Recoding the Renaissance: Text, Tech, and "Artificial" Intelligence
Overview
Science, Invention, and Imagination in the Renaissance explores the dynamic intersections of art, science, and literature in one of history’s most transformative periods. This cluster investigates how Renaissance thinkers challenged traditional boundaries and reimagined concepts of humanity, creativity, and discovery. Through literature, historical figures, and groundbreaking ideas, these courses delve into the Renaissance as a pivotal era of innovation and inquiry. Students will examine how debates on sex and gender shaped Renaissance culture, exploring texts and artifacts that reveal the era’s fascination with the human body and its societal implications. From medical treatises and political pamphlets to poetry and theater, these materials shed light on evolving notions of identity, power, and life itself. How did Renaissance thinkers grapple with the questions of what it means to be human, non-human, or something beyond? How did they articulate ideas that still resonate today? The cluster also highlights the enduring influence of early modern literature on later works, focusing on how authors of the 19th century remixed Renaissance ideas to address topics like science, gender, and psychology. By reading across time periods, students will see how texts enter into dialogues that transcend centuries, enriching our understanding of both past and present. Lastly, the cluster considers extraordinary figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Paracelsus, Galileo, and Maria Sibylla Merian, whose polymathic achievements blurred the lines between disciplines. By studying their works—alongside rare manuscripts, illustrations, and artifacts—students will uncover how art and science coexisted as complementary forces in shaping the modern world. This cluster invites students to reflect on the Renaissance’s lasting impact on how we think about creativity, knowledge, and the intersections of art and science, encouraging them to probe deeper connections between history and contemporary life.
Courses
Italian/ Romance Studies 208FS/ Medieval and Renaissance 250FS/ GSF 251FS - Bio-Lit: The Science of Renaissance Sex and Gender (IJ)
Kate Driscoll, Assistant Professor of Romance Studies
What is a woman? What is a man? Did Renaissance minds ever think of other options? Could women be intellectuals? Were male bodies necessary for reproduction? What fictions of bodies circulated? Where, for whom, and why? Much as it does still today, talk of sex and gender sparked hot debate throughout Renaissance Europe. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, bodies both fascinated and terrorized minds and forms of power. This course studies "Bio-Lit" (literature about life and the body), drawing on Renaissance epic and lyric poetry, conduct manuals, medical treatises, political pamphlets, recipe books, experiment logs, cosmetic how-to guides, paintings, theater, and early opera. We will contextualize early examples of premodern feminism, anti-feminism, misogyny, and prejudice compared to models today.
English 190FS - Artificial Worlds: Renaissance London, the World, and AI (HI)
Astrid Giugni, Lecturing Fellow in the Social Science Research Institute
Writing at the beginning of the 17th century, Captain John Smith describes the hardships and surprises of settling in the New World: “all Sea-men [expected] an enchanted den of Furies and Devils, the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorn place in the world, and they found it the richest, healthfullest and pleasantest they ever saw.” How did English audiences imagine this distant world that could only be described through superlative? In this class, we will explore how early modern writers described the “new” worlds they found and built imaginary one—of bustling cities, distant continents, and cross-cultural encounters—in poetry, plays, and autobiographical narratives.
Focusing on texts ranging from John Smith’s A True Relation, to the collaborative city comedy Eastward Ho!, and to John Donne’s poems—intertwining metaphors of exploration with daring love poetry—we will examine how Renaissance authors constructed persuasive fictions about exploration, wealth, religion, and “strangers.” Students will also experiment with AI and natural-language-processing tools—mapping character networks, modeling thematic clusters, and analyzing rhetorical patterns—to reveal the hidden structures underlying these works.
Medieval and Renaissance 190FS - Renaissance Remixed, (HI)
Camey VanSant, Senior Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Duke University
The Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein compares himself to Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost. Pip attends a (bad) production of Hamlet in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Early modern British literature has influenced, informed, and animated (and haunted) some of the most famous works written in English. In this course, we will read major works of early modern British literature as well as later texts invoking them, with a focus on the nineteenth century. As we will see, later authors do not simply copy and paste from their Renaissance predecessors. Rather, they “remix” them, so to speak, entering into a complex conversation with them on topics that matter today—from the relationship between science and religion, to issues of gender, to psychology. As we consider how these texts talk to each other—and to us—students will develop their skills in close reading and research, preparing them for college courses in many disciplines.