Afterword

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt’s defining study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, the Renaissance has been regarded as defining itself as emanating from Graeco-Roman classical antiquity.¹ Beginning with Burckhardt, and developed through the studies of thinkers as diverse as Paul Oscar Kristeller, Hans Baron and Erwin Panofsky, runs an assumption that the shaping aspects of Renaissance culture — from the rise of the fifteenth-century Italian city states to the humanist studies that ultimately fostered the Lutheran Reformation in northern Europe — were defined by the achievements of the Graeco-Roman world.² According to this argument, European Christianity shaped itself in direct response to the intellectual and territorial parameters of Greece and Rome, and it was this fusion which was primarily responsible for the ‘flowering’ of the Renaissance from the early fifteenth century.