Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, by Gary Ianziti.

Abstract

Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, by Gary Ianziti. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2012. xiii, 418 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). According to many scholars of the European Renaissance, Italian humanism was characterized by the emergence of a new historical consciousness which marked a fundamental shift away from the chronicles of the Middle Ages, inaugurating new approaches and methods of studying the past that led directly to modern and, indeed, modernity itself. Nowhere is this shift in paradigm more evident than in the work of the Florentine statesman and scholar, Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444). A man of considerable talent and energy, his prodigious historical scholarship--he authored the famous multi-volume History of the Florentine People (1428), a biography of Cicero (Vita Ciceronis, 1413), and numerous studies of ancient history, including the Commentarium return grecarum (1439), Commentarii de primo bello punico (1418-1422), and De bello italico adversus Gothos (1441)--marks him as one of the greatest and most innovative historians of the early Renaissance. Along with Biondo Flavio (1392-1463) and Lorenzo Valla (1405-57), Bruni was one of the forefathers of modern historical writing. Even if did not quite revolutionize history by establishing it as a modern discipline, Ianziti argues, he set in motion a process of renewal that would lead more or less directly to the achievements of Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the following century (p. 6). Much has been written about Leonardo Bruni, but Gary Ianziti's new study is the most comprehensive and ground-breaking analysis of Bruni's historical work to date. Ianziti's reassessment of Bruni's place in the canon of western European is based on two complementary strategies. On the one hand, Ianziti seeks to recreate the context in which Bruni's historical thought emerged and matured. Bruni was not just a member of the intellectual avant-garde in Florence; was also a politician of great repute. He served the highest level in Italian and European politics (p. 101) as Florence's Chancellor, and also spent a decade in the service of a number of popes during a time of fundamental change in Italian political life and in the evolution of the state. As Ianziti carefully explains, there was a strong connection between Bruni's innovative historical writings, and the emergence of a new type of political culture and statecraft in early Renaissance Florence. Nowhere is this clearer than in his Florentine histories--arguably the first official history of a modern state--which were written during a time of political and social chaos that witnessed the demise of the oligarchy and the rise of the Medici. Not surprisingly, Bruni's historical writings were at once more secular and ideological than previous works, served a clear political agenda, and represented what the author refers to as a new public historiography (p. 308). On the other hand, Ianziti engages in a close, meticulous textual analysis of Bruni's extensive written work, one which is inseparable from the Florentine context and which is ultimately the greatest strength of Ianziti's work. …