'It successfully argues for the enduring influence of the late-Victorian period in shaping our own canons of the art and mentality of the Italian renaissance, and it makes a convincing case for redressing the ingrained modernist bias in twentieth-century art criticism against the prolific work of writers such as Ruskin, Pater, Symonds, and Lee, which is still often dismissed as amateurish, "purple", and unscholarly.' Victorian Studies
... it is a cogent and wide-ranging collection that develops our understanding of the ways in which the idea of the Renaissance was invented in the nineteenth century. The Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
... by adopting a methodology that embraces biography, politics, economic history, material culture, feminism, and curricular developments in higher education, it makes a significant contribution to Italian Renaissance scholarship... Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance is an academic "must read" not only for those with a particular interest in this time period, but also for graduate students who are being introduced to methodology. This volume is an excellent example of how to direct a scholar's attention to the importance of archival research and historiography. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
John E. Law is Reader in the Department of History at the Swansea University, UK.
Dr Lene stermark-Johansen lectures on Victorian art and literature in the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.