ABSTRACT
The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century is unique among ages of claimed cultural efflorescence, the so-called golden ages, in that it is largely the creation of a single man, Jacob Burckhardt. From Italy the Renaissance passed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to France, the Low Countries, Germany, and eventually England. Tensions within the Renaissance guild rising from the existence of the broad perspectives are plain to be seen. The historiographic concept of the Renaissance was, then, made to order for the general philosophy of progress. Progress may be declared the normal state of change, with man's underlying nature conducive to progress, but there are bound to be occasional periods when superstition, ignorance, intellectual tyranny, and philosophies like scholasticism take command. "Modern political democracy," writes Trinkaus, "was born in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, not in Renaissance Italy.".
