Download PDF | Dr Giuliano Mori - Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy_ Verisimilitude and Factuality in the Humanist Debate (Oxford-Warburg Studies)-Oxford University Press (2024).
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Introduction
Around the year 700 bc, Hesiod warned the audience of his Theogony that the Muses, who inspire poets and historians alike, can both speak the truth and tell “lies that are like the truth” (ψεύδεα ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα).1 Almost a millennium later, Lucian of Samosata wrote his True Story (Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα), a patently fictitious history aimed at ridiculing the pretense of truthfulness sustained by a plethora of Hellenistic historians. “True stories” and “plausible lies” remind us of the intricate relationship between truth and falsehood in historical writing.
Virtually all historians in all times and places have concurred that truthfulness is an indispensable feature of the historical genre. In fact, an untruthful history is not a history at all but rather a myth or a narration of some other kind. As Cicero put it in the De inventione, the historical genre concerns the truthful narration (narratio) of things that happened in the past—if such a narration is not truthful, or concerns things that have not happened, it does not fall under the historical genre.2 Yet, while everyone agreed with Cicero that the prime requirement of the historical genre is truthfulness, not everyone shared the same definition of historical truthfulness.
This contradiction lies at the heart of most disputes in the history of historiography. As I will argue in this book, different currents within humanist culture upheld contrasting notions of historical truth; however, all humanist historians claimed that their works belonged to the historical genre and adhered to the genre’s paramount requirement of truthfulness. Had humanists of opposite camps agreed that their works belonged to different genres, the whole dispute addressed in this book would have hardly existed as it would have been unreasonable to demand that someone working in a genre distinct from history should nonetheless comply with the requirements of the historical genre. Indeed, historians regularly transgressed their own historiographical principles in works that included historical contents but did not belong to the historical genre. First among the principles that caused the most disagreement within humanist historiography was a crucial question about the relevance of verisimilitude to historical truth. Probability, plausibility, credibility, and verisimilitude are perceived today as distinct concepts that, though belonging to the same semantic field, normally concern different objects—for instance, expected outcomes, reported information, or fictional narratives. This was not quite the case before the seventeenth century.
In the Renaissance, the distinction between probabilitas, plausibilitas, credibilitas, and verisimilitudo was extremely blurred, if it existed at all.3 For the majority of Renaissance authors, verisimilitude and cognate notions denoted the property of those accounts that, despite being in most cases unverifiable, displayed the usual or “normal” features of things known to be true. With regard to verisimilitude, Quattrocento humanists agreed with both their classical ancestors and their medieval anti-models. Latin rhetoric and medieval jurisprudence used verisimilitude for a similar purpose, namely to measure the persuasiveness of the claims at issue. While orators needed verisimilitude to present their claims convincingly, judges used it to assess the weight of available testimonies. By the same token, Renaissance humanists could apply the notion of verisimilitude to the field of historiography, which not only required rhetorical persuasiveness but was also rife with unverifiable sources and accounts that displayed in different measures the “normal” features of “true” historical events. A crucial question thus presented itself to humanist historians, namely whether they ought to include in their works historical accounts that displayed the customary characteristics of truth despite being possibly (or actually) non-factual.
This question lies at the very heart of this book and I suggest we should consider it as the major catalyst for humanist debate on historical writing. Quattrocento historians were not unanimous on the issue of verisimilitude and tended to embrace one of two opposing views that they saw as utterly irreconcilable. Some authors held true history to be incompatible with verisimilitude. For them, historical factuality was the very definition of historical truth; therefore, they believed that truth-adherent historians should shun all accounts that did not comply with the factual descriptions of events such as they had transpired, regardless of verisimilitude. Other authors, instead, conceived of historical truth as something “higher” and more soul-stirring than sheer factuality—something that concerned the overall meaning of the events rather than the concrete and minute ways in which they had played out. To attain this kind of historical truth, verisimilitude was indispensable. To provide a rough illustration of these different conceptions of historical truth, one could draw a parallel with two of the main theories of truth that are currently debated by philosophers. I am referring to the correspondence and the coherence theory of truth.
In layman’s terms, the former postulates that truth depends on the existence of a relation between our thoughts or statements and reality, however conceived. As Plato wrote, “that speech which says things as they are is true, and that which says them as they are not is false.”4 At variance with this view, proponents of the coherence theory maintain that individual thoughts or statements are true when they agree with larger sets of propositions or beliefs in which truth is assumed to reside—it is true that water boils at approximately 100 degrees Celsius because this statement agrees with our set of notions about the physical and chemical properties of water. Both the correspondence and especially the coherence theory of truth are largely anachronistic if applied to the Renaissance and, for this reason, I will refrain from using them hereafter; however, they may be useful to offer a preliminary understanding of the divide between the two currents of humanist historiography. One could say that defenders of factual truth espoused some kind of correspondence theory of historical truth.
They believed that historical truth derives from the perfect correspondence between historical facts and their verbal description in written histories. More precisely, individual historical accounts are true when they align with individual historical facts and historical works are truthful when they contain accounts that reflect all of the facts that transpired in a given period. Those who belonged, instead, to the historiographical current that embraced verisimilitude adopted a hybrid conception of historical truth that— without completely disregarding the correspondence between historical accounts and the overall meaning of reported events—was closer to what is known today as a coherence theory of truth. More precisely, they held that the truthfulness of individual historical propositions depended on the coherence of such propositions with the perceived meaning of the events at issue. A work of history was then truthful if all of its elements cohered with one another, reflecting the overall meaning of reported events. Verisimilitude was especially important according to this view because it signaled the coherence of individual historiographical propositions with the perceived general meaning of the events described.
One of the central claims of this book is that the opposition between these two historiographical stances—one equating historical truth with factuality, the other seeing true history as a verisimilar account of the overall meaning of the recounted events—not only stimulated humanist debate over the nature of history but also provided the discourse with philosophical autonomy and specificity. At variance with an antiquated but still widespread scholarly narrative, I shall demonstrate that the humanist philosophy of history was not advanced exclusively or mainly in opposition to earlier historiographical stances, but rather developed in view of an internal polarity that denoted the humanist milieu.
The two main views that humanists held concerning the relationship between truth and verisimilitude involved another crucial aspect of Quattrocento historiography, namely the issue of criticism. The very need to assess whether and to what degree something does or does not display the usual features of truth entailed a form of critical inquiry, as amply illustrated by the history of ancient rhetoric and medieval law. These disciplines provided Quattrocento humanists with numerous examples of methods for assessing the verisimilitude of arguments, witnesses, testimonies, and so on. My claim is that some fifteenth-century humanists used these examples to develop embryonic notions of historical criticism. Yet, throughout the fifteenth century, the development of historical criticism was encumbered by the unanimous assumption that the pursuit of verisimilitude was incompatible with the search for factual truth.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars eventually overcame this obstacle by dovetailing the humanist interest in factual truth with a focus on verisimilitude, thus bringing to fruition their predecessors’ critical insights. My analysis thus affords a fresh perspective on Quattrocento historiography, both prospectively and retrospectively. On the one hand, the humanist debate on historical verisimilitude acquires a new meaning when considered in the light of its contribution to the eventual rise of “modern” historical criticism, which resulted—I argue—from the willingness of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury scholars to reconcile the two main strands of humanist historiography.
On the other hand, the many ways in which humanists pondered the critical implications of the notion of verisimilitude also suggests that, although insisting on the difference that set their historical works apart from medieval chronicles, fifteenth-century humanists were nonetheless influenced by medieval culture and especially by the tradition of jurisprudence, in which most humanists were trained. Finally, the implications of the humanist discussion about truthful histories are not only chronologically but also thematically broader than one may suppose. As I will show, due to the overarching nature of the notion of truth, the polarity between factuality and verisimilitude reverberated throughout the whole spectrum of Quattrocento humanist culture, involving matters of patronage, politics, science, language, and so on.
My analysis of the ways in which Italian humanists discussed historical truth and verisimilitude facilitates a reconsideration of some widely held assumptions about Quattrocento historiography. In the introduction to his Storiografia dell’Umanesimo in Italia, Riccardo Fubini recalled that, as a student, he had been discouraged from researching humanist historiography by the lack of scholarly works able to provide such a study with adequate historical context.5 Thanks to Fubini himself and to the many scholars whose works are cited in this book, this is no longer the case.6 Although analyses of fifteenth-century historiography are still relatively thin on the ground if compared to the many works on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, throughout the past decades scholars have shed considerable light on the histories written by Quattrocento humanists. We now have a number of detailed analyses of the ways in which humanists adopted classical historiographical models and used them to pursue their own civic and political interests. In the wake of interpretations such as Baron’s and Garin’s, these civic and political interests have often been considered—rightly, one could argue—as the main catalyst for humanist historical writing.
The emphasis placed on the political motivations behind historical works such a Leonardo Bruni’s celebrated Historiae florentini populi is responsible, perhaps, for a widely held yet questionable assumption according to which humanist histories mostly followed a practical agenda rather than being influenced by theoretical considerations on the nature of history. The many studies that, in the past years, investigated Quattrocento historiography have not invalidated this widespread conception concerning the lack, on the part of fifteenth-century humanists, of a specific interest in the theory of historical writing. There is at least one Quattrocento source that supports this belief. In his dialogue De hominibus doctis (1490–1), Paolo Cortesi wrote that the ancients neglected the theory of historical writing but at least their works evidenced their familiarity with a set of adequate historiographical precepts. Humanists, instead, seemed to excel in historical writing only by chance (temere aut casu), since they neither expounded on, nor in fact possessed, historiographical praecepta.7
Albeit in a less censorious style, many recent scholars have shared Cortesi’s appraisal, including some of the authors who devoted their efforts to the study of Quattrocento historical writing. To cite a few examples, Eric W. Cochrane, whose monumental work on Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (1981) remains to this day the most exhaustive repertorium of information about humanist works of history, believed that in the fifteenth century “the theory of history failed to keep up with the practice of history in all of Italy”—so much so that “within some seven decades of its birth...humanist historiography was dying of inanition. It was suffering from a lack of clearly defined purposes, from a want of appropriate subject matter, from a confusion about methodology, and, above all, from an inability to provide either a meaningful analysis of the present or a reliable guide to the future.”8 By the same token, Robert Black, whose classic analysis of Benedetto Accolti marked a milestone in Renaissance scholarship, stated in a 1987 article that until the end of the fifteenth century, Italian humanists displayed little interest in the theory of historical writing.9
Analogously, Mariangela Regoliosi—who has edited relevant historiographical sources by Lorenzo Valla, Lapo da Castiglionchio, and Guarino da Verona—wrote that the humanist debate on historical writing is altogether unsatisfying, failing both to define an autonomous historical methodology and to develop a coherent philosophy of history.10 In 2010, Regoliosi’s remark was reiterated by Nicola Gardini, who agrees with Regoliosi although recognizing that Renaissance culture was characterized precisely by the way in which it conceived of time, past, and history.11 Regoliosi’s stance is not incompatible with another strand of scholarship, which acknowledges the humanist interest in the theory of historiography but denies the influence of such a theoretical discussion on the actual practice of Quattrocento historical writing. Girolamo Cotroneo was among the earliest scholars to advance this claim in his I trattatisti dell’“ars historica” (1971).12 A few year earlier, in the greatly influential Machiavelli and Guicciardini (1965), Felix Gilbert had also claimed that the theory of historical writing developed by fifteenth-century humanists was utterly unconnected to their practical and “politicized” approach to history, consisting instead in the mere repetition of classical rhetorical topoi.13 In more recent times, Beatrice Stasi embraced a viewpoint resembling that of Gilbert and Cotroneo.
In Apologie umanistiche della “historia” (2004), she insisted that the humanist interest in the theory of historical writing was resolved within a discussion about classical rhetorical sources, thus remaining disconnected from the practice of historical writing, which was influenced by political rather than theoretical motivations.
The conviction epitomized by Gilbert, Cotroneo, and Stasi functions as a corollary to the belief originally worded by Cortesi: granted that Quattrocento humanists displayed some interest in the theoretical implications of historical writing, they limited themselves to repeating and adapting classical topoi that concerned, for the most part, the relationship between history and rhetoric or poetry. In Donald Kelley’s words, “At the start humanist ideas of history consisted of hardly more than a litany of classical topoi praising history for its truthfulness (Cicero's prima lex historiae) and for its unique combination of pleasure (voluptas) and instruction (utilitas).”15 By the same token, Cotroneo argued that the first Quattrocento phase in the development of the ars historica revolved around the rhetorical principles advanced by Cicero and Quintilian. According to Cotroneo, the “rhetorical phase” of humanist historiography extended throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, when Greek rhetorical models (Aristotle and Lucian) supplanted Latin sources.16
At variance with this view, Regoliosi has rightly shown that Greek and Latin rhetorical models of historical writing coexisted since the early fifteenth century, possibly explaining the different nuances of Quattrocento historiography.17 Be that as it may, the final conclusion of these analyses remains roughly the same: while Quattrocento historiographical practice was motivated by political and civic interests, Quattrocento historiographical theory (if it even existed) was essentially rhetorical in character. Generally concurring in this view, scholars do disagree on a few points. Most importantly, they disagree on whether the rhetorical character of humanist historiography must be intended in a pejorative sense, as a burden to historical writing. Jacob Burckhardt was among the first Renaissance scholars to maintain this pejorative view of the influence of rhetoric on humanist history. In Die Kultur der Renaissance (1860), Burckhardt claimed that humanists deplorably held “that it is the function of the historian—just as if he were one with the poet—to excite, charm, or overwhelm the reader.” Therefore, humanists ultimately produced historical works that were “insipid and conventional” if compared to the vividness of medieval chronicles, unconcerned by the standards of classical rhetoric.18 Many twentieth-century authors rejected this view. Thanks to the seminal works of Renaissance scholars such as John O’Malley, Jarod E. Seigel, Nancy Struever, and Cesare Vasoli, the philosophical implications of Quattrocento rhetoric for all areas of humanist culture came to be regarded as incontestable.19 Burckhardt’s analysis was challenged in particular by Struever’s study of Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (1970), which revealed the fecund influence that the rhetorical debate exerted upon Quattrocento historical writing. In her words, “rhetoric sponsored the productive as well as the difficult aspects of Humanism, and more specifically . . .it fostered, not disguised, the innovative and liberating historicist insight which the Humanists attained.”20 It would be superfluous, here, to insist on relatively minor differences within the scholarly tradition. What matters is that, in spite of these differences, most scholars agree (whether explicitly or not) on two main points. First, that Quattrocento historical works were not especially influenced by coeval discussions on the nature of history. Second, that these discussions failed to develop a fully autonomous theory of history, conceived not only as a rhetorical genre but also as a tool of critical analysis and comprehension of the past. As George Huppert rather brusquely stated: If historians had no philosophy in the 1560s, it was not for lack of trying. Nothing shows more clearly the great need for a philosophical approach to the past than the proliferation of learned treatises on historical method, the artes historicae. The great bulk of these only repeated the commonplaces of classical rhetoric on the subject of history: history is the teacher of life and the historian an impartial judge collecting exempla for posterity; history is considered a branch of rhetoric, the historian an observer, his subject politics. These treatises described history as it was written by the Romans.21 Taking Huppert at his word and hence assuming that the efforts expended by Quattrocento humanists to distance themselves from the narrative and historiographical habits of medieval chronicles could not account for a truly autonomous philosophical or theoretical approach to history, we are left with an awkward question. When was “modern”—or, rather, “critical”—historiography born? From the late nineteenth century throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this question was overshadowed by seemingly similar issues concerning the definition of historicism. Arguably, however, the debate was too involved in philosophy to really have any interest (or use) for a “historicist analysis” of the rise of historical criticism. German exponents of Historismus such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Ernst Troeltsch were primarily interested in the philosophical analysis of the notion of individuality. Even when this notion was applied to historiography, as in Friedrich Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936), philosophical concerns regarding the hermeneutical applications of historical relativism and the relationship between the individual and the absolute remained of paramount importance.22 Consequently, although German historists rejected the grand Hegelian depiction of the forward process of the Spirit, they continued to favor inquiries into the overall meaning of history over analyses of specific historical environments. Roughly the same can be said of the Italian and British offspring of German Historismus. Historiographical theories such as those presented in Benedetto Croce’s Teoria e storia della storiografia (1917) and Robin George Collingwood’s The Idea of History (posthumous, 1946) were profoundly motivated in philosophical, ideological, and political terms, but had altogether little historical foundation.23 Accordingly, both Collingwood’s theory about the Romantic rise of “historicism” and Croce’s Vichian-Hegelian view on the history of historiography were set aside—around the middle of the twentieth century—by professional historians such as Marc Bloch and Arnaldo Momigliano. Unencumbered by overbearing philosophical preconceptions, Bloch and Momigliano focused their analyses about the rise of critical historiography on the philological-antiquarian culture of mid- and late-seventeenth-century scholars such as Jean Le Clerc, Jean Mabillon, and Jakob Voorbroek (also known as Perizonius).24 The general terms of Bloch’s and Momigliano’s interpretations of seventeenthcentury historical culture have remained mostly uncontested. Yet, some scholars have suggested predating the “origins” of historical criticism to the mid-sixteenth century. In Ginzburg’s words, “the trajectory vigorously argued by Momigliano should be moved up by a century. In the mid-sixteenth century both the crisis of the skeptics and its dissipation as a consequence of antiquarian labors were lucidly formulated.”25 Writing in the early 2010s, Ginzburg’s suggestion was grounded in the past forty years of scholarship. Since the early 1970s, flourishing literature on the artes historicae and, more specifically, on historical criticism has demonstrated without question that, by the mid-sixteenth century, humanists and intellectuals were formalizing critical methods of historical analysis that we may consider truly “modern” (this term being used to mean, “critical,” “relativistic,” “scientific” or—as some may still prefer to say—“historicist”).26 In this case too, while scholars mostly agree on the chronological setting for the emergence of historical criticism, they differ in directing their attention to one or another geographical background. For George Huppert’s The Idea of Perfect History (1970), historical criticism was essentially a French invention.27 A similar view was espoused in Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (1970) by Donald Kelley, who acknowledged, however, the retrospective importance of fifteenth-century Italian philological humanism, which flourished in France thanks to the mediation of early-sixteenth-century exponents of the mos gallicus such as Guillaume Budé and Andrea Alciato.28 According to both Huppert and Kelley, historical criticism found its full expression in works by French authors born from the early 1520s to the early 1540s—authors that included Jacques Cujas, François Baudouin, François Hotman, Étienne Pasquier, Jean Bodin, Pierre Pithou, and Henri La Popelinière. Roughly contemporaneous to Huppert’s and Kelley’s books, other publications on the origins of historical criticism suggested a partially different view. Without denying the crucial importance of the French debate on historical criticism, Eckhard Kessler, Girolamo Cotroneo, and Sergio Bertelli shifted the focus on the sixteenth-century Italian environment.29 As a result, a series of cisalpine proponents of historical criticism entered the scholarly debate. They included Sperone Speroni, Francesco Robortello, Francesco Patrizi, Dionigi Atanagi, Giovanni Antonio Viperano, Famiano Strada, and Agostino Mascardi. In the past fifty years, scholars such as Donald Kelley, Anthony Grafton, and Stefania Tutino have combined Francocentric and Italocentric views, setting them against a larger geographical and cultural backdrop. This allowed them to shed light on the apologetic use of historical criticism in the age of religious reformation—a point also made by Irena Backus in her Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (2003).30 Thanks to these authors, we now have a detailed and nuanced reconstruction of the development of historical criticism in the European sixteenth century. Conversely, little consideration has been given to the possibility that the issues that characterized the sixteenth-century debate on historical criticism might have been discussed—albeit in a less systematic way—in the previous century. Due perhaps to the general emphasis on the political and practical nature of humanist historiography, an important question thus remains unanswered. Namely, is it possible to distinguish a specific theoretical and philosophical conception behind Quattrocento historiography as a whole, in the same way that a specific theoretical and philosophical conception characterized the sixteenth-century debate on the artes historicae? And if so, does Quattrocento historiography have anything to do with the historical emergence of “modern historiography,” understood as a critical approach to historical writing? In other words, did Quattrocento humanists perceive the issues that concerned sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars? And if so, to what extent and in what way? Rather than by scholars of Quattrocento humanism, some hints on answering these questions have been offered by the relatively few authors who, while focusing on the sixteenth-century artes historicae, have called attention to its Quattrocento antecedents. Scholars have accentuated the difference between the fifteenth- and the sixteenth-century environments in terms of systematic organization and historiographical maturity. Kelley, for instance, recognized that Quattrocento authors such as Valla “provided for the first time a philosophical. . .justification for historical scholarship.” However, according to Kelley, this justification only came to be fully understood in the sixteenth century, remaining throughout the fifteenth century “a somewhat make-shift epistemology, serving rather to rationalize the often trivial concerns of the grammarian than to broaden the aims of humanistic studies.”31 By the same token, Grafton has shown that the hermeneutical subtlety of Cano, Baudouin, and Robortello was anticipated in the fifteenth century by humanists such as the Milanese Angelo Decembrio, whose De politia litteraria “evokes both a particular culture of facts—chiefly ancient facts—and a particular modern ability to discriminate among them.”32 Yet, Grafton adds, while humanists like Decembrio posed questions about source criticism that were later relevant for modern, critical historiography, they “did not anticipate all the methodological questions and suggestions to be found in the artes historicae any more than those treatises adumbrated all the bold ideas of Le Clerc and Perizonius.”33 As Grafton reiterates in his What Was History? (2007), in spite of the critical insights that can be found in works by humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino da Verona, and Lorenzo Valla, “none of the best-known fifteenth-century scholars. . .drew up a full set of rules for the assessment of older sources. Baudouin, by contrast, offered three distinct solutions to this problem, each of which drew on a particular scholarly tradition and set of practices.”34 This book does not intend to disprove the aforementioned conclusions. I do not argue that the critical innovations introduced by Quattrocento humanism were normally employed as tools of historical criticism well before they were adopted and adapted by sixteenth-century authors. I do not mean to predate the golden age of historical criticism to the Italian fifteenth century. What I aim to suggest is that, in spite of the eminently political and rhetorical nature of Quattrocento historiography and notwithstanding the unsystematic character of the whole spectrum of the Quattrocento cultural debate, fifteenth-century Italian humanists not only developed an autonomous philosophy of history but were also acutely aware of theoretical questions that were later to characterize modern, critical historiography. As I will demonstrate, such awareness was evidenced by both the theory and the practice of humanist historiography, which were much more closely associated than is usually acknowledged, sharing the same preoccupation with historical truth vis-à-vis verisimilitude and factuality. * * * To illustrate the salient innovative features of Quattrocento historiography, Part I of this book explores the humanist debate on historical truth and verisimilitude. The concept of verisimilitude, as addressed herein, is of crucial importance because the reactions it engendered distinguished two concurrent humanist views that characterized Quattrocento historiography from the time of Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni throughout the fifteenth century. Using a working definition that will be further substantiated and qualified, I refer to these irreconcilable stances as the “Brunian” and the “antiquarian” currents of humanist historiography. While Chapters 1 and 3 scrutinize the distinguishing tenets embraced by authors belonging to the Brunian and the antiquarian current, respectively, Chapter 2 provides an example of the clash between these conceptions by analyzing the famous historiographical quarrel that broke out in the 1440s between Bartolomeo Facio and Lorenzo Valla, who disagreed on the controversial question of whether truthful history should or should not obey the criteria of historical verisimilitude. As I shall demonstrate in the first three chapters of this book, the Brunian and the antiquarian currents differed with regard to most of their guiding principles; yet their fundamental disagreement concerned their attitude toward historical verisimilitude. More specifically, in Chapter 1, I argue that the Brunian current incorporated in its conception of historical truth the account of things that might have not been factually true, being instead verisimilar and hence true to the overall meaning of the recounted events. In doing so, the Brunian current favored the rhetorical aspects of historiographical inventio, emphasizing the interpretative role of historians, who are called to give purpose to history by extracting its meaning from a confusing multitude of facts and events. At variance with the Brunian current, in Chapter 3 I argue that fifteenth-century antiquarians believed in the inherent meaningfulness of facts, independently of historical interpretation. Accordingly, they decidedly rejected the rhetorical-judicial notion of verisimilitude, which they considered as a source of historical falsification. Conversely, they stressed the need for truthful historians to place exclusive attention—at least in principle—on the objective and exhaustive account of sheer facts. The consequences of the divide between Brunian and antiquarian humanists are especially noteworthy given that the notion of verisimilitude was a major requisite for the development of a critical method for assessing the reliability of historical accounts and sources by measuring their inherent credibility or verisimilitude. This corollary of the debate over the historiographical use of verisimilitude is addressed in Part II of this book. Chapters 4 and 5 in particular, illuminate the ways in which humanists thought of historical criticism, in connection with their assumptions regarding the relationship between verisimilitude and truth. In Chapter 4, I show that while principles that anticipate modern historical criticism were developed by the Brunian current in the wake of the classical and medieval tradition of judicial verisimilitude, the antiquarian rejection of verisimilitude resulted in uncritical tendencies shared by late-Quattrocento antiquarians such as Pomponio Leto. The fifteenth-century disconnect between its two paramount historiographical currents ultimately resulted in an apparent paradox. Thanks to its adoption of criteria grounded in verisimilitude, the Brunian current devised critical tools of historical assessment and comparison but lacked a sincere interest in factual truth. Diversely, the antiquarian current displayed a deeply felt concern for factual truth but altogether lacked the methodological tools to develop a bona fide critical approach to history or else understood such an exercise of historical criticism as distinct from history proper. In these terms, I argue, Quattrocento humanists did not fail to turn their critical tools into a systematic method of historical criticism because they were overly preoccupied with the “often trivial concerns of the grammarian,” as Kelley put it, nor because they allegedly saw history as a branch of classical rhetoric. Rather, what really prevented humanists from developing a fully “modern” approach to historical criticism was their failure to compromise between the two main contrasting positions that characterized Quattrocento historiography. In Chapter 5, I analyze the nefarious consequences of this disconnect by looking at the example offered by the infamous historical production of the Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo and, in particular, by his Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII (1498). Putting on the mask of the antiquarian, Annius exploited the inherent critical weaknesses of Quattrocento antiquarianism in order to pass as true a universal historical account that had the mere appearance of factuality, despite being utterly fictitious. The scheme was at least partially successful: Quattrocento antiquarians received Annius’ pseudo-antiquarian forgeries with enthusiasm and until the 1530s criticism of the Antiquitates remained unsystematic, sparse, and far between. Annius’ decline paralleled the development of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury historical criticism. This new stage in the history of scholarship is briefly illustrated in the Conclusion to this book, which insists on the crucial role played by the notion of verisimilitude in the sixteenth-century intellectual environment. Scholars such as Guillaume Budé, Melchor Cano, Jean Bodin, and François Baudouin did not differ from their predecessors in terms of the definition or conception of verisimilitude they espoused. Rather, what set them apart from Quattrocento humanists was their willingness to adopt critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude in the context of a historical inquiry that aimed at unearthing factual truth. Doing so, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors finally succeeded in combining the two main historiographical attitudes that Quattrocento humanists had developed as two irreconcilable methodologies. * * * Before I begin my analysis of Quattrocento historiography, some final considerations are due in order to clarify certain choices I have made in carrying out my research. In addition to the chronological and geographical boundaries of my research, which have led me to concentrate on works produced by Italian humanists throughout the fifteenth century, I have also chosen not to delve into specific themes and genres connected to Quattrocento historical writing. In terms of thematic scope, the vast scholarly production dedicated to the political implications of fifteenth-century historical writing allowed me not to focus on these aspects, which have already been scrutinized by authors including Patrick Baker, Robert Black, Eric W. Cochrane, Fulvio Delle Donne, Giacomo Ferraù, Riccardo Fubini, John Gagné, James Hankins, Gary Ianziti, Angelo Mazzocco, and Massimo Miglio. For the sake of brevity, I have also decided not to include in my analysis a discussion of the specific traits and models that characterize Renaissance vitae. Cochrane rightly called biography a “lateral discipline” in the context of Renaissance historiography—one that “remained independent of all the particular forms of humanist history proper.”35 This does not mean, of course, that in the following chapters I shall not refer to Renaissance biographies at all. On the contrary, I will use biographical works under two main circumstances: when they are relevant—directly or by comparison—to my analysis of works belonging to “history proper” (e.g., Panormita’s De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis), or when, despite their topic, they approximate “history proper” in the choice of models, themes, and purposes (e.g., Pier Candido Decembrio’s Vita Francisci Sfortiae).
Finally, a last word of caution. The inconsiderate application of a priori distinctions to the study of history and philosophy has made us rightly suspicious of the use of general historiographical categories. Therefore, I imagine that my referring to the “Brunian” and the “antiquarian” currents of Quattrocento historiography might not appeal to some of my colleagues. I must stress that I do not mean for these labels to carry any meaning to be imposed a priori on those I assign to one or the other category. Instead, my use of general labels such as “Brunian” and “antiquarian” historiography is merely intended, a posteriori, in order to group together authors who shared similar historiographical convictions.
Humanists whom I consider “Brunian” did not necessarily model their work on Bruni’s example; rather, upon confronting a set of broad historiographical issues they developed solutions that were similar to those first advanced by Bruni, agreeing on historiographical principles that I will describe in Chapter 1. Analogously, as I will argue in Chapter 3, by using the notion of Quattrocento antiquarianism, I do not mean to anachronistically interpret fifteenth-century works through the lens of modern antiquarian science.36 I simply mean to describe a set of historiographical tenets (for instance, the concern with bare factual data and the interest in material objects) that distinguished fifteenth-century antiquarians from “Brunian historians” and later characterized certain aspects of modern antiquarianism. These cumbersome distinctions and qualifications are necessary, I believe, because, in spite of their awkwardness, general labels or categories—when employed a posteriori— are essential to the study of intellectual history. Without them, our research risks being limited to the analysis of monadic individuals, almost unaffected by the general cultural matrix to which they belonged.
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