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. 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. 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’.
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