Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices

A fundamental aspect of culture in all ages, religion was a particularly crucial issue in the Renaissance. Religion and imagination, or “faith and fantasy”, represent the theme of this volume. These essays explore the intersection between religion and the creative forces of the individuals who wrote about sacred matters, practised their religion, or fashioned religious themes in their artwork. They touch upon different currents of religious thought-not only Catholic and Protestant beliefs, including the devotio moderna and Calvinism- but also Judaism and ancient Hebrew traditions, and even popular superstitions. The focus is not on the doctrines, but rather on the impact that religion, in its various manifestations, had on the literature, art, and other cultural aspects of the period, and, conversely, the influence of human creativity and imagination on interpretations of religion through cultural manifestations.

ETHAN MATT KAVALER teaches art history at the University of Toronto and is author of Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (1999).

OLGA ZORZI PUGLIESE teaches Italian at the University of Toronto. She has published monographs on dialogue (1995) and Castiglione (2008) and articles on religious texts of the Renaissance.

REVIEW
University of Toronto Quarterly, 82.3 (2013), pp. 639-640. Reviewed by Cathleen Sara Hoeniger.