Part of Series

Ideas in Context

Series · 18 books

By David Todd, Martin A. Ruehl, Joanne Paul, and more

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeois elites became enthralled by the civilization of Renaissance Italy. As their own country entered a phase of critical socioeconomic changes, German historians and writers reinvented the Italian Renaissance as the onset of a heroic modernity: a glorious dawn that ushered in an age of secular individualism, imbued with ruthless vitality and a neo-pagan zest for beauty. The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination is the first comprehensive account of the debates that shaped the German idea of the Renaissance in the seven decades following Jacob Burckhardt's seminal study of 1860. Based on a wealth of archival material and enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, it provides a new perspective on the historical thought of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and the formation of a concept that is still with us today.

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Author

Martin A. Ruehl

Author · 1 books

Martin Ruehl took his BA from Cambridge and his PhD from Princeton. After a research fellowship at Queens’ College, he joined Sidney Sussex as College Lecturer and Director of Studies in History. Since 2007, he has been University Lecturer in the German Department and Director of Studies in MML at Trinity Hall. He continues to teach for the History Faculty at the undergraduate as well as graduate level and is an active member of the teaching staff for the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History.