The Poetry of Philology: Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga

Abstract

In his 1860 book The Civilization [Kultur] of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt argues that because Italy had no overarching system of government, it was free to create different political forms through its multiplicity of competing despotisms and republics. Paradoxically, the very fragmentation of Italy allowed for the birth of individualism, “personality,” and political experimentation—an experimentation marked by Burckhardt’s use of the term “art” to describe both the Italian states and concomitantly their fascination with war. Yet Italy by the same token could never consolidate itself as a nation and did not build on these experiments (69–71, 79, 98). Its wars constantly disintegrated what its art—in the broad sense— had produced. For war, as Jacqueline Rose argues, marks a “limit” to claims of “absolute knowledge,” even as such claims are “offered as one cause—if not the cause—of war” (16–18).