A Renaissance Reclaimed: Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance Reconsidered

The conference that led to this volume was convened in 2018 to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Jacob Burckhardt, the ‘father of cultural history’. The contributors were tasked with the dual aim of, on the one hand, analysing the intentions and methods behind The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and, on the other, considering whether the work has any continuing relevance. Not wanting to reduce the Swiss historian to having been either merely an implausible Whig or simply a reactionary prophet, the emphasis of this essay collection is on Burckhardt’s complexity, above all his ambivalence about the virtues and vices of modernity and the role played by the Italian Renaissance at its birth. After a summary of the individual chapters, the introduction closes with, first, a brief survey of the relevant chapters of the volume occasioned by the other anniversary conference held in Burckhardt’s birthplace of Basel, and then with some concluding reflections on the enduring value of the author’s provisional and subjective approach and his masterly deployment of the language of irony.