Philip Gavitt is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University and the founder of its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A recipient of several fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Program, from the ACLS and from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and both a former Fellow and visiting professor at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), he is the author of Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence (1990).