Background
Voigt was the son of the historian Johannes Voigt.
historian university professor
Voigt was the son of the historian Johannes Voigt.
He died in Leipzig in 1891. 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.
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.
What was very important to him was the new relationship of man in the Renaissance to Classical antiquity especially to Cicero and his humanitas (humanity). Despite the connection between Dante Alighieri and Roman authors such as Seneca and Cicero, he is not, in Voigt"s opinion, a typical Renaissance man like Petrach and his successors, because Dante stood in the late mediaeval world and the corporative structures. In recognizing his own self as a human in context with the studies of the Classical authors, Petrarch left the old mediaeval world and its structures behind.
The consciousness of being a human was the new quality.
Furthermore, Voigt wrote on Maurice of Saxony. Voigt"s biography about the elector is the first, which is compare to the standards of an objective historical science.
He realized within a postulate from the German historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher. von Christopher South.
Saxonian Academy of Sciences. Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.