A Renaissance Reclaimed by Bauer, Stefan; Ditchfield, Simon;

Short description:

A Renaissance Reclaimed reconsiders an 'essay' (Versuch) seen by many as the greatest work of cultural history ever written: the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt. The contributors also investigate the ways in which this work was also a product of its time and place.

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Long description:

A Renaissance Reclaimed brings together an international team of historians of scholarship, politics, religion, literature, and ideas, whose expertise straddles the Renaissance and nineteenth 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.

One reason why Burckhardt can still be read out of sheer interest in his subject-matter is that he drew so much much of his material from primary sources -- chronicles, diaries, anecdotes, satires, comic novelle and so on. This was a humanistic and gentlemanly kind of scholarship, unlike the newfangled academic processing of archival documents; and it helped to inoculate his work against some kinds of obsolescence, since Vespasiano da Bisticci, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro Aretino and the rest can read just as freshly today as they did in 1860.

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Table of Contents:

Introduction: A Renaissance Reclaimed: Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance Reconsidered, STEFAN BAUER AND SIMON DITCHFIELD

Prologue: The Making of a Text 1 A Renaissance from Scraps: The Material Evidence for a New Critical Edition of Burckhardt’s Book, MIKKEL MANGOLD 2 ‘A Centaur at the Edge of the Forest’: Jacob Burckhardt as Cultural Historian, MARTIN A. RUEHL

Part 1: The State as a Work of Art 3 ‘The State as a Work of Art’: State and Politics in Burckhardt and in Italian Renaissance Political Thought, ROBERT BLACK

Part 2: The Development of the Individual 4 The Performance of Identity in Renaissance Italy, VIRGINIA COX 5 Expressions of the Self in Burckhardt’s Renaissance, WIETSE DE BOER

Part 3: The Revival of Antiquity 6 The Colours of Antiquity in Burckhardt’s Portrait of the Renaissance in Italy, BARBARA VON REIBNITZ 7 Burckhardt, Humanists, and the Remains of Antiquity, WILLIAM STENHOUSE

Part 4: The Discovery of the World and of Man 8 What Is Left of the Renaissance? The Discovery of the World and of Man from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, JOAN-PAU RUBIÉS 9 Burckhardt’s (New) World and Ours: Rethinking the Renaissance in the Age of Global History, GIUSEPPE MARCOCCI

Part 5: Society and Festivals 10 ‘A heightened moment in the life of the people’? Festivals in Their Social Context and Burckhardt’s Legacy to Modern Festival Research, HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY FBA

Part 6: Morality and Religion 11 Burckhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions, NICHOLAS TERPSTRA 12 Burckhardt, Religion, and the ‘Principle of Correction’: From Renaissance to Reformation, STEFAN BAUER

Afterword, PETER BURKE FBA

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