The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (
German: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien) 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.
Burkhardt sought to capture and define the spirit of the age in all its main manifestations. For him ‘’Kultur’’ 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.[1]
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.[citation needed]
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is divided into six parts:
Baron, Hans. "Burckhardt's 'Civilization of the Renaissance' a Century after its Publication." Renaissance News 13.3 (1960): 207-222
online.
Danson Brown, Richard (2000). "From Burckhardt to Greenblatt: New Historicisms and Old". In Whitlock, Keith (ed.). The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The OpenUniversity. pp. 4–11.
ISBN9780300082234.
Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance and Historical Thought (1948), pp. 179–192
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