Kenneth Gouwens

Professor Emeritus

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Ph.D., Stanford

Areas of Specialty
European Cultural and Intellectual history, 1300-1600; Italian Renaissance

Professor Gouwens joined the UConn faculty in 1998 and retired in 2022.

Current Research Interests
Cultural history of Italy, 1494-1530; Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’Medici); distinctions drawn between humans and simians in the Renaissance and in our own era

Selected Publications
Books

ed. and trans., Paolo Giovio, Portraits of Learned Men — Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita  (I Tatti Renaissance Library Series, no. 95; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023)

ed. and trans., Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women — Dialogus de viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus  (I Tatti Renaissance Library Series, no. 56; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)

ed., with Christopher S. Celenza, Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006)

ed., with Sheryl E. Reiss, The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005)

ed., The Italian Renaissance: The Essential Sources (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)

Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 1998).

Articles & Book Chapters

“A New Edition of Giovio’s Vitae of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael,” Atti e memorie dell’Arcadia 12 (2023): 113–151.

“Incidental Historiography in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia of Literati,” Rivista di letteratura storiografica italiana 6 (2022): 29–56.

“Institutions and Dynamics of Learned Exchange,” in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, ed. Pamela M. Jones, Simon Ditchfield, and Barbara Wisch (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 500–14.

“What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance,” in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 37–63.

“Emasculation as Empowerment: Lessons of Beaver Lore for Two Italian Humanists,” European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire 22:4 (August 2015): 536–62.

“Reading for Gender,” co-authored with Brendan Kane and Laurie Nussdorfer, European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire 22:4 (August 2015): 527­–35.

“Rhetorical Strategies in a Failed Embassy to Charles V after the Sack of Rome,” L’Ellisse 10:1 (2015): 25–40.

“Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women,” Renaissance Quarterly 68:1 (Spring 2015): 33–97.

“Meanings of Masculinity in Paolo Giovio’s ‘Ischian’ Dialogues,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17:1 (Spring 2014): 79–101.

“Humanists, Historians, and the Fullness of Time in Renaissance Rome,” in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Sixteenth-Century Rome, ed. Jill Burke (Alder­shot: Ashgate, 2012), 95–110.

“Erasmus, ‘Apes of Cicero,’ and Conceptual Blending,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71:4 (October, 2010): 523–45.

“Clement VII: Prince at War,” in The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, eds. James Corkery and Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29–46.

“Human Exceptionalism,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), 415–34.

“L’Umanesimo al tempo di Pierio Valeriano: la cultura locale, la fama, e la Respublica litterarum nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” in Bellunesi e Feltrini tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento: filologia, erudizione e biblioteche, ed. Paolo Pellegrini (Rome and Padua: Antenore, 2006), 3-10.

“Humanist Culture and its Malcontents: Alcionio and Sepúlveda on the Consequences of Translating Aristotle,” co-authored with C. S. Celenza in iidem, Humanism and Creativity, 347–80.

“Perceiving the Past: Understanding Renaissance Humanism after the `Cognitive Turn,’” The American Historical Review 103:1 (February, 1998): 55-82.

“Discourses of Vulnerability: Pietro Alcionio’s Orations on the Sack of Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 50:1 (Spring, 1997): 38-77.

“Life-Writing and the Theme of Cultural Decline in Valeriano’s De litteratorum infelicitate,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 27:1 (Spring, 1996): 87-96.

“Ciceronianism and Collective Identity: Defining the Boundaries of the Roman Academy, 1525,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23:2 (Spring, 1993) : 173-95.