What does it mean to speak of renaissance in the plural? That question animated a roundtable hosted by MIT’s Global Humanities Initiative on 21 March 2025, which brought together five scholars to explore the humanities beyond the familiar contours of the European canon. Under the title Humanisms & Renaissances Across World History, the event challenged linear narratives of progress and invited a more layered understanding of cultural renewal.
Prof. Wiebke Denecke opened the conversation with the global vision for the study of “renaissances” and “humanisms” across world history that she developed for a “Humanisms” cluster in the Norton Anthology of World Literature (5th edition, Volume C, 2023) and called for a broader humanistic horizon that is neither confined to the West nor reducible to disciplinary silos. The discussion that followed offered a space to reconsider humanistic inquiry: its dialogue with the sciences, the potential of human imagination, and what we owe to the past and posterity.
With AI raising new questions about the nature of human agency, several speakers turned to historical traditions of humanism that ventured beyond strictly anthropocentric frameworks. Dr. Ugo Mondini turned to Byzantine thoughts, where the human and the divine were often seen not as mere opposites but mutually constitutive. Arabic thinkers like the 9th century polymath al-Jahiz—but also the monastic traditions of 13th-century Egypt—similarly reflect a world marked by generative tension between divine authority and human creativity. Johannes Makar noted that the pursuit of knowledge in such traditions often gestured toward a more timeless, moral horizon that stretches beyond the fleeting present.
This moral dimension recurred throughout the panel. Prof. Laura Ashe pointed out that thinkers such as Wiliam of Ockham, though often labeled as “medieval,” grappled with competing scientific and moral imperatives that remain relevant today. MIT Senior Jason Chen offered a contemporary echo, arguing that humanistic thinking is vital to projects like decarbonization, which depend as much on cultural and ethical understanding as they do on purely technical solutions.
Renaissance, then, need not denote a single historical rupture or a triumphant rediscovery of lost knowledge. It can also name quieter, more recursive processes that emerge in dialogue with older traditions, in places and periods often left outside the usual frame. Vaclav Zheng’s reflections on 16th-century Poland, along with the panelists’ examples from 12th-century England, 19th-century Egypt, and various East Asian humanisms, gestured toward parallel experiments in reimagining the human.
