Education
BA Duke University, 1967
MA Cornell University, 1969
PhD Cornell University, 1977
Research Interests
Renaissance Italy, Early Modern Europe, and the Atlantic World are the foci of Melissa Bullard’s research. She has written books on political finance and the cultural and diplomatic world of Renaissance Italy as well as numerous articles dealing with patronage, family history, papal finance, diplomacy, psychology, and culture. She published two volumes for the internationally-sponsored critical edition with extensive historical commentary on the letters of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Reaching into the Atlantic World, in 2017 she published a book on Brooklyn’s Renaissance, a transatlantic study of the conjunction of commerce, culture, and community-building in the nineteenth-century. Her courses cover the Renaissance, medieval and early modern economic and cultural history, Mediterranean economies and societies, and a capstone seminar on Myth and History.
Some Notable Publications
- Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- Lettere di Lorenzo de’ Medici, vols. X and XI (Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and Guinti-Barbèra, 2003 and 2004)
- Lorenzo the Magnificent: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance (Olschki, 1994)
- Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favor and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1980; paperback edition, 2008)