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By Niccolò Machiavelli. Introduction By Max Lerner

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “WE LIvE today in the shadow of a Florentine, the man who above all others taught the world to think in terms of cold political power. His name was Niccold Machiavelli, and he was one of those rare intellectuals who write about politics because they have had a hand in politics and learned what it is about. His portraits show a thin-faced, pale little man, with a sharp nose, sunken cheeks, subtle lips, a discreet and enigmatic smile, and piercing black eyes that look as if they knew much more than they were willing to tell…”

NY. Random House. 1950. 587p.

By J. H. Plumb

FROM CHAPTER 1: “I he face of medieval Europe was scarred with the ruins barbarous Frangipani and their armed retainers, greedy, lawless, destructive; the Forum provided a quarry for churches and rough pasture for the cattle market, and beneath the broken columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux the bullocks awaited their slaughter. The Campagna was littered with the crumbling ruins of its aqueducts; the pavements of those splendid Roman roads were narrowed by the returning wilderness. Elsewhere scraps of walls, the ruins of arena, temple, and triumphal arch, sometimes embedded in the hovels and houses of a town struggling to regain its life or lost forever in the countryside, constantly reminded the man of the Middle Ages of the fleeting life of man, of the unknowable nature of Providence. For him the past was dead, and its relics but morals in stone, a terrible warning of the wickedness that God had punished…”

Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1961. 319p.

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By Bernhard Berenson

FROM THE PREFACE: “The following essay owes its origin to the author's belief that Venetian painting is the most complete expression in art of the Italian Renaissance. The Renaissance is even more important typically than historically. Historically it may be looked upon as an age of glory or of shame according to the different views entertained of European events during the past five centuries. But typically it stands for youth, and youth alone--for intellectual curiosity and energy grasping at the whole of life as material which it hope so mould in any shape….”

London. Oxford. Fontana. 1930). 1960. 274p.

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By Jacob Burckhardt. Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore With a new Introduction by Peter Burke and Notes by Peter Murray

FROM THE INTRODUCTION : “….Burckhardt's conception of history was a very different one from that of many of his contemporaries. He rejected both the positivism andthe Hegelianism which fascinated so many of his contemporaries all over Europe. As a student at the university of Berlin, he wrote regretfully that the philosophy of history was taught by followers of Hegel, 'whom I cannot understand'. As a professor at the university of Basel, he told his students that his lectures on the study of history would offer 'no philosophy of history. According to Burckhardt, there was no such thing; the idea of the philosophy of history was a contradiction in terms, 'for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical. In other words, history is unsystematic and systems are unhistorical.

This view is further from British historical empiricism than it may look. Unlike many practising historians, Burckhardt was not philoso- phically illiterate. Despite his claim to be unfit for speculation and abstract thought, he was well acquainted with the ideas of Hegel and Schopenhauer as well as with those of the young Nietzsche, with whom he used to go for walks discussing ideas. Although he was sceptical of the claims made for grand philosophical systems, his vision ofthe past was not completely free of philosophical presuppositions, as weshall see….”

London. Penguin 1990. 388p.

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Edited With An Introduction BY Karl H. Dannenfeldt.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “In 1860 in the introduction to his work on The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt predicted the present "Problem of the Renaissance” when he wrote "To each eye, perhaps, the out¬lines of a great civilization present a differ¬ent picture. ... In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.” To the writers of the Italian Renaissance itself, there was no serious problem. Their views of the age in which they were living furnished the basis for a long-held concept, namely, that after a period of about a thousand years of cultural darkness and igno-rance, there arose a new age with a great revival in classical literature, learning, and the arts. The humanists of the Northern Renaissance continued this concept. "Out of the thick Gothic night our eyes are opened to the glorious torch of the sun,” wrote Rabelais. Moreover, there was also now introduced a reforming religious element, further emphasizing the medieval barbarization of religion and culture. Protestant writers joined in this condemnation of the dark medieval period, an attack little circumscribed by the defense of the medieval Church by Catholic apologists…”

Boston. D. C. Heath. Problems In European Civilization. 1959. 129p.