation…

The debate about Open Access (OA) over the last year has been quite fierce at times. Now things seem to be calming down.  But is this the calm before another storm? In this post I want to share my perspective as editor of Renaissance Studies and say a bit about how we have responded to…

Of making many bookes there is no end, and much studie is a wearinesse of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes 12:12)   The availability of classical and renaissance texts online – whether out of copyright Loebs, the electronic ‘Renascence Editions’ or Early English Books Online – has changed the nature of reading and research. That there is no…

A new website built at East Carolina University analyzes and reconstructs Edmund Spenser’s life, writing and castle complex at Kilcolman, County Cork, Ireland, where the great poet and colonial administrator lived in the late 1580s and ’90s as part of the Munster Plantation.  The website draws connections between Kilcolman, other places in Ireland, and Spenser’s…