Renaissance Borders, Princeton University, April 13-14, 2012
From the beginning, conceptualizations of the Renaissance have been concerned with borders: between the classical past and the modern present; between pagan and Christian; between the civilized and the barbarous. Even as the idea of the Renaissance has endured various critiques over the past half century, this attention to borders has only intensified. In current debates about secularization and periodization in Renaissance studies, the boundaries between past and present and between the sacred and the profane have taken on a newly charged intensity.