William Stenhouse

Yeshiva University

Antiquities, Museums and Historical Writing in the Late Renaissance

2005-2006

William Stenhouse is Assistant Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, before receiving an MA from the Warburg Institute in Renaissance historical studies and a Ph.D. in history from University College London. He is the author of articles on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classical scholarship and two books: the volume of the Cassiano dal Pozzo catalogue raisonné devoted to drawings of inscriptions (2002), and Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (2005), a study of the interpretation of classical inscriptions and sixteenth-century recreations of the ancient world. At the Italian Academy, he will be exploring the connections between museums and the writing of history in the second half of the sixteenth century. He will focus on the ways in which the display of antiquities in Italian collections changed the ideas of scholars across Europe about what constituted historical evidence and how they were to present their own historical scholarship.