Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Conference
Description
The bicentenary of the birth of the Swiss scholar, Jacob Burckhardt (25 May 1818 - 8 August 1897), author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), seems an appropriate moment at which take stock and consider whether or not the idea of an ‘Italian Renaissance’ is still a hermeneutically helpful one. This conference will task an interdisciplinary team of scholars of Renaissance studies as well as of Burckhardt himself to interrogate both the Swiss historian’s own agenda as well as the contemporary validity and helpfulness of the label ‘Italian Renaissance’. Specific reference will be made to the themes treated in his classic account: the state as a work of art; development of the individual; revival of antiquity; discovery of the world and of man; society and festivals; morality and religion.