Guilford College

Faculty Member, History

About

I am an historian of Italian humanism, focusing on the writings of Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). My interests lie in understanding the relation between poetic expression and ethical inquiry, and especially in appreciating how these humanists formulated this relation in response to the dominant cultural spokesmen of their times: the mendicant clergy of the fourteenth and civic humanists of the fifteenth century. As a central concern I study the crossings of history, philosophy, and literature, in the effort to show the way these writers illuminate the freedoms and restrictions of Renaissance culture. 

My courses at Guilford College include seminars in medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, and Tudor-Stuart history, and an historical survey of western Europe from 800 C.E. to the present.

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