Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
Ah! Sweet History of Life
By Francis Haskell
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
by Johan Huizinga, translated by Rodney J. Payton, by Ulrich Mammitzsch
University of Chicago Press, 471 pp., $39.95
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
by John Hale
HarperCollins, 648 pp., £25.00
In his preface to his extremely fine study The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, John Hale hopes it will not be thought presumptuous that his title adapts that of a book of truly seminal importance, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860—a book that 'I have carried...for so long in my mental baggage as a talisman at once protective and provocative that this was not a journey I could undertake without it.' However, as the adaptation of the title itself suggests, and as his nearly six hundred pages of lucid, imaginative, and constantly engrossing text elaborate, it is the provocation rather than the protection that has provided the greater stimulus for Hale. For Burckhardt's Renaissance was emphatically Italian, and not European.
Review, 4174 words
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