At the start of the new year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight some of the fantastic work being done in the field of Renaissance Studies by looking back at the books published with the Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge book series in 2025. We will also give a sneak preview of up-coming work which will be published in 2026.
These authors cover a wide range of intellectual, religious, print, and political history across the Renaissance period, and links to all of the books mentioned here can be found via the Routledge website.
2025 Book Round-Up
Vincenzo Ferrone, The World of the Enlightenment (Routledge, 2025)
The Enlightenment was a laboratory of modernity that changed the history of the Western world, helping to bring about globalisation and the rise of a powerful intellectual class. It gave the scientific revolution new methods and a new purpose by ushering in the sciences of man. At the same time, it constantly interrogated these new sciences, wary of the possibility that they might lead to discrimination rather than emancipation. The late Enlightenment, the most mature and productive period, developed its values and political ideals, such as the concept of liberty and of a constitutional and “republican” government, through its confrontation with the ancien régime, the slave trade and imperial colonialism, and the betrayal of the revolutionary ideals in the Americas. The World of the Enlightenment is a wide-ranging discussion of one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern era. It covers topics from the scientific (such as the approaches of empiricism and humanism), the political (the rights of man, slavery, and colonial independence), and the artistic (modern art and public opinion). The author discusses these topics thematically in ten chapters. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike studying the Enlightenment and the history of intellectualism, as well as all those interested in the history of modern science, politics, and culture.
Edward Holberton, Atlantic Circulations Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750 (Routledge, 2025)
Atlantic Circulations investigates literary conversations about empire in the British Atlantic world, c.1650-1750. Reading texts by Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, as well as writing by overlooked authors who deserve more attention, such as the Quaker anti-slavery activist Benjamin Lay, and the Black classicist Francis Williams, it asks how literary culture interacted with transatlantic debates about law, enslavement, economics and religious freedom. This study explores the relationship between literature and empire by joining up disciplinary areas – Early Modern English Literature and Early American Literature – which are often considered apart. It develops insights and analytical frameworks from recent British and ‘Atlantic World’ history to argue that the transatlantic reception of literary texts was often shaped by ‘archipelagic’ dynamics: political and religious tensions between and within England and Wales, and Scotland and Ireland. Atlantic Circulations examines several previously-unknown manuscripts and archives which throw new light on the circulation of literary texts in colonial culture, and reconstructs key Anglophone transatlantic cultural debates during a crucial phase of European expansion in the Atlantic world. This book will appeal to advanced students and academic researchers of early modern and eighteenth-century English literature and British cultural history, especially readers with an interest in literature’s relationships with empire, colonialism and travel, and scholars of early American literature and history.
Ovanes Akopyan and David Rosenthal, Disaster in the Early Modern World: Examinations, Representations, Interventions (Routledge, 2025)
How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750. Covering topics that range from new thinking about risk and securitisation to the protection of dikes from shipworm, and with a geography that extends from Europe to Spanish America, the volume places early modern disaster studies squarely at the intersection of intellectual, cultural and socio-economic history. This period witnessed fresh speculation on nature, the diffusion of disaster narratives and imagery and unprecedented attempts to control the physical world. The book will be essential to specialists and students of environmental history and disaster, as well as general readers who seek to discover how pre-industrial societies addressed some of the same foundational issues we grapple with today.
Forthcoming to be published in 2026
Valentina Ferrari and Martin Maiden, The Language of Practical Mathematics in Renaissance Italy: A Fifteenth Century Vernacular Didactic Treatise (Routledge, 2026)
This volume presents the first linguistic and philological analysis and edition (with English translation) of a fifteenth-century vernacular manuscript from Renaissance Italy, written by an author from the city of Cremona, in northern Italy. The text is a libro d’abbaco, used to teach practical business mathematics to young boys. The vernacular language of these texts has been largely neglected. The libri d’abbaco, however, reveal much about the native language of the ordinary people and the language of banking, and artisan sectors in the major Italian cities of the time. Our textbook serves as a starting point to reflect upon some key linguistic, cultural, and intellectual developments in fifteenth-century Lombardy. We provide a thorough comparative-historical analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the work, together with a detailed scrutiny of the lexicon, including specialist vocabulary and distinctively dialectal terms. The volume broadens the understanding and mode of engagement with vernacular technical registers and early pedagogical works, and aims to throw light on the little-explored question of the language of the vernacular libri d’abbaco, in ways of interest to linguists, philologists, textual scholars, and historians.
Information about all our books is available on the Routledge website and we will be posting updates on these as well as brief interviews with various authors in the coming months. In the meantime, Happy New Year from the Society for Renaissance Studies!