The Renaissance Society of America

Since its foundation in 1954, The Renaissance Society of America has been the leading organization in the Americas for interdisciplinary study of the Renaissance as the publisher of Renaissance Quarterly. Membership, which includes a subscription to RQ, offers many benefits for a scholar in your field.

The interdisciplinary articles (about twenty-five to thirty-five per year) and some 300 book reviews per year provide coverage of the most important recent scholarly developments in Renaissance studies. The journal's reviews and articles are written by authorities in history, literature, art, philosophy, music, and other areas of study. The Society awards annually the William Nelson Prize ($600) to the best article in RQ as judged by a jury chosen from the members. The Society also awards annually the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of $1,000 for the best book published in Renaissance studies.

Our newsletter, Renaissance News & Notes, is produced twice a year. It supplements Renaissance Quarterly with updates about Society activities, forthcoming conferences, calls-for-papers, awards, and prizes.

Every member of the Society has a right to a discount subscription to Iter, the online interdisciplinary gateway to Renaissance studies. The Society is a founding partner of Iter. The jewel in the crown of Iter is its bibliography of the Renaissance that, when complete, will encompass everything published on the Renaissance since 1700. But Iter also offers other online services, such as Paul Oskar Kristeller's Iter Italicum, the International Directory of Scholars, and Baptisteria Sacra: An Iconographic Index of Baptismal Fonts.

RSA members can also purchase an annual subscription to ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), which offers the full text of over 1,700 monographs in all areas of the humanities, including nearly 500 titles in ancient, medieval and Renaissance, and later European fields. The titles have been selected by committees of scholars drawn from participating ACLS societies, including the RSA, for their continued value in research and teaching. The collection is fully cross-searchable, linked to online reviews (JSTOR, MUSE), and includes both in-print and out-of-print and rare titles. It is available 7/24 on standard web browsers. The collection adds 500 titles a year in all fields. Subscriptions are available through the RSA website at a charge of $35.

The Society has also launched a program of research grants of up to $3,000 for its members. The grants are divided into three categories: pre-doctoral, younger scholar/independent scholar, and senior scholar. To date we have been awarding nine grants a year from our resources and have been able to supplement this number in some years with grants supported by outside foundations.

The Society has a text series in which it publishes editions and translations of texts from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Members may purchase these volumes at discount. The Society also makes available subsidies to presses undertaking the publication of other relevant text editions and translations. In addition, the Society supports various publication projects, among them: the multi-volumed editions of the letters of Lorenzo de'Medici, A. C. de la Mare's The Handwriting of Italian Humanists, and F. Edward Cranz's Microfilm Corpus of Indexes to Printed Catalogues (39 reels) and Microfilm Corpus of Unpublished Inventories of Latin Manuscripts Through 1600 AD (349 reels). The two corpora are major research tools available for library purchase. Members' contributions to the Publications Fund, Medici project, or (unrestricted) General Fund assist in these important efforts for Renaissance scholarship.

The Society's annual meeting offers a range of topics and papers as well as the opportunity to meet scholars from all over the world in one's own and related fields. The Society itself sponsors a plenary panel on "Recent Trends in Renaissance Studies", the Josephine Waters Bennett plenary lecture, and a closing reception. The "Recent Trends" panels examine developments in Renaissance scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. Past topics have included the family, marriage and sex, "Representations", economic history, "Cross-Cultural Encounters", and education. Recent and planned conference sites include Los Angeles; Florence, Italy; Chicago; Tempe; Toronto; New York; Cambridge; San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Venice.

A directory of members is published on the RSA website.