The Viking Portable Renaissance Reader!

Revisiting a classic anthology

Our book today is a classic from the extremely sturdy old Viking Portable line, The Viking Portable Renaissance Reader, which naturally starts off with an echo of the identity crisis that’s accompanied the whole subject of the Renaissance for over a century now. In their Introduction from 70 years ago, James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin bring this up immediately, wondering if there really was anything distinctive about the time period typically assigned to the Renaissance, distinctions that didn’t apply, say, to the late Middle Ages (the classic example, at least since 1927’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles Homer Haskins). “Long regarded as a cultural movement – the revival of art, letters, and learning that they described,” our editors write, “the Renaissance is, as a historical period, the creation of nineteenth-century historians” – ala Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.