Georg Voigt

Who was Georg Voigt?

Georg Voigt was a German historian who was born in 1827 in Königsberg in East Prussia. He died in Leipzig in 1891. Voigt was the son of the historian Johannes Voigt. Voigt belonged to the founders of modern research into the Italian Renaissance along with Jacob Burckhardt.

In 1860 Voigt was called by Heinrich von Sybel to the University of Rostock as professor of history. 1866 he became professor of history at the University of Leipzig, following the historian Wilhelm Wachsmuth. His research was into the topics of humanism in the 15th and 16th centuries and the history of the Schmalkaldic war. Unlike Burckhardt, Voigt described only the first century of a movement which came from Renaissance Florence and spread all through Europe. Burckhardt described all features of Italian society of the Renaissance. Their research methods were very different. Burckhardt was more a cultural historian with a historic-philosophical method. Voigt, in the methodical scholarship of Leopold von Ranke, worked more with a philological method. Voigt wrote Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus.