A Renaissance Reclaimed

One reason why Burckhardt can still be read out of sheer interest in his subject-matter is that he drew so much much of his material from primary sources -- chronicles, diaries, anecdotes, satires, comic novelle and so on. This was a humanistic and gentlemanly kind of scholarship, unlike the newfangled academic processing of archival documents; and it helped to inoculate his work against some kinds of obsolescence, since Vespasiano da Bisticci, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro Aretino and the rest can read just as freshly today as they did in 1860. * Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement *
Here and there in Burckhardt's book, one finds possible hints at the factors that formed this national "spirit": relatively egalitarian social conditions; consciousness of ancient glory; even a kind of tolerance generated by contacts with the Muslim world. * Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement *
a fascinating collection ... The reader learns about both the Renaissance itself and its historiography while learning about Jacob Burckhardt * Noel Malcolm, All Souls College, Oxford, Times Literary Supplement *
... a volume that offers important information on the invention of the "Renaissance" from the spirit of the 19th century and in this way encourages independent reading of the source. * Volker Reinhardt, sehepunkte *
Burckhardt is still capable of imparting an energetic curiosity and love of the past, a drive to imagine it and to try it on for size, of inspiring us to tell our own stories about the Renaissance or early modern; that may be the constant here. * Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, Global Intellectual History *
This is a highly rewarding collection of essays, which sheds much valuable light on a canonical text, and also on many of the ways in which it has informed - and continues to shape - our understanding of, and approaches to, that critical period of European civilization. * Kenneth Austin, University of Bristol, Forum for Modern Language Studies *
Renaissance in this great book is an intellectual and cultural construction of the nineteenth century and of the afterlife of German philosophical idealism. * Goran Stanivukovic, Renaissance and Reformation *