A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered

A Renaissance Reclaimed evaluates the achievement and legacy of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The book explores Burckhardt's broad vision, including fashion, art, and the State, and his ambivalence towards the Renaissance due to his concerns about modernisation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 24 March 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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 Civilization 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, the development of the individual, the revival of antiquity, the 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 emphasize 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.

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 Civilization 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, the development of the individual, the revival of antiquity, the 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 emphasize 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.

Weight: 594g
Dimension: 164 x 240 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197267325