People_
Associate Professor John Gagne
BA MA Toronto AM PhD Harvard
Cassamarca Associate Professor of History
Director, Medieval &
Early Modern Centre (MEMC)
Director, Medieval &
Early Modern Centre (MEMC)
Phone
+61 2 9036 5248
Email
Address
A18 - Brennan MacCallum Building
The University of Sydney
I study and teach European history from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, especially Italy and France. I’m particularly interested in histories of cultural friction and dysfunction, and my research often pursues the links between war, representation, material culture, and the human body in premodernity. I frequently collaborate with art historians and historians of science.
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- Early modern Europe, particularly France and northern Italy
- Technologies of knowledge & histories of information
- Problems in the history of war
- Chroniclers, historians, and historiography
- The human body, appearance, and gender
- Local-Global connections in premodernity
- Consumerism, consumption, and food
- City and Duchy of Milan, 15th-16th centuries
Classes Taught Before 2025:
- HSTY1001: History Workshop - "Paris, 1661" Seminar
- HSTY2602: Tablet to iPad: A History of Information
- HSTY2628: BOOM! The History of War
- HSTY2686: Food, Environment, and Culture in Europe (1300-1800)
- HSTY3707: France, 1500-1800
- HSTY3903: History and Historians
- HSTY4011: Early Modern Europe: Problems & Approaches
Classes Taught in 2025:
- HSTY1002: Age of Empires
- HSTY2710: Renaissance and Reformation
Supervisions:
- Topics in society, culture, and thought, 14th-18th centuries
- Europe and its global contact zones
- Reception of Classical and Medieval traditions in later centuries
Recent Honours thesis supervisions include research on: the cultural and culinary history of saffron; Gothic medievalism in colonial Australian architecture; the transnational history of allodial land tenure in the context of imperial expansion; spectators sitting on the Parisian stage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; public executions in Tudor England; King Henry VII and his relation to Welsh culture; and many other topics.
BOOK PROJECTS:
- Paper World: Obliteration and Lost Documentation in Premodern Europe. Emerging from a project funded by the Australian Research Council, this book traces the reception of writing paper in premodern Europe as a history of decay, destruction, and the emergence of a postmedieval culture of conservation.
- The Fabric of War: The Material Culture and Social Lives of Banners in Renaissance Europe. A book co-authored with Timothy McCall (Villanova University), to be published with the Elements in the Renaissance series for Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2024. Building on material culture, textile history, and new military history, this book reveals flags as numinous objects, tokens of exchange, and figurations of personhood in the tumultuous first global age.
- Mechanism/Organism: The Premodern Iron Hand and Bodily Ambition. This short volume traces the rise and fall of the mechanical iron prosthetic hand from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century as a practical and intellectual history of embodiment in the era before industralization.
- 2024 FASS Commendation for Teaching Excellence
- 2022 Cassamarca Scholar of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies
- 2016-17 Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
- 2015 FASS Teaching Excellence Award
- 2014 Nelson Prize from the Renaissance Society of America for best article published in Renaissance Quarterly
- 2014 Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions
- 2009 Post-Doctoral Fellow @ “Making Publics, 1500-1700: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe” at Concordia & McGill Universities – Montréal, Canada.
| Project title | Research student |
|---|---|
| The Emotions of Female Friendship in Renaissance Italy | Natasha BAILEY |
| ...My just quarrel... : Saviourhood Justice and Unity in the Royal Image of King Henry VII | Reilly O'HAGAN |
| Adorned Hands: Masculinity and the Practice of Ring-Wearing in Fifteenth-Century Italy | Melanie STEPHENS |
Selected publications
Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond
(Amsterdam University Press, 2023)
Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars
(Harvard University Press, 2021)
Publications
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Books
- Gagne, J. (2021). Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [More Information]
Edited Books
- Bowd, S., Cockram, S., Gagne, J. (2023). Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Book Chapters
- Gagne, J. (2023). Heralds and the Representational Culture of War, 1350-1600. In Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram and John Gagne (Eds.), Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, (pp. 147-172). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Bowd, S., Cockram, S., Gagne, J. (2023). Introduction: War and Agency. In Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram and John Gagne (Eds.), Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, (pp. 11-43). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Gagne, J. (2022). Chutes and Ladders: The Twilight of Two Lombard Families in the Italian Wars. In Alexander Lee and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Eds.), The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c. 1494-c. 1559, (pp. 50-74). London: Routledge. [More Information]
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Journals
- Gagne, J. (2024). Ecology, Pathology, and the Life of Paper. Art History, 47(4), 794-813.
- Gagne, J., Lugli, E., McCall, T. (2024). Frontiers of Materiality in Fashion Studies. ITER - Immagini e testi per l'Europa del Rinascimento, 2, 179-188. [More Information]
- Gagne, J. (2020). Dinner with the Greatest Man on Earth, or, Erasmus’s Sword and d’Alviano’s Pen. Sixteenth Century Journal: journal of early modern studies, 51(4), 983-1008. [More Information]
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Other
- Gagne, J. (2010), Stefano dall’Aglio, 'Savonarola and Savonarolism': Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
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2024
- Gagne, J. (2024). Ecology, Pathology, and the Life of Paper. Art History, 47(4), 794-813.
- Gagne, J., Lugli, E., McCall, T. (2024). Frontiers of Materiality in Fashion Studies. ITER - Immagini e testi per l'Europa del Rinascimento, 2, 179-188. [More Information]
2023
- Gagne, J. (2023). Heralds and the Representational Culture of War, 1350-1600. In Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram and John Gagne (Eds.), Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, (pp. 147-172). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Bowd, S., Cockram, S., Gagne, J. (2023). Introduction: War and Agency. In Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram and John Gagne (Eds.), Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, (pp. 11-43). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Bowd, S., Cockram, S., Gagne, J. (2023). Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
2022
- Gagne, J. (2022). Chutes and Ladders: The Twilight of Two Lombard Families in the Italian Wars. In Alexander Lee and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Eds.), The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c. 1494-c. 1559, (pp. 50-74). London: Routledge. [More Information]
2021
- Gagne, J. (2021). Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [More Information]
2020
- Gagne, J. (2020). Dinner with the Greatest Man on Earth, or, Erasmus’s Sword and d’Alviano’s Pen. Sixteenth Century Journal: journal of early modern studies, 51(4), 983-1008. [More Information]
2018
- Gagne, J. (2018). Cranach's Lucretia in the balance. Source: Notes in the History of Art, 37(2), 108-118. [More Information]
- Gagne, J. (2018). Emotional Attachments: Iron Hands, their Makers, and their Wearers, 1450-1600. In Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, Sarah Randles (Eds.), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, (pp. 133-153). Oxford: Oxford University Press. [More Information]
2017
- Gagne, J. (2017). Collecting Women: Three French Kings and Manuscripts of Empire in the Italian Wars. I Tatti Studies: studies in the Renaissance, 20(1), 127-184. [More Information]
- Gagne, J. (2017). Paper World: The Materiality of Loss in the Pre-Modern Age. In Martyn Lyons, Rita Marquilhas (Eds.), Approaches to the History of Written Culture: A World Inscribed, (pp. 57-72). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]
2015
- Gagne, J. (2015). Crisis Redux: The Views from Milan, 1499. In Nicholas Scott Baker, Brian Jeffery Maxson (Eds.), After Civic Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy, (pp. 215-240). Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
- Gagne, J. (2015). Fixing Texts and Changing Regimes: Manuscript, Print, and Holy Lives in French-Occupied Milan, c. 1500-1525. In A. Frazier (Eds.), The Saint Between Manuscript and Print: Italy 1400-1600, (pp. 379-420). Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
2014
- Gagne, J. (2014). After the Sforza: Making History in Milan during the Italian Wars. In Not known (Eds.), Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti, (pp. 35-55). TBC. [More Information]
- Gagne, J. (2014). Counting the Dead: Traditions of Enumeration and the Italian Wars. Renaissance Quarterly, 67(3), 791-840. [More Information]
- Callisen, C., Gagne, J. (2014). Introduction. In Not known (Eds.), Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti, (pp. 1-16). TBC. [More Information]
2010
- Gagne, J. (2010), Stefano dall’Aglio, 'Savonarola and Savonarolism': Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
Selected Grants
2018
- Shadow Agents of War: Italy, 1480-1530 , Gagne J, Bowd S, Office of Global Engagement/Partnership Collaboration Awards
2017
- Paper World: Document Loss in Premodern Europe, Gagne J, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Discovery Projects (DP)
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In the media
Public talks
"The King of Time in Baroque France," Sydney, At Gallery of New South Wales, 15 & 16 May 2024.
"Prospero Fontana, his daughter Lavinia, and the Bolognese Renaissance,” Sydney, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 8 & 9 February 2023.
“Selected Italian Renaissance Manuscripts in the Nicholson Collection at the University of Sydney,” University of Sydney: Friends of the Library Sixtieth Anniversary, 22 September 2022.
“Fashioning Triumph through Armour in Renaissance Europe,” Sydney, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 2 March 2022.
“Art, War, and Death in Renaissance Italy,” Sydney, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 24 & 26 June 2021.
“Absorbing Raphael: The Renaissance Artist’s Early Years,” Sydney, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 22 & 24 October 2020.
“From Lake Como to Sydney Harbour: The intricate itineraries of a Ducal portrait, 1551-1996,” Symposium: Stripping the Armour – Uncovering visual culture in the Medici court – Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 31 August 2019.