Burckhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions

When Jacob Burckhardt framed the Renaissance as an age with a distinct and secularising character it was perhaps inevitable that religion would be seen as marginal, superstitious, and ‘harmful’ or ‘damaging’, or even ‘retrograde’. Yet Burckhardt gave religion considerable attention and nuance in the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, and it was in fact the longest of the book’s six sections. The negative image of religion we associate with Burckhardt is due less to his own methods for cultural history than to the tools he borrowed from contemporary historiography, and to the enthusiasms of those followers who took the Civilisation as a creation myth for modernity. Their beliefs about religion reflected some 19th-century realities and ignored others. Burckhardt’s own methods allowed for a more anthropologically-inflected understanding of religion; yet he worked within a traditional and institutional understanding of Catholicism, remaining curiously silent on the breadth of Renaissance religions, and on the parallels between the civic religions of Swiss and Italian cities.