SOURCE: "The Limits of the Notion of 'Renaissance Individualism': Burckhardt after a Century," in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, Vol. II, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 155-81.

In the excerpt below, Baron evaluates Burckhardt's concept of the Renaissance, assessing criticisms of it and outlining two areas of weakness in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

September 1960 marked the hundredth year since the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. No other work has had a comparable influence on the formation of the historical concept of the Renaissance, and during the last four decades before its centenary it became a classic read in all western countries. Since the republication of Burckhardt's original text by Walter Goetz in 1922, one German reprint has followed another. After the Second World War, the early Italian and English translations began to share...