Modern Historical Consciousness Research Articles

Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy

Italy between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries was not a unity in any significant respect, but, perhaps even more than in the preceding age, only a collection of localities differing widely in economic and social structure, political organization, traditions, culture, and speed and direction of development. Profitable discussion of Italian affairs in this period must therefor make careful distinctions of place. This caveat is, indeed, particularly true for the period following the Peace of Bologna, early in 1530, which brought to an end the Italian phase of the Hapsburg-Valois wars; it marked the conclusion of a long ordeal which, however tragic for the peoples of Italy, had at least supplied a common thread for the history of the peninsula. It is thus hardly an accident that after Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia (written between 1537 and 1540, but published only in 1561) there was not another general history of Italy until well into the next century.' Any account of historiography in Italy after the publication of his masterpiece must therefore recognize a variety of tendencies, related for the most part only dialectically, corresponding to the variety among political centers. Each of these had interests and pre-occupations of its own which imposed special requirements on historical composition. Under these circumstances the historiography of three Italian centers assumed particular importance during the later sixteenth century. Although, under the Medici principate, the memory of the republican past was now fading, the contribution of Florentine republicanism to the formation of the modern historical consciousness gives a special interest to historical writing in Florence during this period of radically altered circumstances. Rome invites our attention because of her eagerness to press all forms of cultural expression into the service of the Counter Reformation, as well as by her revitalized commitment to an ecclesiastical and political universalism which