A History of Histories by John Burrow

Author:John Burrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307268525
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

From Civic Chronicle to Humanist History: Villani, Machiavelli and Guicciardini

The gatecrashing Londoners at the Council of Winchester (above, Chapter 16) were a portent. As cities grew, in wealth and population, and developed corporate institutions for self-regulation, corporate consciousness grew also, and produced record-keeping, just as it did in monasteries. We have looked at conventual chronicles, at national histories presented as the deeds of kings, and at vernacular history as the representation of the deeds of a chivalric warrior aristocracy. Town chronicles, also in the vernacular, came to express a similar self-consciousness, in their case that of the largely unlearned but literate burgesses—the merchants, financiers and employers of labour, chiefly in the various aspects of the cloth industry—who dominated town life. Theirs was sometimes a contentious and divided form of self-assertion, with substantial citizens set against nobles and overlords and also against the lower grades of artisans with their own grievances. There were serious insurrections in the later 1370s and early 1380s in the major centres of population and urban prosperity and power: Paris, London, Ghent and other towns of Flanders, and Florence, which witnessed its first serious rising of the inferior artisans, the ciompi. Town life had flourished in central Italy, and manifested itself in Florence in city chronicles from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onward.

In central and northern Italy some cities became virtually autonomous, essentially city states; the conflicts of popes and emperors, and the primarily German concerns of the latter, made imperial suzerainty increasingly nominal. The result was in some cases, most notably in Venice and Florence, the emergence of a republican form of internal politics and the political fragmentation of Italy into a number of mutually suspicious and hostile states, both of which had implications for the writing of history. This was also to be shaped by the revival of classical learning known as humanism, which from the fifteenth century onward incorporated a close attention to the manner as well as the content of exemplary Roman historians, particularly Livy. But the local situation was not that of the empire, nor of a national kingdom: it was rather that faced by republican Rome, with its early conflicts with the rival states which were its close neighbours, and its growing internecine class conflicts. As the eminent historian of the Renaissance Denys Hay put it, “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Malmesbury, the St. Albans writers down to Matthew Paris, were, whether they knew it or not, writing the history of England…And so, in a less marked fashion, with France. But no works like that can be found in Italy” (The Italian Renaissance, 1977).

But city chronicles proliferated, and from them, in conjunction with the classical revival, emerged in Florence in the fifteenth century a way of writing history much more closely modelled than before on Roman practice, and a new way of reflecting on the lessons of history. It incorporated not merely the conventions of Roman historiography—Greek historical writing was still much less well known, though translations were beginning to be made—but also

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