It is with great pleasure and admiration that the SIHS awards the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Citation to Guido Ruggiero.
Guido Ruggiero is Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. His incisive analysis and imaginative approach to the history of early modern Italy has spanned the topics of gender, sex, crime, violence, magic, science, and everyday life and culture. He has especially mined the Venetian and other Italian archives to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of ordinary men and women living, working, loving, and fighting in the Italian Renaissance cities. Professor Ruggiero’s work also displays a dizzying array of analytical approaches, including microhistory, narrative history, archival research, gender, and literary criticism. He restores social context to texts, including famous writers such as Machiavelli, and discerns the daily performance of life in the public and private spaces, the civil and religious courts of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.
Professor Ruggiero has been one of the most prolific scholars in the field of Italian Renaissance history. He has published numerous monographs, including Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (Rutgers, 1980), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985), Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1993), Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2007).
His most recent book, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge, 2014), offers a radical rethinking of the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a cultural phenomenon; it received the 2014 American Association for Italian Studies prize for the best book on premodern Italy.
In addition to his own groundbreaking work, Guido Ruggiero has worked tirelessly to promote the work of other scholars in the field of early modern Italian history. With Edward Muir, he edited select articles from Quaderni Storici, making them accessible to English-speaking audiences in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Johns Hopkins, 1991), and History from Crime (Johns Hopkins, 1993), edited with Edward Muir. He has edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) and Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 2003), translated with Laura Giannetti, and served as both series editor for Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and co-editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner’s (2002).
Professor Ruggiero’s work has been recognized with numerous fellowships, including a Guggenheim. He has served as the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor in Residence at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Rome Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome, and been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
As an instructor, Professor Ruggiero earned the 2010 William R. Jones Outstanding Mentor Award, a state-wide award for mentoring minority graduate students given by the Florida Education Fund. Students at all the institutions where he has taught has benefited from his learned and supportive mentorship as have numerous younger colleagues in the field.
Usually recognition of how much a scholar has done for the field would stop here. But Guido Ruggiero’s unflagging energy was not limited to the worlds he wrote about or the colleagues who profited from debating and reading with him. He also spent decades as a tireless warrior to keep History and the Humanities more generally as vibrant strongholds in an ever more antagonistic institutional environment. At Pennsylvania State University and the University of Connecticut he pushed for the expansion of Women and Gender Studies and was fundamental in ambitious infrastructure reforms that have helped both universities’ history departments continue to flourish even after his departure. But his greatest success is undoubtedly what he did to transform the Department of History at the University of Miami. Thanks to his constant maneuvering (perhaps inspired by the smarts of the Renaissance figures he has followed so long), under his leadership as Department Chair, he negotiated for the hiring of at least twelve tenured and tenure-track faculty within a ten-year period, including many generous Visiting Assistant Professorships and an increase in salary, stipends, and research funds for every member of the History Department. Today, the University of Miami’s History Department is flourishing, and widely known for its strong research profile. This is mostly thanks to Ruggiero’s helmsmanship; his colleagues appreciate him so much for all he has done that they even put up with his impish smile and some of his sillier jokes, with a nod and a smile back. In short, what Ruggiero has done for Italian history is mirrored in what he has done for the profession of history more generally. He has made it stronger and livelier.
For all these reasons, we are delighted to celebrate Guido Ruggiero’s contributions to the field of Italian history, including his forthcoming book, appropriately titled Love and Sex in a Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance, which will appear in Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History in June 2021. We extend our warmest congratulations to Guido con molto affetto e stima!