The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy () is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Together with his History of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien; 1867) it is counted among the classics of Renaissance historiography. An English translation was produced by S.G.C. Middlemore in two volumes, London 1878.
Content
According to Denys Hay:
Burckhardt sought to capture and define the spirit of the age in all its main manifestations. For him âÂÂâÂÂKulturâÂÂâ was the whole picture: politics, manners, religion...the character that animated the particular activities of a people in a given epoch, and of which pictures, buildings, social and political habits, literature, are the concrete expressions.
Its scholarly judgements are considered to have been largely justified by subsequent research according to historians including Desmond Seward and art historians such as Kenneth Clark.
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is divided into six parts:
- Part One: The State as a Work of Art
- Part Two: The Development of the Individual
- Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity
- Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man
- Part Five: Society and Festivals
- Part Six: Morality and Religion
Editions
See also
References
Further reading
- Baron, Hans. "Burckhardt's 'Civilization of the Renaissance' a Century after its Publication." Renaissance News 13.3 (1960): 207-222 online.
- Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance and Historical Thought (1948), pp. 179âÂÂ192 online
- Garner, Roberta. "Jacob Burckhardt as a Theorist of Modernity: Reading The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." Sociological Theory (1990): 48-57 online also online at JSTOR
- Hay, Denys. "Burckhardt's Renaissance: 1860-1960." History Today (Jan. 1960), volume 10, issue 1, pp. 14âÂÂ23.