Elizabeth McCahill
History Department
617.287.6843
Biography
Professor McCahill received her PhD from Princeton. After a year at the American Academy in Rome, she joined UMB's History department in 2009. Professor McCahill's research focuses on humanism, the Renaissance papacy, patronage, ritual/ ceremony, rhetoric and classical reception. Her new book, Pope Leo X and Papal Authority on the Eve of the Reformation, is forthcoming from Oxford.
Degrees
Yale, BA
Princeton, MA, PhD
Professional Publications & Contributions
“Papal Patronage and the Reception of Classicism in Medieval and Renaissance Rome.” In Cambridge History of the Papacy, Volume 3: Society and Culture. eds. Miles Pattenden and Joëlle Rollo-Koster. Cambridge, 2025.
“Letters to the Editor: Friendship and Self-Fashioning in a Fifteenth Century Humanist Epistolary Collection." Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023): 408-443.
“The Stanza dell’Incendio and the Ideological Agenda of Pope Leo X,” in Revisiting Raphael’s Vatican Stanze, eds. Kim Butler Wingfield and Tracy Cosgriff. Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2022.
“Humanism Between Medieval and Renaissance.” In New Horizons in Early Modern European Scholarship, eds. Ann Blair and Nicholas Popper, 15-30. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.
“Civility and Secularism in the Ambit of the Papal Court.” In After Civic Humanism, eds. Nicholas Baker and Brian Maxson, 131-151. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015.
Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420-1447. Harvard University Press, 2013.
“Rewriting Vergil, Rereading Rome: Maffeo Vegio, Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo and early Quattrocento Antiquarianism.” Memoirs of the American Academy 54 (2009): 165-199.
“Finding a Job as a Humanist: the Epistolary Collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger.” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 1308-1345.