“Beneficium dando accepit, qui digno dedit” (“by conferring favors on the worthy, you receive them in return”: Publilius Syrus, cited by Bartolomeo Scala in his fable Beneficium, trans. David Marsh, Renaissance Fables [2004], 160–61). Accompanying a present to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the classical tag seems equally appropriate to this gift of lavishly illustrated essays to Joseph Connors in bestowing luster and favor on both the authors of the essays and on the recipient — not only Connors, but also the institution that he headed, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti. Reflecting Connor’s own area of expertise, as well as Berenson’s (and I Tatti’s own balance of disciplines), the first and much-fatter volume is devoted to art history, the second sweeping up history, literature (including philosophy), and music. Totalling 177 essays in all, they are too numerous to describe or even list individually. But because they have been contributed by an international cast of fellows, associates, and visiting scholars at I Tatti during Connors’s eight-year directorship from 2002 to 2010, they offer a unique overview of Renaissance scholarship as it is reflected by its distinguished veterans at one end of the time scale and by its tyros at the other.

The first thing to be said is that it is now a very long and increasingly global Renaissance, extending from the early Trecento to the late Seicento and beyond, and from Italy to Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Far East. Italy remains its stable center, but in terms of rebirth its jaded mother, mulier defessa, is now more likely to produce reformed children than reborn classical offspring. Some are young Jesuits, whose petitions for missions to China reveal an interesting range of motivation; others are dissident reformers influenced by Bernardino Ochino; while its more classical offspring belong to academies like the Lucidi in Florence and the Incogniti in Venice, which produced believers in a naturalistic religion as well as libertines who believed in nothing at all. Underpinned by the new Galilean science and by growing interest in foreign languages — especially Arabic, championed by the orientalist and printer G. B. Raimondi — the new thinking changed attitudes (toward giants, dwarves, and animals, for instance, no longer viewed as monstrous but as evidence of the diversity of the natural world) and it created new tensions between empiricism and speculation in painting and in scientific research.

The contributors’ strict page limit does not encourage the production of new paradigms, of course, and these novelties are gleaned from papers scattered throughout both volumes. What the page limit does encourage is the close reading of documents, images, and music, some newly discovered and others reinterpreted by these experts to throw new light on the familiar — on portraits and viewers’ responses to them; on histories and history writing, especially in Florence (Villani) and Naples; on iconic figures like Machiavelli, Ficino, and Galateo; and on the artists Ghiberti and Leonardo da Vinci, Ghiberti’s dogs and Leonardo’s dreams and geometrical drawings being no mere jeux d’esprit but revealing emblems of the artists’ achievement. Astrology is used to throw new light on the Medici, especially in Rubens’s portrait of Maria de’ Medici. And among the many new topics is an interesting account of the pigment trade in Venice, as well as two valuable papers on the editing and encoding of Renaissance manuscripts, a topic dear to the heart of the humanists themselves and one that lies at the heart of the revival of classical antiquity — like the many papers that pay tribute to the dedicatee by writing about art and architecture, especially in Baroque Rome.

A more varied and thick Renaissance is produced by the functional and anthropological approaches of other contributors, including the musicologists. Art objects in the Medici Palace serve a political function and so does the madness of a debt-ridden son of a Florentine vintner. Food serves as both a political and a social indicator, lubricating diplomatic encounters and revealing dietary rituals (through the presence of chickens in birth scenes) as well as their disappearance. In the same year that feasts disappear from a confraternity’s account book in Florence, the ancient ritual practice of planting of male (Guelf) or female (Ghibelline) trees in front of houses in Alessandria (echoing the virile Guelf “tree of fecundity” in Trecento Massa Marittima?) was condemned as “a pagan superstition rather than a Christian activity,” and replaced with the planting of crosses. The changing status and roles of women are documented by new images of the Madonna and of Charity, by bequests in wills, by account books registering the large profits of the bell-making sisters in Venice, and through the politics of the Medici court theater.

So does the label Renaissance still have validity as the definition of this extended and recentered period? Burckhardt makes only one appearance (with Huizinga) in order to pose a rare question about the quality of Renaissance culture (primitive and/or classical?) through the role of play and its rules. In view of I Tatti’s much-valued interdisciplinarity and the broad view adopted by most of the contributors (especially stressed by the penultimate art historical paper), it is perhaps disappointing that the volumes do little to address this question directly, and I was left wondering whether a more organic organization of the papers might not have produced a more satisfying read as well as a more coherent Renaissance. Yet, since this is a florilegium or zibaldone (a salad of many herbs) offered to an individual, maybe we shouldn’t even ask the question but simply savor the wealth of flowers and leaves it offers, one by one.