Konrad Boeschenstein began graduate studies with the History Department in September of 2019. He is interested in the transmission of ideas, with a special attention to the role of education in determining social status. His focus is on fifteenth-century Florence, which has long since been identified as transitional due to the increasing value afforded to learning during the period. In the future he hopes to study how ideas from Florence and the Italian Renaissance were later transmitted into the rest of Europe and affected the Reformation, but his present studies concentrate on the opposite direction, how earlier ideas from the Classical and Medieval periods effected the changes we see occurring in Renaissance Florence.