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

“Continuità inaspettate e contesti intrecciati della cultura clementina,” in I papati medicei tra Erasmo e Machiavelli. Religione, politica, cultura, ed. Gaetano Lettieri (Rome: Viella, 2025), 95–108.

“The Uses of Defamation in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia of Literati,” in Von Paolo Giovio bis Johannes Latomus. Intermedialität und Intertextualität in den Elogia virorum literis illustrium, ed. Hartmut Wulfram and Matthias Baltas (Tübingen: Narr Verlag [NeoLatina], 2025), 59–78.

“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.