A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered(245 Proceedings of the British Academy)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements 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

About the Author :
Stefan Bauer is a lecturer in early modern world history at King's College London. He is a fellow and council member of the Royal Historical Society and has taught at the universities of York, Warwick and Royal Holloway as well as in Switzerland and Italy. Simon Ditchfield is professor of early modern history at the University of York, where he has taught for over thirty years. His research interests encompass religious history and the history of history writing. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan.

Review :
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. Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy is one of the most successful historical works all time; its critical reception is unique. Over a century and a half after the first edition was published, several of the author's central theses continue to be the subject of debate.