Jacob Burckhardt

Western Civilisation was in its pomp when Jacob Burckhardt delivered his Judgements on History and Historians; European Empires spanned the globe, while the modern age was being forged in the nationalist revolutions of 1848. As a tutor to the young Friedrich Nietzsche as well as one of the first historians to take 'culture' as his subject rather than the triumphs and travails of kings and generals, Burckhardt was at the vanguard of this modern sensibility. Ambitious in its scope, ranging from the days of Ancient Egypt, through the Reformation to the time of Napoleon, this is indeed a history of 'Western Civilization', written before two monstrous world wars threw such a concept into disrepute.

Published in 1860, Burckhardt's work redefined our sense of the European past, wholly reinterpreting what has since been known simply as the Italian Renaissance. With unsurpassed erudition, Burckhardt illuminates a world of artistic and cultural ferment, innovation, and discovery; of revived humanism; of fierce tensions between church and empire; and of the birth of both the modern state and the modern individual. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy remains the single most important and influential account of this crucial moment in the history of the West.

In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt, one of the preeminent historians of classical and Renaissance culture, presented this revolutionary work, which portrays ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world based on a ruthless competition for honor, a competition that led, in turn, to a tyranous state with minimal personal freedoms. Burckhardt's landmark project, the culmination of thirty years of scholarlship by leading Oxford historian, Oswyn Murray, offers a rich cultural history of a fascinating society.

For the first time in English, one of the greatest masterpieces of historical writing: 'Every civilized library must have a copy.' CHRISTOPHER STACE, Telegraph

For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

"There may not be any book on architecture so delightful to dip into; one wishes there were a pocket edition to take on an Italian vacation-not only for its information and vision but for such pleasant reminders as that the citizens of Treviso carried Tullio Lombardo's friezes through the town in triumph before they were attached to a building."-D. J. R. Bruckner, New York Times Book Review

In the present work it has been the author's design to describe the remarkable half century from the accession of Diocletian to the death of Constantine in its quality as a period of transition. What was intended was not a history of the life and reign of Constantine, nor yet an encyclopedia of all worth-while information pertaining to this period. Rather were the significant and essential characteristics of the contemporary world to be outlined and shaped into a perspicuous sketch of the whole.