Part 4 of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) greatly contributed to the shaping of an interpretation of the so-called ‘age of exploration’ that was still influential until a few years ago. This was largely due to its inspiring title, ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’. This chapter discusses the cultural background to Burckhardt’s successful idea, its dissemination across the literature about the discovery of America, and its legacy to the 20th-century historiography on the age of exploration, which the global turn in historical studies has especially affected. A few examples of transcultural interactions on a global scale, relating to the writing of histories of the world and their reliance on oral sources and a plural notion of antiquity, are used to explain why and how, our view of the new world has moved away from Burckhardt’s. Ultimately, however, it is argued that a critical reappraisal of Burckhardt may well support current attempts to develop a much more complex and multifaceted understanding of the Renaissance.
