History’s own history: Renaissance and Enlightenment historiography (Part 3)

By Dimitris Kouvaras,

The Renaissance, a cultural movement that came to classify as an era on the cusp of Late Medieval and Early Modern times, brought about a drastic shift in historiography. It originated in Italy, which had developed a dynamic network of city-states since the 12^th century and become a hotpot for trade, shipping and ideas. Its peak can also be framed in a wider context of developments in the 15^th century, including the beginning of the Discoveries and the invention of print, which revolutionised the dissemination of ideas in central Europe and beyond. The Renaissance brought with it not only admiration for the Greco-Roman civilisation —which came to be “constructed” as a unitary and continuous entity against previous perceptions— but also interest in new fields of knowledge such as philology and physics. The adoption of a human-centred orientation clashed with theocentric medieval thought, which was degraded as inferior and often misunderstood, a stain that has yet to wash away fully.

Nevertheless, religion did play a part in shaping the cultural context of the day, and it was an important one. At the beginning of the 16^th century, Desiderius Erasmus introduced historical research in the Holy Scripture texts to produce his New Testament edition. At the same time, the advents of the Reformations made use of historical evidence to highlight the deviation of the Catholic Church’s practices from those of ancient Christian communities. This form of processing of the past was interlinked with the development of the critical philological method, a textual critique of Greek and Latin manuscripts practised by Classical Philology. This method can be traced to Petrarch in the 14^th century and became a tool for historical inquiry. Lorenzo Valla, a student of Petrarch and a prominent philologist of the 15^th century, used it to prove the forgery behind the Donatio Constantini, a document in which Constantine the Great supposedly offered spiritual and temporal supremacy over the western part of the Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I.

Through archival research, Valla concluded “that there is no mention of an acceptance” of the donation, which, together with linguistic disparities, was “reason for saying that there was no donation”. In fact, the document was not produced until the 8^th century. The critical method revolutionised historical writing by emphasising the examination of sources’ validity and is intertwined with the emergence of the so-called “auxiliary sciences” in history by the 16^th century, including palaeography, chronology and epigraphic. This apparatus was developed parallel to the re-evaluation of classical sources and the preoccupation with classical artefacts, which required interpretation.

Meanwhile, a secularising current in history had already been underway since the 14^th century. At the time, history was limited to biographies of great men of antiquity and focused on providing moral lessons based on their examples. The educative role of history was a fundamental assumption in Renaissance historiography, also present in the work of Nicolo Machiavelli (late 15^th – early 16^th century), a Florentine official and political thinker renowned for “The Prince”. Machiavelli tried to understand Italy’s plunge into war and apparent decay after 1494 in the context of state organisation and political leadership. According to Machiavelli, the ragione di stato, the reason behind a state’s existence, could not be deduced to divine providence, but should be examined based on its political stability throughout history. This was a drastic shift away from religious explanations, with history focusing on people’s intentions and actions instead, including unintended consequences, and offering political guidance to the erudite ruler.

Wise policymaking required accurate knowledge of past policies and their degree of effectiveness, which was the sole criterion for present implementation. History’s mission was to contemplate and offer a variety of ancient exempla, which would then be adjusted to contemporary political experiences. This conceptualisation belies the assumption of a constant human nature and the presence of recurring patterns in history, although it precludes absolute repetition. Successful historical agents had to face their destiny with prudence (prudentia) and possess the ability (virtu) to choose the right time for action (occasione) through historical insight to influence their position against fate (fortuna). The notion of the ripe time for action, prevalent in ancient Greek thought, is a testament to classical influences in the renewed historical thinking of the Renaissance.

Yet, it was not only the Greek and Roman civilisations that had to be incorporated in historiography. By the 17^th century, the Discoveries and the first wave of European empire-building had accumulated knowledge of previously unknown cultures and continents. Pre-Columbian civilisations in the Americas left behind artefacts relating to time measurement and record keeping, many of which were destroyed or dismissed as primitive compared to European ideas. In these cultures, historical thought embraced a multitude of entities, including humans, animals, plants and gods, while information took the form of symbols and paintings. Its religious and ritual functions clashed with the emerging European rationalism and sadly, a lot of historical evidence was lost amidst the imperial loot. Nevertheless, intercultural contact widened the scope of history. Nation-state-based history in the 17^th century started to shift towards universal history and encompass new regions and peoples, often still with providential undertones, while Renaissance emphasis on people now gave way to the consideration of overarching systems.

The 18^th century saw the apogee of these global “histories of mankind”, relating to a famous intellectual movement of the day: the Enlightenment. Under the influence of the Scientific Revolution and the findings of figures, such as Newton and Copernicus, as well as the philosophical empiricism of David Hume, enlightenment thought saw human nature as constant and history’s mission as that of discovering the universal laws of human behaviour through the study of multiple civilisations. Historical studies ceased to prioritise politics and diplomacy as in the Renaissance and turned to the study of cultures, societies and religions, while history acquired a philosophical character.

The new “philosophy of history”, a term coined by Voltaire, aimed at discovering the causes behind great events, while all historical phenomena and events came to be considered part of a particular cause-effect nexus, which human thought could unveil. The goal was to ameliorate the human condition, and the historical process started to be seen by many as a form of progress, in which superior forms of civilisation succeed one another in the form of stages. Voltaire, who wrote histories of India and China, created the first global history of civilisation, believing that reason and science enable one to learn from the “great errors of the past”. Montesquieu, emphasising regularities in history, explained the emergence of institutions through climate, ground fertility, commerce and various other factors, while Edward Gibbon, in his “History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, described a period of decay from Augustus to 1453 in which barbarism spread to Europe not least due to the spread of Christianity, crystallising the negative conception of medieval times.

At the end of the 18^th century, history could not be more different than it was in the 13^th. Besides its widened scope and new methods, the groundwork for turning it into an academic discipline had been set by developments in universities, especially the University of Gottingen, which since 1737 produced its school of historical thought. Progress, source examination, and a global sociocultural orientation underlined the contemporary vision of history, although critical analysis was often missing. However, the tide of the French Revolution in 1789 and the coming of the “century of nation-states” would once again send ripples of change altering the course of historiography.

References

• Cochrane, Eric W. “Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981
• Woolf, Daniel. “A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.