Professor Nicholas Davidson

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Professor Nicholas Davidson
Associate Professor of the History of the Renaissance and Reformation
St Edmund Hall
01865 (2)79000
nicholas.davidson@history.ox.ac.uk

I am interested in European and world history between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.  My research and publications have focused mainly on the social, cultural and religious history of Renaissance and early-modern Italy; but I also work on European intellectual history, on the history of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and on the consequences of growing contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans in the same period.

 

See page on St Edmund Hall website

 

Featured Publication

'Lucretius, Irreligion and Atheism in Early-Modern Venice’, in D. Norbrook, S. Harrison, and P. Hardie (eds.), Lucretius and the Early Modern (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 123-34

Lucretius and the Early Modern

The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius' De rerum natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling book,  The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity. But how modern did early modern readers want to become? 

This collection of essays offers a series of case studies which demonstrate the sophisticated ways in which some readers might relate the poem to received ideas, assimilating Lucretius to theories of natural law and even natural theology, while others were at once attracted to Lucretius' subversiveness and driven to dissociate themselves from him. The volume presents a wide geographical range, from Florence and Venice to France, England, and Germany, and extends chronologically from Lucretius' contemporary audience to the European Enlightenment. It covers both major authors such as Montaigne and neglected figures such as Italian neo-Latin poets, and is the first book in the field to pay close attention to Lucretius' impact on political thought, both in philosophy - from Machiavelli, through Hobbes, to Rousseau - and in the topical spin put on the  De rerum natura by translators in revolutionary England. It combines careful attention to material contexts of book production and distribution with close readings of particular interpretations and translations, to present a rich and nuanced profile of the mark made by a remarkable poem.

Research
  • The history of the Inquisition
  • Italian history
  • Early-modern Catholicism

My work explores two major themes in the history of the early-modern period: the religious divisions created by the Reformation, and the cultural challenges generated by the increased interchange of people and ideas between Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.  How readily in the wake of these developments could contemporaries question or reject the political, intellectual, moral, religious, and social norms of their own cultures?  And how effectively could those norms be enforced by the established powers of Church and State?  My research and writing are therefore shaped by questions about the nature of relations between different societies, about coercion and co-existence, about human rights and international law, and about conscience, free will, and authority.  Much of my evidence is necessarily drawn from legal and judicial records, and especially from the extraordinarily rich archives of the Inquisition tribunals in Italy, Portugal, and Spain.  But both the content and the processes of the law need to be examined in the context of the communities in which lawyers, judges, witnesses and defendants operated.

I am currently completing a book on the Inquisition in Venice in the sixteenth century.  Forthcoming projects include studies of relations between Greek and Latin Christians in the East Mediterranean, the origins of the Roman Inquisition, founded in 1542, and the careers and policies of the Cardinals who ran the Roman tribunal between that year and the end of the 1700s.  I am also interested in the history of Catholicism as a global religion, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Americas; in Catholic missionary activities and tactics both within and outside Europe; and in the development of cultural understanding and exchange in the early-modern world.

Publications

  • Sebastian Castellio: Knowledge, Doubt, and Ignorance

    2020
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    Chapter
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    Le doute dans l’Europe moderne

  • Latins and Greeks in the Venetian Colonies of the Eastern Mediterranean

    2019
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    Chapter
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    Venetian Rule in the Eastern Mediterranean 1400–1700: Empires, Connectivities and Environments

  • ‘Lucretius, Irreligion and Atheism in Early-Modern Venice’

    2015
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    Chapter
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    Lucretius and the Early Modern
    Atheism,. and. Irreligion. in. Renaissance. and. Early. Modern. Venice. N. S. Davidson Research on Lucretius in Renaissance and early modern Italy is often focused on Florence, and with good reason. The text of the De rerum natura was first ...
    Didactic poetry, Latin

  • Hispanophobia in the Venetian Republic

    2015
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    Chapter
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    Renaissance Italy and the Idea of Spain, 1492-1700

  • The Inquisition

    2013
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    Chapter
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    The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation

  • Sex, Religion, and the Law: Disciplining Desire

    2012
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    Chapter
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    A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance
    Europe saw such revolutionary cultural change between 1450 and 1650 that those who witnessed the transformations conceived of the period as a time of rebirth. Ideas and practices around sexuality were transformed as much as any other aspect of society. Religious change, the growth of empires, educational development, social mobility, the theater and the printing press, and medical advances all radically reshaped sexuality in the West. Focusing on texts, images, and social practices, this volume examines the changing attitudes to sexuality during the Renaissance and the strategies used both to enforce and subvert public assumptions and standards. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.
    History

  • Religious Minorities

    2008
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    Chapter
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    The Renaissance World
    Collating thirty-four essays from the field's leading scholars, John Jeffries Martin shows that this period of rapid and complex change resulted from a convergence of a new set of social, economic and technological forces alongside a cluster of interrelated practices including painting, sculpture, humanism and science, in which the elites engaged. Unique in its balance of emphasis on elite and popular culture, on humanism and society, and on women as well as men, The Renaissance World grapples with issues as diverse as Renaissance patronage and the development of the slave trade. Beginning with a section on the antecedents of the Renaissance world, and ending with its lasting influence, this book is an invaluable read, which students and scholars of history and the Renaissance will dip into again and again.
    History

  • Le plus beau et le plus meschant esprit que ie aye cogneu: Science and religion in the writings of Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585-1619

    2005
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    Chapter
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    Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion
    The separation of science and religion in modern secular culture can easily obscure the fact that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe ideas about nature were intimately related to ideas about God. Readers of this book will find fresh and exciting accounts of a phenomenon common to both science and religion: deviation from orthodox belief. How is heterodoxy to be measured? How might the scientific heterodoxy of particular thinkers impinge on their religious views? Would heterodoxy in religion create a predisposition towards heterodoxy in science? Might there be a homology between heterodox views in both domains? Such major protagonists as Galileo and Newton are re-examined together with less familiar figures in order to bring out the extraordinary richness of scientific and religious thought in the pre-modern world.

  • Poor relief and health care in Southern Europe, 1700-1900: The ideological context

    2005
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    Chapter
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    Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Southern Europe
    ...all this is still relevant today, since the situations that governments and the Catholic Church found themselves confronted with, and the stark choices they had to make, are being replayed to some extent today. Who is responsible for the poor, who is to blame for their being poor? How should their poverty be relieved, how should the health care of the many be funded? These are still live issues today. While complete in itself the present volume also forms the fourth and last of a four-volume survey of health care and poor relief in Europe between 1500 and 1900, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham
    Social Science

  • Fuggir la liberta della coscienza: Conscience and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Italy

    2004
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    Chapter
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    Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700
    In the early modern period, the conscience stood as a powerful mediator between God and man, directing and judging moral actions. This collection conveys the breadth of the conscience's jurisdiction, analyzing its impact on politics, religion, science, and the understanding of gender and sexuality. It demonstrates how individuals resolved ethical problems in these areas through applying the methods of casuistry, the branch of theology devoted to resolving difficult moral cases. However, casuistry itself was challenged by newer sources of moral guidance.
    • More
Teaching

Current DPhil Students

  • Bradley Blankemeyer (co-supervised with Professor Alan Strathern)
  • Ashley Ellington
  • Katie Fellows
  • Oliver Ford
  • Thomas Goodwin
  • John Hawkins (co-supervised with Professor Geoffrey Tyack)
  • Ernesto Oyarbide Magana (co-supervised with Professor Alex Gajda)
  • Giulia Vidori
  • Luca Zenobi (co-supervised with Professor John Watts)

 

I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil or Masters students regarding Italian history; history of Catholicism.

I currently teach:

Prelims: FHS: Masters:
General History III, 1400-1650 (Renaissance, Recovery and Reform)

General History VII, 1409-1525

 The Dawn of the Global World, 1450-1800: Ideas, Objects, Connections
OS 10: Conquest and Colonisation: Spain and America in the Sixteenth Century General History VIII, 1500-1618  
Approaches to History: Anthropology and History; and Art and History General History IX, 1600-1715  
Foreign Texts: Machiavelli General History XVIII, Eurasian Empires, 1450-1800  
  SS8: Politics, Art and Culture in the Italian Renaissance, Venice and Florence, c. 1475-1525