Renaissance Literature
MIT OpenCourseWare's Renaissance Literature course examines early modern travel narratives, from firsthand accounts of discovery and captivity to imagined voyages across real and fantastic landscapes. Readings span sonnets, plays, prose narratives, utopias, and chivalric romance, tracing how exploration became a metaphor for intellectual inquiry, spiritual growth, and love. Authors include Petrarch, Amerigo Vespucci, Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Hernan Cortes, John Donne, Francis Drake, Mary Rowlandson, and Francis Bacon. The course includes a syllabus, reading list, and assignments drawn from MIT's undergraduate literature curriculum, freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare with no enrollment or certificate fee. It offers a close look at how Renaissance writers processed an age of encounter and conquest through narrative form, pairing firsthand exploration accounts with the fictional voyages they inspired.