‘A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered’
Edited by Stefan Bauer and Simon Ditchfield Oxford University Press, 2022
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.
For more information, see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-renaissance-reclaimed-9780197267325
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
History and Theology 