Spotlight Detail

Renaissance Europe Goes to the Movies

Prof. Jane Newman's Winter 2022 class
CL 100A | ES 101A | FMS 161
Lectures Tuesday-Thursday 9:30-10:50am
Film Screenings Tuesday 11-12:20pm

In Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996), scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the film Jurassic Park contains several errors, but that these errors “belong to the juicy and informative class of faults” characterized by the economist Vilfredo Pareto in the following way: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.” We will examine the “juicy faults” about the European Renaissance that we find in a series of movies from the 1940s up through the early twenty-first century and look at them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period, asking what role cinematic representations of the European Renaissance and European early modernity (c. 1500-1650) played in the fashioning of modern and post-modern political, religious, cultural, and scientific identities from the Cold War through the aftermath of 9/11.