This site accompanies Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta, a Newberry exhibition (Fall 2020) and Northwestern University publication.
Travel to the Renaissance through the Newberry’s engravings, maps, and books—using the Nova Reperta print series as a guide.
During a time of globalization, colonization, and warfare, Europeans in the Renaissance embraced new technology even as they lamented its disruptive, destructive, and destabilizing consequences.
Renaissance Invention explores the conception of novelty and technology through an unprecedented study of Nova Reperta (New Discoveries), a late sixteenth-century print series that celebrated the marvels of the age, including the stirrup, the cure for syphilis, and the so-called discovery of America.
Designed in Florence and printed in Antwerp, the Nova Reperta images spread far and wide, shaping Europeans’ perceptions of the innovations that were changing the world and breeding anxiety about the future.