News and Announcements https://www.rsa.org/news/default.asp Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:11:01 GMT Fri, 22 May 2026 14:17:00 GMT Copyright © 2026 Renaissance Society of America Shakespeare in the Kitchen https://www.rsa.org/news/news.asp?id=727805 https://www.rsa.org/news/news.asp?id=727805 Shakespeare in the Kitchen asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Marissa Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

Shakespeare in the Kitchen is an original and fascinating read for anyone interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance England, Early Modern literature, history, food studies, and the history of food. ]]> Fri, 22 May 2026 15:17:00 GMT New Identification of Isabella d’Este’s Personal Copy of a Lost Renaissance Manuscript https://www.rsa.org/news/news.asp?id=727681 https://www.rsa.org/news/news.asp?id=727681 A new public-facing article in The Conversation presents the identification of a Renaissance manuscript now preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris as having belonged to Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. The discovery emerged through a chance encounter with a painted Renaissance maiolica plate bearing one of Isabella’s many imprese (personal emblems), also found in the Parisian manuscript. The article explores the circulation of rare early Italian poetry, the transmission of manuscripts in sixteenth-century Italy, and Isabella d’Este’s role as a reader, collector, patron, and broader cultural figure who carefully shaped her public image.

Public-facing article: https://theconversation.com/what-a-renaissance-plate-reveals-about-a-woman-who-shaped-literary-history-273654

French version: https://theconversation.com/ce-quun-plat-de-la-renaissance-revele-sur-la-bibliotheque-disabelle-deste-275735

Scholarly publication (open access): https://doi.org/10.54103/2282-7447/26679

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