Renaissance Studies

About Renaissance Studies

Renaissance Studies — Journal Profile

Renaissance Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies, the United Kingdom's national society for the study of the Renaissance, and it is published on the society's behalf by Wiley (John Wiley & Sons) through the Wiley Online Library. The older short profile on this page named the publisher only as a number, “23”. That figure is a database artefact, not a publisher: the journal's own home on the Wiley Online Library, its ISSN records and its indexing entries all name Wiley as publisher and the Society for Renaissance Studies as the owning society. The journal has appeared since 1987 and is one of the longest-established English-language venues devoted entirely to the Renaissance. It publishes historical and interdisciplinary studies of the society and culture of the Mediterranean world and northern Europe in the Renaissance era, together with a substantial book review section that keeps readers in touch with new scholarship across the whole field.

The journal's standing rests on breadth. Where many period journals are anchored in a single department or discipline, Renaissance Studies was designed from the start as a meeting place: historians, literary scholars, art historians, historians of religion, musicologists and historians of science all publish in its pages, and its readership is the full membership of a learned society plus the library subscribers of a major commercial publisher. For authors, that combination matters. A paper placed here is read by specialists in adjacent fields who would never open a single-discipline journal, and the journal's five-issue yearly rhythm means accepted work reaches print on a predictable schedule.

Identity and Identifiers

The journal's registered title is Renaissance Studies. Its print ISSN is 0269-1213 and its online ISSN is 1477-4658; the two numbers are the pair stored in this JournalsWorld record, and they are confirmed by the journal's library catalogue entries, which list “ISSN: 0269-1213 (1477-4658)”, and by OpenAlex, which resolves the title through its ISSN endpoint to source S37879103 with exactly this ISSN pair and Wiley as host organization. The linking ISSN (ISSN-L) is the print number, 0269-1213. The journal's home is the Wiley Online Library journal page addressed by its online ISSN, and the Society for Renaissance Studies carries journal news — new issues, prizes and society announcements — on its own website at rensoc.org.uk.

One identity caution is worth recording, because the title is a generic phrase as well as a journal name. Renaissance Studies the journal is not the same thing as the wider academic field of the same name, and it is distinct from near neighbours such as Renaissance Quarterly (the journal of the Renaissance Society of America, a separate North American society) and Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (the Canadian journal). Authors citing or submitting should anchor on the ISSN pair above: 0269-1213 and 1477-4658 identify this Wiley journal and no other.

History and Setting

Renaissance Studies began publication in 1987, the year OpenAlex records as its first publication year and the start of the Scopus coverage window stored in this record (1987–2026). The Society for Renaissance Studies, founded to provide a national and international forum for everyone interested in any aspect of the study of the Renaissance — academics, independent scholars, postgraduates, students and members of the general public, in the society's own description — made the journal its flagship publication. For its first eighteen years the journal appeared quarterly. From 2005 it moved to five issues a year, a frequency it has kept since; volume numbering is annual, so the 2026 volume is volume 40, and the society reported volume 40, number 3 as the June 2026 issue. Earlier publishing arrangements passed through Blackwell and a period in which reference works described Oxford University Press as publisher; the current publisher of record is Wiley, which absorbed the Blackwell journals programme, and new issues appear on the Wiley Online Library.

The journal's longevity gives its archive unusual depth. Four decades of issues trace how Renaissance scholarship itself has changed: from the social history and literary historicism of the late 1980s, through the turns toward material culture, gender, race, religion and global exchange, to current work on sound studies, the environment and the digital mediation of early modern texts. Back issues remain the standard first port of call for review coverage of the field's monograph literature, because the journal has always treated book reviews as a core service rather than filler.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The journal publishes research on the society and culture of the Mediterranean and northern Europe during the Renaissance era, interpreted broadly in both geography and chronology. Subject categories assigned in its indexing records span History, Literature and Literary Theory, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Cultural Studies and Religious Studies, and OpenAlex's topic analysis of its contents tells the same story from the article side: the largest topic clusters are Renaissance literature and culture, Renaissance and early modern studies, Reformation and early modern Christianity, libraries, manuscripts and books, historical art and architecture, and early modern women writers. Shakespeare studies, seventeenth-century political and philosophical thought, travel writing, translation, and the history of science and medicine all appear as persistent smaller streams.

In practical terms, the journal welcomes articles that speak across sub-fields: a study of a single text, image, building, ritual or archive that draws out consequences for how the period is understood as a whole. Purely antiquarian notes and work whose interest stops at one author's biography tend to fit less well than essays with an explicit stake in wider debates. The book review section is commissioned rather than submitted speculatively; review essays that place several recent books in conversation are a recurring feature.

Editorial Practice and Peer Review

Renaissance Studies is a refereed journal: submissions are read by the editorial team and sent for specialist peer review, and publication decisions rest on those reports and on fit with the journal's interdisciplinary remit. The journal is edited on behalf of the Society for Renaissance Studies, whose officers and community supply much of its editorial and reviewing capacity. The name of the current editor-in-chief could not be verified from the sources consulted for this profile, and readers who need the current masthead should read it on the Wiley Online Library journal page, which is the authoritative listing. What can be verified is continuity of standard: the journal has maintained its five-issue schedule, its mix of articles and reviews, and its society ownership without interruption since 1987, including through publisher changes — a record that itself speaks to stable editorial governance.

Authors should expect the conventions of a society journal at a large commercial press: manuscripts are submitted through the publisher's online submission system, articles carry DOIs, and accepted papers are published online ahead of their issue where the publisher's workflow allows. Because the readership is deliberately cross-disciplinary, editors value introductions that set specialist material in its wider context for non-specialist Renaissance scholars.

Metrics — Reported With Their Sources

Journal metrics differ by database because each counts a different corpus, so the figures below are given with their sources rather than blended. The h-index stored in this JournalsWorld record is 26. That value matches the Scopus-based figure reported in SCImago-derived listings, which also report a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.11 and a Scopus CiteScore of 0.6 for the journal. The same listings place the journal in quartile Q3 for History, Q3 for Literature and Literary Theory and Q3 for Visual Arts and Performing Arts, and in Q4 for Cultural Studies and for Religious Studies; the single “Q3” label in the older short profile is the headline of that mixed picture. A Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 0.2, from the June 2026 JCR release, is reported by the journalsearches.com listing consulted for this profile.

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to source S37879103 at the time of checking, paints the larger-corpus picture: 2,521 works, 7,462 citations received, an h-index of 37, an i10-index of 214 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.034. The gap between the OpenAlex h-index (37) and the Scopus-based h-index (26) is normal for a humanities journal — OpenAlex indexes more of the book-adjacent and review literature that cites humanities work — and neither figure is “wrong”; they answer slightly different questions. Authors comparing venues should compare like with like, database by database. Citation levels in Renaissance scholarship are structurally lower than in the sciences: books carry much of the field's argument, citation half-lives are long, and a journal-level average says little about the fate of an individual article.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage from 1987 recorded in this profile's sources, and in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index of the Web of Science, according to its SCImago-derived and publisher listings. OpenAlex records it as listed in ERIH PLUS and in several national research registers, including the Norwegian register (level 1), the Polish ministerial list (70 points), the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO level 3) and the Italian ANVUR Class A list for its area — a spread that reflects how widely the journal counts toward national research assessment in Europe. Its articles are discoverable through Google Scholar and the usual humanities bibliographies that harvest publisher metadata.

On open access directories, one caution applies. OpenAlex's source record marks the journal as not listed in DOAJ, which fits its model: it is a subscription journal with an open access option, not a fully open access title. The DOAJ search API itself could not be verified at the time of checking because it returned a server error, so this profile records the DOAJ position as reported by OpenAlex rather than from DOAJ directly: DOAJ status as reported by OpenAlex is “not listed”; from DOAJ itself it could not be verified.

Fees, Open Access and Licensing

Renaissance Studies is a hybrid journal. The standard route is subscription publication at no charge to the author; the optional open access route makes an individual article free to read on payment of an article processing charge. OpenAlex's source record, checked for this profile, lists the open access APC as USD 2,900 for 2025 (with EUR 2,450 and GBP 1,930 equivalents), continuing a series that stood at USD 2,500 in 2019–2021 and rose in steps thereafter. Authors at institutions with Wiley read-and-publish agreements may find the charge covered by their library's deal; the Wageningen University library page consulted for this profile, for example, describes a 100% APC discount for corresponding authors at Dutch universities covered by the national Wiley agreement, running to the end of 2026. Society members and subscribers read through the Wiley Online Library; the journal itself is not fully open access, and 332 of its 2,521 OpenAlex-indexed works are recorded as open access — the visible footprint of the hybrid option.

How to Submit, and Who Should

Submissions are made through the journal's page on the Wiley Online Library, following the author guidelines given there for length, referencing and anonymized review copies. The strongest fit is a scholar — at any career stage — with a finished piece of Renaissance research that can be framed for readers outside its home sub-discipline: a literary scholar writing for historians, an art historian writing for literary readers, a historian of religion writing for everyone. Doctoral students and early career researchers publish in the journal alongside senior figures, and the society's ecosystem (its conferences, its postgraduate community and its book prize) makes the journal a natural home for work first aired in society settings. Work that belongs in the journal is work about the Renaissance as a connected cultural world — Mediterranean and northern European, textual and material, sacred and secular — rather than work merely dated between 1400 and 1700.

Before submitting, check three practical things on the journal page: the current article types and word limits, the reference style required at submission, and whether your institution's Wiley agreement affects the open access decision you will be offered at acceptance. None of these is static, and the publisher page — not any directory, including this one — is the authoritative source for all three.

Reading the Journal: What Its Archive Shows

Forty volumes in, the archive is a cross-section of the field's memory. Thematic issues recur on the society's conference themes and on emerging topics — the society's news pages were trailing the journal's role in a new early modern sound studies venture in 2026, a sign of where the editorial ear is pointed. The review section, several dozen reviews a year across five issues, functions as the field's running bibliography: for many readers, especially teachers and researchers outside large research libraries, it is the fastest way to learn what has been published and what it argues. Citation practice follows humanities norms: articles build on monographs and editions as much as on journal literature, and footnoted references rather than author–date citations are the house convention.

The Society Behind the Journal

The journal cannot be separated from the Society for Renaissance Studies itself, whose activities frame its readership and much of its content pipeline. The society runs a biennial book prize for first monographs in the field — the 2026 prize was announced for Chloe Ireton's work on slavery and freedom in Black thought in the early Spanish world — supports postdoctoral fellows (the 2026–2027 fellows were named in the society's news in July 2026), and lends its name and editorial board members to related publishing ventures, including a Routledge book series on Renaissance and early modern worlds of knowledge whose editors invite proposals across the history of literature, science, religion and art. Journal, prize, fellowships and book series reinforce one another: the journal's pages are where much of the community's peer-reviewed conversation happens, and its review section is where the community takes stock of the monographs its members produce. For an author, publishing in Renaissance Studies therefore means publishing inside a living scholarly community, not simply into a citation index — one reason the journal's editors can ask, credibly, that articles address readers beyond their own sub-field.

Similar Journals

Authors weighing venues for Renaissance research most often compare this journal with Renaissance Quarterly (the Renaissance Society of America's journal, published by the University of Chicago Press; the field's largest North American venue, with a similar article-plus-reviews model), Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (the bilingual Canadian journal, published from the University of Toronto; comparable breadth with a stronger French-language presence), and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Duke University Press; three issues a year and a longer chronological reach back into the medieval period). Each overlaps with Renaissance Studies in scope; the differences are society affiliation, continent of the owning society, and the exact chronological edges of the remit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Renaissance Studies? Print ISSN 0269-1213 and online ISSN 1477-4658.

Who publishes Renaissance Studies? Wiley (John Wiley & Sons) publishes it on behalf of the Society for Renaissance Studies, the UK learned society that owns the journal. The numeric publisher code in older versions of this record was a database artefact.

How often does it appear? Five issues a year, a frequency kept since 2005; before that it was quarterly. Volume 40 is the 2026 volume.

Is Renaissance Studies peer reviewed? Yes. It is a refereed society journal; submissions undergo specialist peer review before acceptance.

Is it open access? It is a hybrid journal: subscription publication is the standard route, and individual articles can be made open access for an article processing charge listed by OpenAlex at USD 2,900 for 2025. It is not a fully open access journal.

What h-index should I quote for it? Quote the figure with its source: 26 on the Scopus/SCImago basis (the value stored in this record), or 37 in OpenAlex at the time of checking. The databases count different corpora.

Where is it indexed? Scopus and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index are its principal citation indexes, with ERIH PLUS and several national registers also listing it, as detailed above.