Society for Renaissance Studies

• 1. Introduction

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  The Society for Renaissance Studies began with a single meeting, on the 12th of July 1967, at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The chair that day was Denys Hay, one of the most respected historians of his generation. Around the table sat figures who had shaped how the English-speaking world thought about art and the past: Ernst Gombrich, Kenneth Clark, and Sydney Anglo, who would become the society's first secretary. What were they trying to build? And why did the Renaissance need its own dedicated society in Britain? Those questions carry us from that first gathering into a half-century of scholarship, publication, and the slow construction of a genuinely interdisciplinary community.

• 2. The Founding Meeting

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  Denys Hay chaired the founding meeting, and the names in the room suggest the ambition behind the project. Ernst Gombrich was already famous for his writing on the psychology of art and the history of visual representation. Kenneth Clark had brought Renaissance painting to a mass television audience. Sydney Anglo specialized in the political culture of the early Tudor period. That these figures gathered under one roof, in pursuit of a shared forum, says something about what the Renaissance meant to mid-twentieth-century British intellectual life: it was a subject that crossed every boundary between art history, literary studies, and political history. The society they created on the 12th of July 1967 was designed to keep those boundaries deliberately porous.

• 3. A Forum for Many Disciplines

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  The society's stated aim is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for everyone interested in studying the Renaissance across the UK and Ireland. That word "interdisciplinary" is the organizational principle. Renaissance scholarship, by its nature, refuses to sit quietly inside a single department. A study of Petrarch touches philology, literary history, and the history of ideas all at once. The society pursues its mission through a range of activities: organizing events, allocating research funding, and supporting publications. Among those publications is a book series and, most prominently, a journal called Renaissance Studies, which serves as the field's flagship publication. Running a journal means making hundreds of editorial decisions each year about what counts as important Renaissance scholarship, and that ongoing work shapes how the discipline defines itself.

• 4. Leadership Over Decades

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  Peter Murray held the chair first, from 1967 to 1970, and the handovers that followed trace a line through the leading figures of Renaissance scholarship in Britain. Nicolai Rubinstein, whose work on Florentine political thought became foundational, chaired from 1970 to 1973. John Hale followed, then Margaret Mann Phillips, who was a leading expert on Erasmus. Peter Burke, whose writing on the social history of the Renaissance reached far beyond academic audiences, chaired from 1983 to 1986. Sydney Anglo, who had been at the founding meeting as secretary, eventually rose to the chair himself from 1986 to 1989. Later chairs include Brian Vickers, a scholar of Renaissance rhetoric and the history of science, who served from 2004 to 2007. The list continues into recent years: Jane Grogan chaired from 2022 to 2025, and Hannah Murphy took up the position for the 2025-2028 term.

• 5. Renaissance Studies the Journal

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  Renaissance Studies, the society's flagship journal, is central to how the organization sustains the field over time. A journal does more than collect articles; it defines the conversation, sets standards of evidence, and signals which questions are worth asking. For a field as chronologically and geographically diffuse as Renaissance studies, a dedicated publication also gives scattered scholars a shared reference point. The society's commitment to funding research alongside publishing means that the journal is part of a broader infrastructure, one that includes grants and organized activities designed to lower the barriers facing early-career researchers. The combination of a book series and a periodical gives the society two distinct ways to shape what gets written and read.