Co-sponsored by Lumen Christi Institute & Abigail Adams Institute

Often characterized in older scholarship as a secularizing tendency that foreshadowed the Enlightenment, Renaissance humanism was actually a movement that aimed to build a more humane, virtuous, wise, tolerant, and open-minded Christian civilization. This history provides the framework for humanism’s enduring adaptability and its application to contemporary debates about reason, faith, education, and the ethical life.

James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard and an internationally recognized authority on Renaissance Humanism. He received his PhD from Columbia, has written widely on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance, and serves as general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Among his numerous authored and edited books, translations, and articles is Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019).