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The Renaissance, Second Edition (Studies in European History)

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Burke's `The Renaissance' is an historical primer with a twist. This is a short historiographical study that covers the usual Renaissance topics (politics, war, art, politics, religion, money, and politics) but is organized around an unconventional interpretation: namely, that the Renaissance was not strictly an Italian phenomenon, nor was it a clean break with the medieval past. Burke's interpretation (not entirely his, not entirely original) is that the Renaissance was more a `movement' than a `period'--an "attempt to revive antiquity" in art, politics, science, etc. As a result, suggests Burke, "almost every other characteristic attributed to the Renaissance can be found in the Middle Ages, to which it is so often contrasted" (p. 57, 2nd ed). In short, Burke downplays the traditional interpretation (begun over 150 years ago with Jacob Burckhardt) that the Renaissance heralded the rise of the individual and of reason (in a word, modernity) following a millennium of Dark Age stultification.

Burke is the author of the very readable `The Italian Renaissance' (a solid introduction to this `movement'), as well as the superb introductory essay to the Penguin edition of Jacob Burckhardt's classic `The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy'. 'The Renaissance' discussed here is a mere 80-odd pages; for a book this brief, which requires a clarity obtained not by length but by focus, he is the right scholar for the job. For that reason this work is useful as a first step, or a refresher, to the larger world of Renaissance scholarship; it offers the professional and amateur student of history an assessment of scholarly interpretations of the period (or `movement', whichever you prefer), as well as an alternate view of the significance of the Renaissance.