ABSTRACT
The Renaissance was a period of flourishing global connections of goods, fashions, and ideas, producing a culture that masked its newness by imagining it was reviving the old. The family system of the Renaissance especially victimised the young. The intense Renaissance study of humanity might be cast as the anthropology of the period. An anthropology of the Renaissance has required more than a shift in understandings of the individual and the self. Two facets of the Renaissance fascination with the uncanny jump out at modern readers as particularly disorienting: the fad for hermeneutic magic and the great witch craze. Most Renaissance art was religious, and the motives of the great Renaissance patrons of the arts glorified God along with the supposedly sovereign individual. In the past historians analysed the Renaissance economy largely in terms of production, but there has been a shift toward consumption, especially of luxury goods traded in the global economy.
