o each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture; and in treating of a civilization which is the mother of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is unavoidable that individual judgement and feeling should tell every moment both on the writer and on the reader.
150 years after the publication of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt’s ‘essay’ remains unavoidable. How to explain this book’s unlikely longevity? Now that so many of his conclusions have been questioned, to what is the continued vitality of Burckhardt’s personal vision of history due? Why do we – and why should we – keep going back to Burckhardt?
On 19 April 2010, the Oxford Centre for Medieval History hosted an interdisciplinary symposium at Jesus College to mark the 150th anniversary of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt. Now the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature is making the proceedings of this symposium available online.
These papers by Oxford academics use Burckhardt’s six chapter titles as prompts. They show how the time has come not just to read, but to rediscover Burckhardt’s book, the influence of which is still at work among us.
To assist readers, we are also making available on these pages links to relevant material. We hope that you find this website to be a useful and thought-provoking resource for your own studies of Burckhardt and his most famous book.
Oren J Margolis, editor
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Vienna
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Prof. Ritchie Robertson (Queen's College, Oxford)
Abstract
‘Der Staat als Kunstwerk’ means not only the state as a work of art, but alternatively as a work of artifice. In the work of Jacob Burckhardt, it is this second meaning that is most important: the states of Renaissance Italy were deliberately constructed and, as such, they lacked legitimacy. Burckhardt’s interpretation of the Renaissance state owes a lot to his observation of the recent political and social transformations that had shaken Europe (including Switzerland), and with which he had become disillusioned. But despairing of the despotism he associated with the State, Burckhardt also appreciated the modern realism he associated with Renaissance statecraft. Looking at the birth of a double-edged modernity, Burckhardt’s historical vision is ultimately ironic, and opposed to the favoured nineteenth-century notion of moral progress in history.
Keywords: Jacob Burckhardt, Kunstwerk, Niccolò Machiavelli, politics, Renaissance, Sonderbundskrieg, state
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Prof. Martin McLaughlin (Magdalen College, Oxford) and Dr Nicola Gardini (St Cross College, Oxford)
Abstract
In the second chapter of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt turned Leon Battista Alberti into the incarnation of the ‘universal man’. Burckhardt’s portrait of Alberti is the most influential in modern times. Yet through omissions and additions, Burckhardt distorted Alberti’s self-portrait found in his autobiography, turning a man obsessed with recognition, plagued by illness and physical sensitivities, driven by a work ethic, and possessed of a sense of humour into a Schopenhauerian devotee of an ‘iron will’. Scraping away Burckhardt’s reconstructions and suppressions, however, forces us to confront the fact that Alberti’s self-portrait is just as much a construct as Burckhardt’s 1860 restoration, looking back to and departing from classical models.
Keywords: Leon Battista Alberti, autobiography, Jacob Burckhardt, Anthony Grafton, Renaissance
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Dr David Rundle (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
Abstract
It is always salutary to consider our own ignorance and that of others. Any process of constructing the past is also a process of forgetting, as Burckhardt would have acknowledged: his ‘essay’ on the Renaissance was self-consciously a personal interpretation. It was also one in which , for his own purposes, he re-defined ‘humanism’, a term which was itself an invention of the nineteenth century. The success of his work meant that – in the English-speaking world – another ground-breaking German work, Georg Voigt’s history of the first century of humanism, published a year before Civilization, has been all but overlooked. At the same time, Burckhardt’s idiosyncratic construction of the humanist movement itself swept aside significant elements of knowledge that had provided common-places in the previous century. This can be exemplified by his description of the history of Greek learning in the West, which pays scant attention to earlier historiography. That Burckhardt was for so long the corner-stone of discussions of the Renaissance has damaged our understanding not only of humanism but also of his Civilization itself.
Keywords: humanism, studia humanitatis, Georg Voigt, Humphrey Hody, Edward Gibbon, Greek.
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The Discovery of World and of Man
Dr Gervase Rosser (St Catherine’s College, Oxford)
Abstract
For all of Jacob Burckhardt’s gloominess about the modern world, one positive feature of the modernity inaugurated by the Renaissance was what he claimed was a direct encounter with the world, free from imposed ideologies. Yet Burckhardt’s thesis about the Renaissance and the natural world is not what it seems. The fourth chapter reads as an extended commentary on Michelet’s definition of the Renaissance as ‘the reconciliation between man and nature’. For Burckhardt, however, the withdrawal of the veil from nature amounted to more than Michelet’s celebration of the liberty of the people. Burckhardt’s primary goal as a teacher was the opening of eyes; and, in the writings of this former theology student who lost his faith, the celebration of the nature and art of Italy begins to acquire the seriousness and the coherence of a metaphysical belief.
Keywords: art, beauty, Jacob Burckhardt, J. W. Goethe, Jules Michelet, nature, Renaissance
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Dr Malcolm Vale (St John ’s College, Oxford)
Abstract
Throughout The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt placed a heavy emphasis on the liberation of the individual from both feudal and ecclesiastical oppression, and on the rise of a secular mind-set and its accompanying lifestyles in Italy. We may ask, however, what was happening at the same time elsewhere, and whether Italy was quite so exceptional. Although the culture of late medieval northern Europe was characterized by Burckhardt and also by Johan Huizinga as in terminal decline and decay, it was in fact an integrated, multi-faceted culture in which the sacred and the secular interacted with and interpenetrated each other to a high degree. The period yields evidence not only of secularization, but also of what might be called the ‘sacralization of the secular’. These concepts may help us put lay northern European culture in a more plausible relationship with that of the Italian Renaissance world.
Keywords: chivalry, Johan Huizinga, Middle Ages, religion, Aby Warburg
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Morality and Religion
Mr Nicholas Davidson (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)
Abstract
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Dr Matthew Kempshall (Wadham College, Oxford)
Abstract
A century and a half after its publication, the grounds on which The Civilization of the Renaissance Italy has merited such attention are worth clarifying and reviewing. Burckhardt’s method is a guide to his own understanding of history and historiography. Moreover, this method – his commitment to identifying the Volksgeist, his choice of primary material (particularly poetry), his appeal to metonymy, his understanding of historical causation, and his counter-factualism – explains why his work continues to resonate to this day. Yet in the content of Burckhardt’s work there also remain directions for future discussion: the double-edged critique of the Renaissance state; the similar ambivalence towards the ‘individual’, encapsulated in the symbiosis between the despot and the scholar; the distinction between humanism and the Renaissance; and the Neo-Platonism in Burckhardt’s poetic and prophetic historiography.
Keywords: Hegel, humanism, Neo-Platonism, philosophy, Pico della Mirandola.
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Burckhardt's Renaissance, 150 Years Later -- Materials
The complete text of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italyis freely available on-line:German originalEnglish translation (S. G. C. Middlemore)
Further materials will be placed on-line over time.
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Each paper takes as its prompt one of Burckhardt’s six chapter titles. They are being made available on-line and are downloadable in pdf format by clicking on the links below:
‘The State as a Work of Art’
Prof. Ritchie Robertson (St John’s College)
‘The Development of the Individual’
Prof. Martin McLaughlin (Magdalen College) and Dr Nicola Gardini (St Cross College)
‘The Revival of Antiquity’
Dr David Rundle (Corpus Christi College)
‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’
Dr Gervase Rosser (St Catherine’s College)
‘Society and Festivals’
Dr Malcolm Vale (St John’s College)
‘Morality and Religion’
Nicholas Davidson (St Edmund Hall)
The closing remarks on the day by Dr Matthew Kempshall (Wadham College) are alsoavailable.
