Stephen Bowd

My research has generally focused on the history of Venice during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, initially on the history of religious beliefs and practices. I combined both interests in my first book, which was a surprisingly lengthy account of the brief life of a Venetian patrician-humanist-turned-hermit Vincenzo Querini. In this book I also explored the spiritual worlds of Venice, Rome, and Florence during the crucial years of religious change up until c.1540. In 2000 a chance encounter at a conference in Oxford led me to undertake research in the rich archives of the formerly Venetian subject city of Brescia (now in the region of Lombardy) and I produced an edited collection of texts (translated by Dr J. Donald Cullington) and a monograph, published by Harvard University Press, about aspects of civic religion and culture in the city during the first century of Venetian rule (1426-1530). I then edited a selection of humanist texts about the infamous alleged torture and murder of the child Simon of Trent by the Jews of Trent in 1475, which was published in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series in 2012. These texts were written by a number of Brescian humanists, but the works had Italian, and indeed European, resonance since they confirmed in the new medium of print Christian fears about the dangers of Jews present in Christian society. Finally, my interest in belief has encouraged my work on prophecy, millenarianism, the supernatural, and ‘superstition’ in Renaissance Italy. I have focused attention on the social, religious, and political roots of the ‘occult’ and outlined how it formed an essential and contested part of everyday beliefs and practices. I have extended my interest in this field, which has also formed an important strand of my teaching, to sixteenth-century England with three articles exploring the life and work of John Dee, who was warden of Manchester College and considered the 'arch-conjuror of England', as the title of his most recent biography puts it.

with Alex Lee, Why Machiavelli Matters Now (London: Bloomsbury, 2026) Edited with Sarah Cockram and John Gagne, Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, (2022) 'A Family Affair: War, Agency, and Female Epistolary Networks in Renaissance Italy', Gender & History (2026) 'Publication, Performance and Politics: Machiavelli's "Clizia" and the Culture of Medicean Florence and Rome', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 102.1 (2026): 1-17