Arthur Kinney has a vision. Call it a dream, even. He sees distinguished Renaissance scholars from all over the world gathered in a gracious New England room lined with bookshelves and display cabinets. Framed pages of centuries-old printing and calligraphy grace the walls – hand-lettered sacred texts in Latin and Arabic, typefaces from some of Europe’s earliest printing presses. A mantel clock gently chimes the passing hours. Every so often, the visiting scholars lay aside the books or documents they’re studying and stroll over to the picture window on the west wall of the reading room. Taking up binoculars from a table by the window, they refresh their spirits for a few peaceful minutes observing the wildlife in the gently sloping meadow outside.Academia meets Arcadia at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, which opens this fall on a one-time Amherst dairy farm, a piece of property rich in both local history and natural beauty, located on the edge of the Amherst campus on East Pleasant Street, just north of the Eastman Lane intersection. Kinney, professor of English and director of this newest UMass research facility, talks with equal enthusiasm about his plans for the Center’s future and his determination to preserve its past. “I want to keep alive as much as possible the history of the property,” he says. “To my extraordinary delight, I found out that this property actually was settled in 1660, which means it had a Renaissance settlement. It was settled by the Montague family. These people helped found Amherst, Hadley, and South Hadley.” The Montague farm thrived into the 20th century – according to one story Kinney has come across, this was where Mount Holyoke College got all its milk back in the 1930s – until World War II forced the family to sell. The older Montague sons got drafted, and the younger ones were too small to run the farm, so their father sold the property to Winthrop and JanetDakin, a wealthy couple who are remembered today as two of Amherst’s foremost philanthropists. Winthrop Saltonstall (“Toby”) Dakin was in Kinney’s words “an extraordinarily involved citizen of Amherst” – trustee of Amherst College, founder of Hampshire College, popular Amherst Record columnist, and long-time town official. Janet Wilder Dakin, sister of playwright Thornton Wilder, was passionately committed to environmental and animal protection causes, in addition to being a tireless friend of UMass. To supplement her own generosity, Kinney recalls, she was known for gruffly exhorting others who shared her privileged private school pedigree that they had a special obligation to support public education. It was she who donated the Dakin house and land to the University of Massachusetts Foundation, and Kinney wants her concern for the environment to endure as a guiding principle of the Center for Renaissance Studies. Coyote, deer, and red fox are among the wild creatures who will continue to make themselves at home in the property’s 30 acres of woods and grasslands. The meadow outside the picture window has become an important breeding area for ground-nesting bobolinks, so the grass will stand unmowed each summer until July to preserve the birds’ habitat. Attention to the beauty of the grounds will find other expressions as well. The Kestrel Trust, a wilderness preservation group founded by the Dakins, is designing two walking trails on the property. Students and faculty in the UMass landscape architecture department have begun work on a project that will convert one small portion of the estate into a showcase of Renaissance-style garden design, what Kinney calls “a laboratory to teach landscape gardening.”

Performances could range from plays staged by the UMass theater department to concerts featuring some of the nations best known Renaissance music groups.

Like the meadow that slopes away from the house, the study of the Renaissance is an enormous field teeming with variegated flora and fauna. Kinney envisions scholars from a kaleidoscopic array of academic disciplines teaching classes at the Center – not only literature and landscaping, but also history, ancient and modern languages, geography, theater, music, art, science, philosophy. Study of the Renaissance, he says, embraces nothing less than “the world between 1400 and 1700.” To promote modern-day understanding of those three eventful centuries, the Center will supplement its teaching and research with a variety of scholarly publications, lectures, exhibits, and performances of Renaissance music and theater. These public events will do more than serve an educational function, Kinney hopes; by opening up the Center for Renaissance Studies to residents of Amherst and surrounding communities, they will help promote positive town-gown relations. Items for exhibit might include antique maps, artworks, and rare books from the Center’s collection. Performances could range from plays staged by the UMass theatre department to concerts featuring some of the nation’s best known Renaissance music groups. Kinney has his eye on a barn not far from the house as a possible performance hall, and there’s a carriage house he likes for an art exhibit space. Both outbuildings will require extensive renovations before they can be put to use, so some of the director’s plans will have to wait their turn. In recent months, construction crews have been concentrating their efforts on the house – upgrading the plumbing, installing climate-control equipment in the rare book storage rooms, and otherwise preparing the Dakins’ former home for its new life as the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. The centuries designated as the Renaissance were a time that transformed human experience in countless ways. Monolithic European Christianity splintered into Catholic and Protestant factions. The spread of printing technology, and with it the spread of literacy, gave people a new means of communicating across time and distance, and a new way to think about the accumulated learning of the human race. The decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism set the stage for new global patterns of wealth and power. Colonial empires reshaped the world, bequeathing to subsequent ages a complex heritage that encompasses realities as diverse as the glories of Renaissance art and the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. This vast, multi-faceted era is one of the most closely studied periods in world history, but there is still an enormous amount to learn, Kinney says. He offers a few examples of research topics that might excite a Renaissance scholar’s curiosity: • What geopolitical role did Russia play during the Renaissance? Rich in natural resources, sprawling across a land mass that dwarfed other nations, the country was uniquely positioned to influence world affairs in many ways that scholars have yet to understand. “Russia was enormously important in the fur trade,” Kinney muses, “but nobody has really worked out Russia’s relationship with Islam on the one side and the Catholic and Protestant continent of Europe on the other. We’re just beginning to find out how crucially important Russia was.” • How much was the literature of the English Renaissance influenced by writers from England’s great political rival, Spain? Recent scholarship seems to indicate that many works attributed to English writers were actually “plagiarized English translations of Spanish works,” Kinney says. “We haven’t begun to plumb the relationship of those two countries.” • What was the extent of the Jewish presence in Elizabethan England? As a literary scholar who has taught numerous courses on Shakespeare, Kinney takes a particular interest in this question. “A lot of people say that The Merchant of Venice was written by a playwright who never met a Jew,” he says. “I think that’s wrong. Even though they were technically illegal, Queen Elizabeth’s private physician was Jewish.” • How should we understand the Renaissance heritage of the North American colonies that later became the United States? The American Revolution is usually regarded as a phenomenon of the 18th-century Enlightenment, but Kinney sees the earlier Renaissance era exerting profound religious, political, and cultural influences on the embryonic American nation. As one example, he offers the history of England’s Puritans. Some of those 17th-century radicals remained in their native land to fight with Oliver Cromwell for the overthrow of Charles I, while others set sail across the Atlantic to plant their ideology in the soil of a new continent. “The Puritans who didn’t make it to the English Civil War,” Kinney says, “often made it to Massachusetts.” Now, thanks to Arthur Kinney’s vision and Janet Wilder Dakin’s munificence, the world’s leading Renaissance scholars will have ample reason to make it to Massachusetts. With a trea-sure trove of rare books donated from the personal libraries of Kinney and other supporters, the Center will offer researchers the tools they need to delve deeply into questions of Renaissance culture and society. And the facility’s semi-rural New England setting will give visiting scholars an experience as nourishing to the spirit as it is stimulatin to the mind. Making the Center gracious and inviting as well as intellectually produc- tive is one of Kinney’s top priorities. It won’t be possible, he says, to furnish the house entirely with Renaissance antiques, but he intends to remain vigi- lant against any modern touches that might undermine the attractiveness of the place. “No steel desks!” he declares fiercely. The Massachu- setts Center for Renais- sance Studies will be first and foremost a home of “real study, real scholar- ship, and serious publication,” Kinney says, but it will also be “a homey, quiet place.” The intellectual riches inside the Dakin house will be the primary attraction, but the splendors of the western Massachusetts countryside will be right there outside the window, and those binoculars will always be within easy reach.