The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) catapulted what we call the renaissance onto the intellectual stage. Despite initial sluggish sales, Die Kultur proved immensely popular; as a foundational piece of the narrative of the rise of the West and the secondary historical importance of the rest, it was translated into Italian, Russian, English, French, Polish and Hungarian in the nineteenth century, and since then into Hebrew, Danish, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.