Table of Contents
Questions about article submissions: elight@rsa.org
Questions about book review submissions: rq@rsa.org
1. Article Manuscript Submission
Renaissance Quarterly welcomes original essays of various lengths, up to a maximum of 15,000 words (including notes, bibliography, and any appendixes), on all fields represented by the Renaissance Society of America. Submissions require a 100-word abstract. Please submit articles using Editorial Manager, our online peer review system.
Renaissance Quarterly publishes contributions that have not been published elsewhere in whole or in part: submission of a manuscript to RQ signifies that the author has no outstanding agreements or proposals to publish the material elsewhere. Please note that the evaluation process typically takes between three and six months.
The double-blind peer review process requires that the author’s name not appear on the title page and elsewhere in the manuscript. Make sure to also remove any acknowledgments from the article before submission; if an article is accepted, acknowledgments can be added pre-publication. A cover letter to accompany submissions is optional. If a cover letter (optional) is included, use a separately uploaded file to preserve the anonymity of the essay.
Digital images should not be embedded within the manuscript. Instead, submit the files separately in Editorial Manager as “figures.” Digital images must be low-resolution for ease in uploading. Name digital image files (using a short title of the article) as ShortTitle_Image001, ShortTitle_Image002, etc., making sure that the numbers correspond to the figure and caption numbers in the manuscript. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permissions to publish the images.
Renaissance Quarterly uses a slight modification of the style found in the Chicago Manual of Style, seventeenth edition. The journal uses American English punctuation, spelling idioms, syntax, and vocabulary, as found in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Although initial submissions do not need to conform to the specifics of these guidelines, if an essay is accepted, it must be revised according to the RQ style.
2. Preparing your submission
A. Formatting
Manuscripts should be formatted in double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Submissions must be in MS Word, which Editorial Manager converts to PDF. Essays should not exceed 15,000 words total, and should include a 100-word abstract. Aside from the abstract, figures, and optional cover letter, all remaining components of the manuscript must be submitted as a single document: body text, followed by any captions and appendixes (where appropriate), then the bibliography and endnotes.
B. Dates
RQ requires the inclusion of life dates for historical figures and publication dates for early modern works; these appear in parentheses immediately after the first mention, e.g., the Essais (1580) of Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). For sovereigns or popes, regnal dates may be substituted for life dates: Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603).
C. Quotations
All foreign-language quotations must be translated to English in the body of article. Passages in their original language may be included in the notes if relevant to the argument. (When quoting from a standard translation of a well-known work, there is no need to also cite the original.) Quotations in the original language should always be provided for archival, unpublished, or rare sources.
For reasons of space, quotations that appear only in the notes (and not in the body text) must be translated to English and appear only in English (i.e., without the corresponding foreign-language quotation). Except in cases where no acceptable translation exists, please use standard, published translations. Authors providing their own translations should state “All translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted” in the first relevant note. If the passage is paraphrased rather than quoted in the text, only a citation is required; however, a translation — and not the original — may appear in the notes.
In the notes, quotations in non-Roman alphabets should be reproduced in the original alphabet; they should not be transliterated. Hebrew and Greek texts should be formatted in Times New Roman to avoid font incompatibility. Latin abbreviations and contractions should be spelled out. Use modern punctuation and capitalize proper names.
Avoid using italics for emphasis. Quotation marks should only be used for actual quotations; do not use “scare quotes.”
D. Citations
Essays should include a bibliography as well as endnotes, cited by author’s last name and page number. Overlong notes (more than 10 lines) should be avoided.
E. Endnotes
Do not use footnotes or parenthetical citations in the text. Numbered endnotes begin in the text proper, after the abstract. For appendixes, note numbers should start over with note 1 in each appendix.
The basic format for citing quotations in the endnotes is author/editor last name plus page number(s): Anderson, 90.
Include the publication year in the citation only if there are multiple works by the author in the bibliography: Anderson, 2007, 90. If there are more than one work published by the same author/editor in the same year: Anderson, 2007a, 90 (use a, b, and so on in the bibliography as well).
Multiple citations are separated by semicolons, not commas: McCoy, 89; Greenblatt, 1988, 122; de Grazia, 155–59.
For modern editions of classical, medieval, and early modern works, cite the specific work and, where appropriate, its internal divisions in parentheses following the citation to the modern edition. For example: Virgil, 1960, 1:150–51 (Georgics 2.490). For works divided into sections: Dante, 1:221 (Inferno 14.43–45).
F. Bibliography
The bibliography is a single alphabetical list that includes all primary and secondary sources that are cited in the notes, including printed works, electronic sources, and manuscripts (unless an Archival Sources section is needed; see section 2G, below). Only those works that are cited in the notes should be listed in the bibliography.
Renaissance Quarterly’s style for citations is a slight modification of that found in the Chicago Manual of Style, seventeenth edition. Some examples:
Basic author entry; note that the second author’s name is not inverted:
McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth Maclean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Basic editor entry; note the inclusion of total volumes. Publisher name can be omitted for works published before 1900:
Dasent, J. R., ed. Acts of the Privy Council. 32 vols. London, 1890–1907.
Ruderman, David B., ed. Preachers of the Italian Ghetto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
An edition or translation (note that Ed. or Trans. follows a period and begins with a capital; when Ed. precedes the names of multiple editors it never appears as Eds., since Ed. signifies “edited by”):
Marguerite de Navarre. Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars. Ed. Richard Cooper. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007.
A single selection from an edited book; note the inclusive page numbers:
Owens, Jessie Ann. “Was There a Renaissance in Music?” In Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown, 111–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Two or more selections from an edited book: the edited book gets its own entry and is listed by its title; each selection’s author, title, and pagination are given in full, with a brief citation of the volume itself. The entries are presented alphabetically:
Davis, Robert C. “The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance.” In Gender and Society (1998), 19–38.
Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy. Ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis. London: Longman, 1998.
Kuehn, Thomas. “Person and Gender in the Laws.” In Gender and Society (1998), 87–106.
Edition/series. Include series information only when it is essential for identifying the work:
Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ed. Giorgio Melchiori. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2000.
Reprint/facsimile:
Tomasini, Jacopo Filippo. Gymnasium Patavinum. 1654. Reprint, Sala Bolognese: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1986.
Multivolume work. Provide the total number of volumes, even if not all volumes are consulted. (In the notes, indicate volume number as follows: Brecht, 2:102):
Sandya, John Edwin. A History of Classical Scholarship. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Only a single volume should be listed for an enormous collection, such as the Patrologia Latina:
Folieto, Hugone de. De medicina animae. Vol. 176 of Patrologia Latina. Ed. J. P. Migne. Paris: Garnier, 1854.
Journal article (include volume as well as issue numbers wherever possible; for online sources, include DOI as URL):
Steinberg, Leo. “Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Art Quarterly 36.4 (1973): 297–410.
Garin, Eugenio. “Dante nel Rinascimento.” Rinascimento, n.s., 7 (1967): 3–28.
Allen-Flanagan, Tara. “The Face of an Empire: Cosmetics and Whiteness in Imperial Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I.” Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal 3 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/R73151193.
Book review:
Hayton, Darin. Rev. of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire by Tara Nummedal. Renaissance Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 1343–44.
Multiple works by an author in the same year, alphabetized by title, with “a,” “b,” etc., added to date:
Grady, Hugh. “Moral Agency and Its Problems in Julius Caesar: Political Power, Choice, and History.” In Shakespeare and Moral Agency, ed. Michael Bristol, 5–28. New York: Continuum, 2009a.
Grady, Hugh. “Theory ‘After Theory’: Christopher Pye’s Reading of Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.4 (2009b): 453–59.
Introductions and forewords:
Do not list editors’ or translators’ introductions or forewords separately in the bibliography. If a work is already cited by author and listed in the bibliography—for example: Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser. New York, 1982—then a citation to the editor’s introduction would appear in the notes as: see Jenkins’s introduction in Shakespeare, 1982, xiii.
Only if the work is not otherwise cited, list it in the bibliography by editor:
Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1982.
The citation would then read: see Jenkins, xiii.
G. Archival and manuscript sources
If an article contains extensive use of archival or manuscript sources, those sources should be included in a separate section of the bibliography labeled “Archival Sources.” This section should come first in the bibliography, followed by “Printed Sources.” If only one or two archival sources are cited and without great frequency, they can be integrated into a single, general bibliography.
Archival or manuscript sources should be cited with the full name of the archive — which should correspond with the bibliographical listing — at the first citation in the endnotes; subsequent citations may use a standard abbreviation, such as ASV or BNF, which is indicated parenthetically after the first citation. For example:
British Library (hereafter BL), Cotton MS Vitellius (hereafter Cotton MS Vit.) C. VII, fol. 8r.
The next citation to this manuscript appears as: BL, Cotton MS Vit. C. VII, fol. 8v.
Bibliography entries for archival sources should include the repository where the item is located, including city name (e.g., British Library, London); the collection and collection number (if available); any available filing information; and information on the document, including pages, author, title, date, etc., as available.
The bibliography entry for the manuscript from the above citation would appear as:
British Library, London, Cotton MS Vitellius C. VII, fols. 1r–14r. Dee, John. “John Dee’s account of his life; addressed to two commissioners, sent to him by the queen; written by himself.” 1592. Cited as BL, Cotton MS Vit. C. VII.
The “cited as” at the end of the bibliographical entry supplements the “hereafter” abbreviation provided in the first citation of a given manuscript.
If the bibliography contains numerous manuscripts from a single archive, the archive abbreviation can be adopted throughout the bibliography after the first listing:
Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Avogaria di Comun, registri 3644–3647. Cited as ASV, AC, with the number of the register.
ASV, Collegio, Notatorio, registri 10, 11. Cited as ASV, CN with the number of the register.
Other examples of manuscript bibliographical entries:
Newberry Library, Chicago, Ayer MS 432 I/4. 2–5–4/12, fol. 1r. Account of Pedro Menendez. 12 September 1580. Cited as NL, Ayer MS 432.
Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Cancelleria inferiore. Notai.(CIN), busta 74–75, Francesco Elmis, register XXIII, carta 20r. Cited as ASV, CIN, b. 74–75, Francesco Elmis, reg. XXIII, c. 20r.
H. Captions and callouts for images
Examples of caption format:
Figure 1. Facade of convent church of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Venice. Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, cod. Correr 317, fol. 10r.
Figure 2. Pietro Pomponazzi. Tractatus de immortalitate animae, title page of first edition, Bologna, 1516. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
Figure 3. Girolami Tower, Florence, twelfth century. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
Figure 4. Sandro Botticelli. Mystic Nativity, 1501. London, The National Gallery.
Figure 5. Letter from Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 22 September 1514. Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga, 2120, fol. 284r.
Figure 6. Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Author’s photo.
Figure 7. Giovanni Stradano. Magellan in the Americae Retectio series, late 1580s. Engraving. Private collection.
Figure 8. Giovanni Stradano. America, late 1580s. Pen and brown ink. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 9. George Wither. A collection of emblemes, ancient and moderne, page 65, London, 1635. © The British Library Board. STC 25900b.
Note: a credit line usually appears at the end of a caption. If indicated in permission agreements, use specific language required by rights holders in the credit line. Captions should not contain expository writing, but only information necessary to identify the illustration and its location.The RQ editorial staff may edit credit-line language for consistency across captions.
Images must be called out in the text as close as possible to its discussion. Callouts are placed within parentheses and numbered sequentially. Use the abbreviated form of figure as “fig.” with a lowercase f: (fig. 1).
3. Manuscripts of accepted articles
When the revised final manuscript has been accepted by the editors (after revisions concerning content, format, and/or style potentially requested by the editors have been completed), the managing editor will request the author to prepare a final version, formatted according to RQ style, to serve as the basis for copyediting.
The author must complete all revisions before the article is submitted for copyediting; constraints of time and cost prohibit substantive editing by the author during the copyediting process. Before copyediting can begin, the author must provide:
- The revised version of the accepted article — including text, captions, appendixes, bibliography, endnotes, and high-resolution images — along with any required style revisions approved by a copyeditor.
- Copyright assignment, rights, and requirements for publication as stipulated in the Renaissance Quarterly Publication Agreement. In addition, all RQ authors must be RSA members for the year their article is published. ###li
The role of the RQ editorial staff is to help produce the best possible version of each article, During the copyediting phase, the author will have the opportunity to review the edits, to answer editorial queries, and to correct any errors. The copyediting (punctuation, spelling, grammar) and line-editing (style, usage, clarity) will generally be done silently, without track changes. For substantive editing, the author will receive query letters; the author will be expected to respond to all queries.
Renaissance Quarterly and its editors are willing to discuss editorial policy; in the case of an author disagreeing with a particular edit, it is the author’s responsibility to demonstrate why the original text should be retained. A compromise can often be reached, in case of disagreement. If the edit is deemed to reflect best practice, RQ style or precedent, American usage, etc. the objection by the author does not entail an obligation on the journal’s part to restore original text.
4. Review Essays
Review essays are commissioned by the journal editors, and are not accepted as unsolicited submissions.
Review essays should be between 4,000 and 4,500 words and must not exceed 5,000 words including the bibliography and any notes. Review essays do not have subsections; introductory and concluding comments should likewise be integrated into the main text. Please submit your manuscript double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman.
A. Guidelines
1. Use short titles of works in the body text to refer to publications discussed in the review.
2. Do not use parenthetical citations.
3. Do not put publication dates of works in parentheses.
4. Use endnotes sparingly, and only for citing quotations.
5. Include a bibliography of all publications discussed in the review, but do not include in the bibliography works that are not mentioned in the body text.
B. Citations in the body text
Following are some examples of citing works in a review essay. Note that the full titles and publication dates appear only in the bibliography, not in the body text of the review.
A single book:
This complements Carey’s monograph, Surviving the Tudors, which vividly evokes life on the borders of the Pale for the restored Fitzgerald family in a time of great crisis.
Multiple works discussed together:
Equally, however, such urban rituals and the unity they enshrined have been understood to reveal the frictions and fractures between communities and groups within the city as, for example, Charles Zika’s “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages,” Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi, and Franz-Josef Arlinghaus’s “The Myth of Urban Unity” have shown for religious rituals in Germany.
An acceptable alternative to short-title references is to use the author’s name without the title of the publication. In this case, please make sure there is only one work by that author in the bibliography in order to avoid ambiguity:
The application of animal metaphors and the interplay of texts and heraldic-allegorical animal imagery to anti-Venetian political polemics were demonstrated in studies by Lewis Jillings and Robert W. Scheller.
C. Bibliography
The bibliography is an alphabetical list of all publications mentioned in the review. The bibliography should not include publications that are not discussed or cited in the review. Each listing in the bibliography should be mentioned in the notes.
The publications from the examples above would appear in the bibliography as follows:
Arlinghaus, Franz-Josef. “The Myth of Urban Unity: Religion and Social Performance in Late Medieval Braunschweig.” In Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400–1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, ed. Caroline Goodson, Anne Elisabeth Lester, and Carol Symes, 215–32. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Carey, Vincent. Surviving the Tudors: The “Wizard” Earl of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland, 1537–86. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002.
Jillings, Lewis. “The Eagle and the Frog: Huttens’ Polemic against Venice.” Renaissance Studies 2.1 (1988): 14–26.
Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge, 1991.
Scheller, Robert W. “L’unions des princes: Louis XII, His Allies and the Venetian Campaign 1509.” Simiolus 27.4 (1999): 195–242.
Zika, Charles. “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany.” Past and Present 118 (1988): 25–64.
See section 2F for other bibliographical examples as needed.
D. Notes
Endnotes should only be used for citing quotations. For example:
Some years ago now, Richard Trexler commented that “social spaces are central to the formation, expression and modification of individual and group identities.”1
1. Trexler, 1985, 4.
The basic format for citing quotations is author/editor last name plus page number(s): Anderson, 90.
Include the publication year in the citation only if there are multiple works by the author in the bibliography: Anderson, 2007, 90.
See section 2E for other citation examples as needed.
5. Book reviews
Book reviews are commissioned by the reviews editor, and are not accepted as unsolicited submissions. Reviewers are to consult the guidelines for review provided by the RSA office (guidelines will be included with the book when it is mailed to the reviewer). In general, reviewers must follow the style guide for articles, with the following modifications:
A. Guidelines
1. At the top of the review, type the name of the author(s), editor(s), and/or translator(s), the title of the book, and the publication date. The RSA editorial staff will add other bibliographical details to this header information.
2. Use italics for short phrases in foreign languages, e.g., ut pictura poesis. If well known to an anglophone audience, there is no need to translate them. Otherwise, provide an English translation in parentheses immediately following the phrase. Do not italicize or place quotation marks around the translation.
3. Use arabic, not roman, numerals for chapter and section numbers, and do not capitalize chapter and part. For example:
- Smith’s primary argument is developed in part 2, “Memory.” Of particular importance is chapter 5, “Repetition and Remembrance,” in which Smith introduces his ideas about repetition.
4. Series names are neither italicized nor placed between quotation marks. For example:
- This book, part of the University of Chicago series The Other Voice, is beautifully designed.
5. At the end of the review, give your name and institution as follows:
- Joan Y. Doe, Hunter College, CUNY
If you do not have an institutional affiliation, you can include Independent Scholar, a profession (e.g., Freelance Writer), or a location (e.g., New York, NY)
B. Citations and quotations
Quotation marks should only be used for actual quotations; do not use “scare quotes.” Avoid using italics for emphasis.
RQ does not print footnotes to reviews. Quotations within the text from the book under review are followed by a page number in parentheses: “the history of the text” (132).
For quotations in languages other than English, please either paraphrase in English or provide English translations of quotations and omit the foreign-language original.
Please limit references to other works; these are cited parenthetically as follows:
“The history of the text” (Thomas Writer, The Book Cited [2009], 132).
“The history of the text” (Thomas Writer, “The Article Cited,” The Journal 62.1 [2009]: 132).
“The history of the text” (Thomas Writer, “The Article Cited,” in Collection of Essays, ed. Tricia Writer [2009]: 132).
Parenthetical citations to books in reviews do not include the name of the publisher or the place of publication.
C. Submit your review
Please submit your review online at http://editorialmanager.com/rq/. You will need to login with the username and password emailed to you when you accepted to write the review. Please follow these steps to submit your review (please see our online guide for detailed instructions):
1. You must log in as an Author (not as a Reviewer). Once logged in, go to My Accepted Invitations. Hover over Action Links, and select Submit Invited Manuscript.
2. You will be asked to submit a title. Please title your review using a short title of the book and your own last name, e.g., Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, review by Fitzpatrick.
3. On the next page, your name will appear as the author of the review: click “next” to go directly to the following page where you will enter the word count of your review in the comments field.
4. On the next page, upload your review as a Word file, and click next. On the next page, click Build PDF. Then click the link for Submissions Waiting for Author’s Approval page.
5. Hover over Action Links, where you must first view and then approve your submission.
Reviews may be edited for clarity and length. Reviewers will receive via email a formatted, copyedited version of the review for approval. The RSA editorial staff asks that reviewers read the review carefully and check the bibliographical header information for accuracy.