A Renaissance Reclaimed

Abstract

This volume brings together an international team of historians of scholarship, politics, religion, literature, and ideas, whose expertise straddles the Renaissance and 19th century, to evaluate the achievement and legacy of the most famous work by the Swiss ‘father of cultural history’ Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97): The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The capaciousness of Burckhardt’s vision, which embraced fashion, false teeth, and hair extensions as well as the ‘State as a work of art’, development of the individual, revival of antiquity, discovery of the world and of man, society and festivals, and morality and religion, has never been equalled. Insights in this volume are made possible by the new critical edition that only serves to emphasise how artful Burckhardt’s reading of primary (pre-eminently literary rather than art-historical) sources was. It also shows how Burckhardt’s ambivalence towards the Renaissance reflected his deep anxieties about the social and political corollaries of modernisation.