Customer Reviews

Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Harper torchbooks, TB40-41)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Jacob Burckhardt had one of those rare minds who could construct a new synthesis out of thought, government, art, and culture -- and who, for the first time, made it possible to talk about the Renaissance as a moment in the history of Western man.

This is a very dense work with flashes of genius as well as long scholarly footnotes with extensively quoted Italian and Latin. In a book by a dullard, this would be excruciating. But Burckhardt is anything but as he manages his material like a Moscow taxi driver: by accelerating and then coasting. When you least expect it, another epiphany draws you in.

Burckhardt's Renaissance was an incredible high in the history of mankind. The Medicis, Sforzas, and Malatestas strut their way through the history of the period; Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante create works of the imagination that still overpower us; popes like Julius II, Alexander VI, and Leo X combine worldliness with spirituality (sometimes); and even the average man has a face and a voice for the first time.

This book will make your blood race.

Yes, this is still the standard for studies of the Renaissance. But the book deserves a better edition: especially one with relevant illustrations on the page. The best I've seen is the 1958 two-volume Illustrated Edition by the Perennial Library of Harper & Row: not only are all notes conventiently at the bottom of the page, but over 240 illustrations grace the text, usually next to the mention of the subject. Too bad it is out of print. I hope an enterprising publisher will rise to the challenge.

For much of the last 139 years, Jacob Burckhardt's work has been dismissed as too "Nineteenth Century" for serious study: more literature than serious history. So much the pity. What Burckhardt left us in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a magisterial, thematic, understanding of the Italian Renaissance that is far more 1990's in its observations and human understandings than its original 1860's. It is a shame that Burckhardt's famous pupil, Nietzsche, didn't learn a little more balance and discretion at his elder's feet. This book is a joy to read. Like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, this work shows us how history can engage the spirit, and how far off the mark some modern historians have gone with their more "scholarly" work.

Burckhardt's brilliance is undeniable. His erudition is obvious and his synthesis of numerous themes and what would now be deemed separate academic disciplines is magnificent. The edition, however, was awful. Individual pages had literally dozens of typos and an entire half a chapter was printed twice. While I would gladly recommend the work, I strongly suggest finding another edition.

Burckhardt's 'Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' is fundamental to our understanding of the Renaissance, even though it has long since ceased to be definitive. For Burckhardt (who wrote `Civilization' in the 1850s), the Italian Renaissance represented the punctuated end of the middle ages and the beginning of the modern world. He placed particular emphasis on the idea that for the first time in history, the Renaissance gave us "individuality": the idea that a person could separate themselves from the crowd by their creative genius (in art, politics, science, etc.).

Contemporary scholarship, however, takes a more nuanced approach: while Burckhardt did indeed identify in the Renaissance new cultural, political, and artistic trends, it is now argued that the Renaissance nevertheless retained many aspects of medieval civilization while the Italians, and later other Europeans, revived classical art, architecture, and science and created a new economic and political order.

Two different publishers of this book each offer introductions by two excellent contemporary historians: the Penguin Classics version is introduced by Peter Burke, and the Random House Modern Library version is introduced by Peter Gay. In the Penguin version (reviewed here) Burke (as elsewhere) argues that the Renaissance was not the clean break with the medieval past that Burckhardt suggests, although he readily acknowledges Burckhardt's foundational contribution to early Renaissance scholarship: "Burckhardt's view of the Renaissance may be easy to criticize, but it is also difficult to replace."

And of course, Burckhardt's influence on Friedrich Nietzsche should not be ignored: the concept of the `rise of the individual' (found in Part II of `Civilization': The Development of the Individual) was to have significant impact on Nietzsche's concept of the `Übermench.'

Because for so long Burckhardt's 'Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' defined what the Renaissance was, one must spend at least a little time with Burckhardt to understand current concepts of the Renaissance in any depth. Burckhardt is effectively now a primary source.

A better book could not have fallen into my hands! An American professor in Venice recommended it, and after I read it I was only sorry I had not read it before going to Italy. The mystery of its medieval, rather Renaissance cities (Florence, Venice, among others) would have been clearer; even today's Italians' ways and personality. So much a product of Renaissance Italy...and its wonderful heritage from Ancient Rome. I truly recommend this book for Italy lovers, anyone going there soon, or for the sheer joy of reading a good history book. Jacob Burckkhardt is one of the most intelligent, enlightened historians I know.

I have to disagree with one of the former reviewers who said that this book is "outdated". His attitude is the one most wide-spread today, that is, he is one of those who regard our today's views and perceptions of history as being more consistent and just than those of the 19th century. But such attitude is simpty laughable.Most certainly our views have changed since the 19th century, but have they become "better"? We have discovered many previously unknown facts, but history lies not in the facts, but in our interpretation of them. And it is very useful to understand that alternative approaches exist, and that our "Zeitgeist" is not the ultimate and supreme one.
Read Burckhardt - it'll help to widen your horizons.

Burckhardt's Civilization is a classic. Of course, it provides a view of Renaissance Italy that differs from more recent works. New information has come to light. New interpretations have been proposed. But little (if any) of the information considered relevant by Burckhardt has been shown to be wrong. As EH Carr has pointed out, the perspectives of different times on the past are necessarily different because different times have different experiences and different attitudes. But different perspectives do not imply that one is right and all the others wrong: all that difference implies is difference, and different perspectives are frequently broadening.

To be sure, Burckhardt did not have the advantage of the scholarship of the last 150 years, and so some of his conclusions will be outdated. For example, anyone who has read Huizinga is likely to conclude that the 14th and 15th centuries in Italy were just as much successors to the 13th century as precursors of the 16th. Anyone who has read Braudel is likely to wonder how much of what Burckhardt saw as unique to Italy was not part of a broader Mediterranean matrix that included, say, Constantinople. That the reader will not learn all there is to know about the subject from Burckhardt's book alone is a problem only for those naive enough to believe that any one history completely and accurately illuminates some aspect of the past. Historical information is always partial, but few if any have ever known more about Italy in the 14th and 15th century than did Burckhardt.

Unfortunately, the quality of this edition is so awful with such frequent typos that it is impossible to get into Burckhardt's mind and readily follow him on his journey because the reader must constantly struggle to figure out what the text should say. Read Burckhardt by all means, but not in this edition.

Burckhardt's work is a classic and is well worth the read. However, this edition by BiblioBazaar is horrible. Let me explain:

What the publisher did is take a translation that is so old that it is no longer copyrighted. It then scanned the translation into a computer. However, no one at the publishing house even bothered to check the proof before printing. A number of words are misspelled. Often you can discern what word the scanner mis-read; other times the spelling is a bunch of unintelligible symbols. At one point (I believe it is in section 3) the same few pages are printed twice and some section of unknown length is omitted. Finally, BiblioBazaar doesn't even bother to give you a place of publication.

If BiblioBazaar were charging $3 or $4 for this edition, I might excuse the fact that they didn't even read the proofs once. However, $20 for a book that cost them nothing to produce other than the paper it is printed on is absurd. In my opinion, Amazon shouldn't even carry this edition. Buy Burckhardt, but buy it from a reputable publishing house.

This review is of the edition of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy published by BiblioBazaar. This edition should be recalled by the publisher: there are typo's on every page, making it nearly unreadable. I attempted to continue reading the book (which is of course a classic) but was too annoyed with trying to figure out what certain jumbled characters meant.

I think BiblioBazaar must has scanned the text of an old edition of the book whose copyright had expired, but then never bothered to proofread the finished product. Very bad business. Save your money and get an edition by a reputable publisher.