‎"MICHELET, J.‎
‎Renaissance. Histoire de France au seizième siècle. - [INVENTING THE ""RENAISSANCE""]‎

‎Paris, 1855. 8vo. Very nice contemporary diced half calf with gilt spine. Cracks to upper and lower hinges, and inner front hinge weak, but overall a very nice copy. A bit of brwning and soiling to first and last leaves and dampstaining to inner margin of first ab. 20 leaves. (10), CLX, 334 pp‎

Reference : 36287

‎First edition of this seminal work - the third in Michelet's series of ""The History of France"" - in which he coins the term ""Renaissance"" and uses it for the period of the sixteenth century as an historical period in its own right.The humanists of the period that we now call the Renaissance had a strong sense of being and doing something that was very different from that of the centuries before them"" they clearly thought of themselves as living in and creating a new epoch, re-inventing and re-using the classical Greek and Roman values. Once again they gave birth to the humanistic arts, literature, philosophy, painting, sculpting, etc. It is not a new invention of later times to view this historical epoch as something new and still something different, something worthy of the term ""Re-birth"", acknowledging both the source from which inspiration was drawn as well as the achievements of the new era.Thus, Michelet is not the first to understand what went on in this period, but still he changed our concept of it for ever - he invented the term which has not only determined this perioed ever since, but which has also been used to explain and understand all that went on in this most crucial period for modern man. It is in the present work by Michelet that he uses for the first time the noun ""Renaissance"" for this epoch and lets it refer to the discovery of world and of man in the 16th century. He not only lets the term refer to the artistic or scholarly part of the period, he lets it refer to the entire complex of changes that were taking place in this period, and he thus gives birth to the period as that of the mind and spirit of man, instead of just that of painting and learning. Michelet's work appeared at a time that allowed for it to exercise the greatest of influence. From the end of the 16th century until the middle of the 18th century, the history of the Renaissance was a field that barely existed. Only with Voltaire was some focus put on this period that we ever since Michelet have called the ""Renaissance"". Only with Michelet are we given the vocabulary to sum up this period and to describe it properly and in detail. When he publishes his work in 1855, historians and thinkers are ready to view this period as something in itself and as something worth noticing. That which Michelet thus began is that which Burchardt takes up in his ""Cultur der Renaissance in Italien"" (1860), in which ""Renaissance"" is finally characterized as the birth of modern humanity. Both Michelet and Burckhardt believed that modern, secular man is a product of the ""Renaissance"".""The terms ""restauratio"" or ""resttitutio"" had been applied by fourteenth-century Italian humanists to the revival of ancient languages and literatures, that of ""rinascita"" by Ghiberti and Vasari to the new blossoming art and architecture. In the eighteenth century Voltaire and Gibbon first saw the Italian civilization of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries as an entity and as a determining factor in the whole course of European history. Michelet (324) in 1855 first used the term ""renaissance"" for this period as an historical epoch in its own right. Burckhardt, an admirer of both Voltaire and Gibbon, supplied the final synthesis."" (Printing and the Mind of Man, p. 211) ‎