Welcome to the eRenaissance Project

a mockup cover
for our prospective eBook

Let's create an eBook that explores the connections between the European Renaissance of the 15th-17th centuries and the current digital renaissance. After all, doesn't one good renaissance deserve another?

That's the premise for this project, launched by students of a Renaissance literature course at Brigham Young University in early 2013. The embedded picture is a mockup cover for our prospective eBook. As we think through our book's content and form, we will make that process public on this blog.

Already we have been using the Open Renaissance Wiki to collect and organize our content and ideas. But with the blog we can interact better among ourselves and with potential readers of our finished book.

Six Themes
We have already identified six themes, lenses by which we can understand Renaissance literature. These have proven to be handy concepts for understanding our present day, and also for conceptualizing our own project:

1. Ad Fontes: Recovering the Past and Returning to Sources
2. Brave New Worlds: Travel, Science and Social Change
3. What a Piece of Work is Man: Humanism and Rhetoric
4. Plough Boys and Bibles: The Protestant Reformation 
5. Typographia Conservatrix: Printing's Cultural Impression
6. Sprezzatura: Courting Culture

Each of these will be introduced separately.

Twelve Authors