Great changes do not occur within short time-spans.
Between 1350 and the early 1700s decisive changes occurred that have led modern
historians to select various persons or years in that period as the beginning
of, or the transition to, the modern age. Such designations have produced sharp
controversies over the exact character of this period of Western Civilization
because, on the one hand, many elements of the traditional world view persisted
yet, on the other hand, vast changes redrew the image of that world.
In the age of discovery the world became
global; scholars and philosophers conjured up new visions of nature and the
cosmos; the works of classical antiquity were recovered, critically assessed,
and adulated to an unprecedented degree; over a thousand years of a united
latin Christendom ended; and the state, emerging as the basic framework for
peoples' lives, provoked discussions of statecraft, collective identity,
customs, and laws.
Chronologically, Italian Renaissance historiography
is best discussed in two parts: first, the quattrocento histories written when
the Italian states were prosperous, secure, and dynamic, and, second, the
histories written after 1499 when Italy suffered sixty years of warfare as the
battlefield of the European powers. Topically, one must address the humanists'
tentativeness about universal history and their decisive innovations, which
only gradually were seen to have a revolutionary character.
Humanist historiography fused enthusiasm for ancient
models with pride in the contemporary patria, the city-state. Its
prototype was created by one of the historians, Leonardo Bruni. He ascribed
Florence's success to her republican liberty, from which flowed virtue, beauty
of style, courage, industriousness,
and strength. Bruni also followed his classical models when he divided his
works into books, inserted dramatic set speeches, wrote an elegant classical
Latin, made a whole people the central figure, told mainly about affairs of
state, and reaffirmed the civic use of history. The emphasis on politics
enabled Bruni to maintain the traditional view that the individual's psyche
produced the true causes of change in the world.
Humanist historiography in Rome fastened on the
personalities of the popes, the greatness of Rome, and Italian consciousness.
One scholar, Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, narrated the Lives
of the Popes. The commissioned work was well-informed, often frank,
sometimes critical, and vastly popular-partly because people have always craved
information on the lives of the prominent and partly because Protestants used
it, in Robert Barnes's translation, as proof of the medieval church's corruption.
In the new spirit of humanist criticism, the old tales of Venetian history were
now generally downgraded, but it was less any humanist ideal than the Venetian
pragmatic attitude that made historians add to their works official records
such as deliberations of governing bodies, correspondence, treaties, and
diplomatic reports. In the main, Venetian historians told about Venetian
realpolitik with love for the republic but without flourish and substantial
digressions into the world of high ideals.
Humanists restructured the Western past through the
concept of the Dark Ages. Italian humanists had rejected the notion of the translatio
imperii with its continuity between the Roman and the medieval empires,
because it gave legitimacy to the Holy Roman Empire, whose claims the citizens
of Italian citystates had rebuffed in long struggles. Bracciolini termed the
notion a Germanic invention. The humanists arrived at a tripartite division of
Western history: (1) the Ancient Period, (2) the Dark Ages, and (3) the
Renaissance, which was seen as the rebirth of the Ancient Period.
Renaissance historians, inspired by the ancients,
simply granted mankind a greater measure of "home rule ," which in
turn made them stress the importance of human deeds and motives in history.
When the humanist historians emphasized Greek and
Roman models of historical explanation they began to weaken the dominant
medieval Bible entered account of human affairs.
The neoclassicism of the Italian humanists and their
conviction that they had spearheaded a return to intellectual and aesthetic
glory proved contagious elsewhere. Most other countries, however, lacked those
elements which had made humanism flourish in Italy: an abundance of Roman
ruins, city-states and sophisticated courts, and a sense of close connections
between classical Rome and the present. When acceptance occurred, the
classicism of the humanists was inevitably modified by national conditions.
Such acceptance was not merely of literary and aesthetic import but became an
ingredient in the slow nation- forming process.
German humanism, including a humanist
historiography, found its major support at the imperial court and in the
cities. By 1520 German historiography had acquired many humanistic attributes, and
the new printing presses enhanced the trend. Then the Lutheran Reformation and
decades of religious controversy changed the intellectual world radically. It became
a manifestation of the new interest in what we now call the auxiliary fields:
working on inscriptions, collecting manuscripts and coins, and editing sources.
In the 1480s and 1490s Italian humanism inspired a
small but influential group of French scholars gathered around Guillaume
Fichet, a professor at the Sorbonne. The battle over the true church tradition
was raging in all of Europe when in France another tradition came under attack:
the centuries-old version of Roman law.
About 1513 Thomas More wrote his History of Richard
III, the first English historical work carrying the marks of humanist
historiography: emulation of Roman historians; an elegant Latin; brilliantly
constructed speeches; a conscious attempt to compose the narrative rather than
to narrate events year by year; a stress on human characteristics and motives
and a reaffirmation of history's teaching role. The work, with its lesson on
the destructiveness of tyrannical rule, was much admired when from 1543 it was
published in various, frequently poor, editions. Thus the humanist seed was
scattered. A more complete inventory would show that many humanists served
patrons in regions from the Atlantic into Eastern Europe, producing influential
humanist historiographical enclaves in the midst of chronicle territories.
The Italian humanists had tried to restore the
"pure" classical heritage by removing layer upon layer of accretions deposited
by the "Dark Ages." Such an endeavor held no fascination for Martin Luther,
who viewed the classical achievements as products of feeble human reason,
devoid of spiritual purpose. But Luther engaged in his own work of restoration
when he called for a return to the "pure" holy Christian church, that
of Christ and his apostles. He and other reformers, laboring to remove the "corrupt"
layers of tradition accumulated over centuries, realized the need for historical
studies that would help to reestablish the pure and timeless faith and church.
In an unexpected parallel to humanist
historiography, Peucer's edition of Melanchthon's chronicle made a sharp
distinction between the two orders, the sacred and the profane. Protestant historiography
thus came to a fork in the road leading to two entirely separate histories: one
ecclesiastical, telling the story of Christ's church, and one mundane, concerned
with the state as God's instrument. Although God still linked the two, this
link was deemphasized with every passing century.
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