Historiography

HISTORIOGRAPHY. - The exposition of the complex of human events in their concrete configuration within spatio-temporal coordinates.

I. GREECE and ROME

In the Greece of the 6th century B.C. a first form of historiographical consciousness can be fixed, that is, a rethinking, an evaluation of history. This reveals itself in Ionia (the culturally most advanced zone) with the criticism of the mythical world (whose most characteristic representative is Hecataeus), which constitutes a characterizing element of Greek h. as opposed to Oriental h.; a criticism understood, however (and in this lies its limitation), only as a rectification of the traditional datum, an elimination within it of whatever might conflict with the truth ascertained by another route: by means of philosophical or naturalistic inquiry; or the direct experience of things personally seen, or checked against the most reliable versions. And, further, with an avid curiosity toward the surrounding reality, concretized first within the narrow limits of ethnographic-geographic description (the "logographers"), then widening, through the first attempts at local histories and biographies, into the broad Herodian fresco, where ethnographic interest is slowly pushed back into the background, while a war, its distant roots, its complex unfolding, rise to become the principal theme. Until in Thucydides, with every ethnographic residue burned away, once again a war, that of the Peloponnese, is the problem on which the historian's passionate inquiry converges, and which, identified in the clash of two political forms, becomes, as it were, the guiding thread of Greek history. Between the zone of myth on which the criticism of tradition operates and that of pure contemporary history naturally open to comprehension, Herodotus has identified an intermediate one, of uncertain physiognomy, too recent to be subjected to a critical revision, yet too distant from the present to make possible a pragmatic comprehension of it; toward this the historian turns his attention in order to preserve its memory, to recall its glories. He thus places, chronologically and ideally, himself and his work between Hecataeus and Thucydides, characterizing a third fundamental direction of Greek h. Indeed the encomiastic character that it implies will come to assume in this an ever more prevalent importance, with the spread, in h. after Thucydides, of an ethical-rhetorical attitude, in the judgment of human works, of Isocratean derivation. The work of a Xenophon, of a Theopompus, of a Callisthenes is indeed, through the influence of the master, synchronous history (and even those who turn to the past - Philistus, Ephorus, Anaximenes - give their narrative, as they approach their own time, broader dimensions), but an ethical-rhetorical conception is also at work in them, in which the Herodian and Isocratean motives flow together, and of which Theopompus is the most evident example. On the one hand, contemporary political ideals pass resolutely into h., become motives for the interpretation and judgment of the past, upon which they cast the equivocal light of praises and censures; on the other, interest - as happened in the practical and in the speculative field - becomes increasingly concentrated on individual personalities: from the "almost anonymous history of two constitutions," that of Thucydides, one arrives at the Philippics of Theopompus, a vast framework for the history of a single man. The desire - typically rhetorical - to keep attention alive enriches the narrative with extravagant and fantastic particulars, but renders quite uncertain the boundaries between it and the historical novel with a thesis, as already in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon. If the vision widens from the πόλις to Greek civilization as a whole, and then to other peoples, if it deepens in the analysis of the characteristics of peoples, and of the humanity of individuals, the limits between real and imaginary fall: Callisthenes, Onesicritus, Cleitarchus create a biography of Alexander that is already, in nuce, a novel. Others (Aristobulus, Nearchus, Hieronymus of Cardia, etc.) will react to this tendency, but their concern for a rigorous adherence to the reality of things seen and known resolves itself into an exasperated formal simplicity, which diminishes its effectiveness. Linking himself to the most rigorous memoir-writing, to the ideal of the "practical historian" by which he was informed, Polybius creates an h. that, beyond rhetorical falsifications and chronicle-like narrowness, grasps in their concrete physiognomy political transformations and military events; with him history recognizes its true center, Rome, and becomes cosmopolitan history. Polybius's pragmatic vision, however, is constrained to explain human events by means of the intervention of τύχη, fortune, an irrational and transcendent force. Even if his continuator, Posidonius, will seek to reintroduce this force into the historical process, as "fury" (θυμός), antithetical to logos, reason, but with it the motor of events, and, seeing the barbarians as the incarnation of this "fury," will include them, rendering it more rigorous, within the framework of cosmopolitan history, in these two historians the passage from h. to teleological reflection, to the philosophy of history, is already implicit. After Posidonius, Greek historiographical activity lives on the past, without revealing original motives: Theopompus, Posidonius, Xenophon, and above all Thucydides remain the great models; those who wish to react against the ever-flourishing rhetorical h. turn to Thucydides, and he is well present, like the best Greek historiographical experiences, in Lucian's How History Should Be Written. The best products of late Greek h. are born from contacts with the Roman world, but the relations of influence and mutual dependence with Roman h. are not yet clarified. The Polybian effort toward a pragmatic comprehension of the Roman world has its continuators; the Lives of Plutarch, the most notable product of the imperial age, are at once an effort to hold the Greek world high in relation to the Roman, and a recognition of the moral values of the latter.

The beginnings of Roman historiography are to be traced in the primitive pontifical records, in family traditions, in the popular memory bound to monuments, festivals, and folk songs. But chronicle-style recording constitutes a sort of "prehistory" of Roman historiography, which is born from its overcoming. Its effort will therefore be to go beyond the annalistic scheme, even in cases where this is formally accepted. Another fundamental characteristic of Roman historiography is its close relationship with Greek historiography: a relationship of dependence and mutual influence whose vicissitudes are difficult to define for the whole of pre-Livian production, of which several significant testimonies remain. The most ancient annals seem to have been written in Greek for a twofold reason: through the influence of their models and because they were intended to trace the history of the city more for the Greeks than for the Romans; Cato the Censor, who violently reacted against this historiography in a foreign language and for foreigners, nevertheless made use of two Greek literary genres — the history of city foundations and contemporary history — in order to combat it: a sign that his criticism was aimed above all at the linguistic and narrative form, that is, the annalistic form, of that production. Since Cato's work is lost, nothing can be said about the methods with which, in the Origines, he intended to gather, almost into a single corpus, the archaic legendary material concerning the individual cities of the peninsula, or about the ways in which he was able, in writing of his own time, to overcome the traditional arrangement. But one can discern in him an attitude that would remain a constant characteristic of Roman historiography: the refusal to provide the names of the actors of the events he narrated, because the true actor of them was the Roman people; an indication of a political passion that is not appeased in the objective consideration and exposition of the fact, but makes it live again with the spirit of one who participates directly in the things narrated. The continual presence of the "virtue" and the "majesty" of the people, as historical forces, in the narration of its vicissitudes constitutes the perennial and evocative fascination of Roman historiography.

From this derives the resolute moralism, on the one hand, and on the other the rhetorical character, so clearly defined by Cicero, that informs it; from this derives its linking, beyond the formal imitation of Thucydides, to the rhetorical-political historiography of the Hellenistic age. But the rhetorical quality does not consist, as in the more debased aspects of that historiography, in an unjustified deformation of the facts, so much as in an organization of them according to a context responding to the writer's feeling before them. A history of Roman historiography can nevertheless be given only of what has remained to us, and it converts into a judgment of the work of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus, in which the attitude outlined above reveals itself and modulates itself in different tones.

And so Sallust turns back to Thucydides and Cato as witnesses of an ancient austere virtue that he sees, submerged by corruption, disappearing in the society of his time; so Caesar identifies himself with the interests of the Roman people and transfers, in his memoirs, to the events narrated that lucidity of design and that sure touch that characterized his political action; so Livy sets forth the history (or the epic?) not of Rome, but of its greatness or virtue, under the continual, looming threat of devastating corruption; so, finally, Tacitus, in his bitter, pitiless analysis of the figures and designs of the tyrant emperors, documents the desolating absence of those civic ideals, of that original virtus which he transfers — as a warning or in despair — to the barbarians of Germany. And each of them judges above all as a citizen, and a citizen in whom is incarnated the whole ideal heritage, the spirit of the Roman State. The impossibility of comprehending within oneself the reasons and ideals of this State, so as to make them the criterion of historical interpretation, is the sign of the decadence of Roman historiography after Tacitus. Already to him the world of the provinces was escaping; to his contemporary Suetonius history appears organized and enclosed in a series of imperial biographies, and as such it is handed down to the continuators and reworkers whose work flows into the Historia Augusta of the 4th century A.D.: and here too the boundaries with the novel become very uncertain. In the 4th century Ammianus Marcellinus, an officer who wishes to transfuse, in a continuation of Tacitus, that sense of a Latinity recovered from military tradition and from bookish experiences, creates a singular work in which Roman historiographical thought merges with Oriental suggestions. An absolute poverty of thought characterizes the Livian epitomes and the analogous compilations that become ever more frequent, with the sole merit of preserving the sense of the unitary development of the history of Rome.

Meanwhile the Christian thought of the first centuries elaborates the seeds of a new historiographical vision, and in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius it represents the moment in which the Church, setting itself against the State, makes of its vicissitudes a history complete in itself. But "the true work that opens and dominates the Middle Ages is the De civitate Dei of St. Augustine,... because it poses and resolves the new problem that arose from the dissolution of the ancient political world: that of the relationship between the civitas terrena and the civitas caelestis" (A. Momigliano).

II. MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

With St. Augustine, in fact, the historian was invited to consider not the vicissitudes of individual organisms or political aggregates, but that of "humanity," operating through the ages, manifesting itself, in a dramatic alternation of good and evil, in individual empires. History became a moral problem, a drama of human conscience, and this problem and this drama became the interpretive criterion of it. This vision was framed within schemas that lie at the foundation of all medieval historiography: the schema of the six ages of the world, corresponding to the six days of creation, or to the various ages of man; the other, which was interwoven with the first, of the four monarchies (Assyrians and Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Diadochi, Romans), to which Isidore of Seville and Bede would later give a precise chronological determination. And again to the profound and lasting influence of Augustine is to be traced the sense of continuity between the new era and the Roman Empire (whose providential function of preparation for the advent of Christ he had celebrated); a sense that prevents the exact perception of the profound changes that had taken place among peoples and that links the Christian Empire of the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries to the ancient one, though so different from it, by means of the formula of translatio. The great Augustinian construction would not remain intact in the writers who, in the succeeding centuries, would draw inspiration from it, simplifying and popularizing its motifs, shattering its architecture. The sense of the dramatic conflict between the earthly and the heavenly, the fabric of human vicissitudes, would be transformed, for example, into the minute, sporadic moralistic marginal note inserted into the narrative. Nevertheless some of the fundamental concepts of Augustinian thought continually resurface, constituting almost the characteristic constants of medieval historiography: the predominance of the moral-religious element in historical judgment ("evil" in history is born from the sins of men, above all from the most ancient and deep-rooted, pride); pax as the supreme good for man on this earth, and yet only a pale image of true peace, that of eternal life; the creation of the two types of the rex iustus and the tyrannus to which the great protagonists will be constantly assimilated, with the result of a uniform stylization of the intellectual and moral characters of individual personages, in contrast with the care taken to identify their external particularities. Placed at the center not only of the consideration of the present but also of the vision of the past, the problem of salvation, historical research was reduced to the subordinate role of ancilla of theological and moral speculation; and as such it assumed, in the hierarchy of the arts and sciences, that uncertain character that was proper to it in ancient times, now magistra vitae, now fabula. In this way, and through the other more direct way of the persistent fortune enjoyed by certain Roman historians (Suetonius, Justin, Eutropius), there thus operated, alongside the Christian-Augustinian influence, the undiminished one of the ancient world; and it became evident both in the external modeling of the innumerable Vitae and Gesta on the Suetonian work, and in the more general effort to approach, in the tones and modes of narration, the texts taken as models.

This second influence is indeed, in many respects, prevalent in the historiography of the 6th-9th centuries: even if one perceives that the spiritual climate is different from that of the "pagan" historians, the marked interest in the political fact, and certain characteristics of the narrative, lead back to them. The Augustinian motifs, and even the moralistic attitude, are absent in Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum, or remain in the background; history is still, for him, above all a fine tale, in which reality is veiled by a legendary tone, rich, above all, in epic-chivalric motifs: he admires his heroes with complacency, and curiously notes what strikes him in the surrounding world. The radical wickedness of the civitas terrena is totally forgotten. And in Einhard's Vita Karoli Magni not only is the exaltation of the rex iustus conducted along clear Suetonian lines, but the very fact of its being the exaltation of a layman and of placing the accent on human factors in the narrated events reveals the suggestive force of the ancient model; on the other hand, there is already evident in him the inability to fuse, in the portrait, physical characteristics with moral and spiritual ones. More complex is the picture of later historiography: on the one hand, the capacity to grasp particular men and things, to represent "realistically" individual aspects of reality, to judge certain political events with acuity, becomes more vivid and more acute; on the other — and perhaps in the same person, as in Liutprand of Cremona — the religious-moralistic note is likewise accentuated, recourse to the designs and judgments of Providence becomes more frequent in motivating events, and to moral reflections in judging them. Indeed it is this note alone that documents the "Christianity" of the chronicler, now that the universal dimension of the Augustinian framework has been lost, and a kingdom, an emperor, a region or a city, a monastery, are the object of the narrative; and this narrative sometimes loses even the awareness of the intrinsic sinfulness of human action, and at other times is tinged with an incipient national pride. In such production, the character of pure and simple testimony and registration of facts is accentuated, while the task of giving them a judgment of value is being transferred into the rich political polemical literature that grew up around the problem of the relations between regnum and sacerdotium, and thus rich in new insights and presentiments. It is precisely within such polemical literature, in fact, that the new conception is being delineated and clarified, which sees human history articulated not in the contrast between the earthly city and the heavenly city, but in the far more clearly defined one between Church and State. This new conception matured in parallel in the polemical literature of the Libelli and in the historiographical production of Annales, Vitae, Chronicae arising out of the investiture struggle. The central problem, for historians, is now that of the relations between Church and State, two institutions which, even in their otherworldly foundation, present themselves in earthly form and act in ways and terms that are entirely human. This makes possible a new unitary synthesis of world history; on Augustinian foundations, in the work of Otto of Freising (v.): but Otto's Civitas Dei, insofar as it can be realized on earth, comprises Church and Empire together; and of the Imperium, which had become, through the translatio, Teutonicum, the greatness is profoundly felt and its mission vigorously asserted. This curious interweaving of Augustinian conceptions with the imperial idea is at once the point of arrival of medieval historiography and the symptom of a new and profound crisis. Alongside a revival and deepening of the concept of history as the unfolding of spiritual values, original but scant in fruits, there is gaining strength, in the chroniclers, the national sentiment, already present, within certain limits, in Otto of Freising's moved participation in the vicissitudes of his Empire. Here we see, especially in Norman historiography, the idea of a divine mission entrusted no longer to a universal power but to a State, to a particular nation; here we see the city, its glories and its vicissitudes, assuming the role of protagonist in municipal historiography, especially Italian. To municipal pride there is soon interwoven, in the production of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the spirit of faction; one takes sides for the Guelph or the Ghibelline party, in defense of the free communal government or of the new seigneurial power in the process of asserting itself; the great universalistic ideas grow ever paler in the background; in the concrete political reality that is now at the center of historical treatment, the play of forces is ever better identified in its human components. When the vision widens again beyond the city or regional sphere, the object of the narrative is at most the vicissitudes — and political vicissitudes — of "Italy" (A. Mussato, F. de' Ferreti). This "national" character is accentuated, especially in Italian historiography, by the use of the vernacular; but all this does not mean a repudiation of the classical tradition, the twilight of the suggestive force of the idea of Rome, but rather its rethinking in new terms. Rome is above all caput Italiae, the Roman tradition is considered the root of the new municipal reality, and its republican moment is therefore revalued, to the detriment of the imperial one; on the contrary, with regard to the more recent past, aversion and the suspicion of a decline are accentuated, and ever graver reservations are placed upon the glorification of the Empire. Thus the eschatological faith in an otherworldly conclusion of history is ever more attenuated, in the sense that confidence grows in man's possibilities of creating, by his own forces, better times, and the conviction makes headway in some (Villani) that, despite everything, the things of the world were going well: a confidence and conviction that make the historian ever more exclusively attentive to man's action in his earthly school. The ties between the Italian chroniclers of the fourteenth century and their predecessors are not, however, entirely cut; a whole series of traditional motifs coexists, in their treatments, with the new ferment: a certain stylization in the picture of political disputes, whose fundamental — and undifferentiated — motif remained human pride, and a vein of moralism of which Dino Compagni is the most conspicuous example. Such ties with the past are far more evident in historiography beyond the Alps. Here too, from the collapse of universalistic conceptions, the sense of national particularity had emerged strengthened, and was accentuated by the adoption of the vernaculars: notable testimonies to the new direction, in France, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are Villehardouin and Joinville. In the latter, however, there was mirrored a spiritual world quite different from the Italian one; whereas here, the nascent bourgeois world urged one to see in history, as in daily life, the effects of human reasoning and action, in the society beyond the Alps, still governed by a chivalric-religious basis and then at the height of its splendor, a heroic-adventurous sense passed from life to permeate history.

Italian historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the other hand, works a profound revolution in what are the criteria of judgment and the overall attitude toward human vicissitudes, a revolution that is at the basis of modern historiography.

The return to the Latin form does not represent a loss of freshness and representational capacity, as it would seem at first sight; the cult of beautiful form, the vigilant attention to style that characterizes this, as the other manifestations of humanism, the admiration for Livy, the new model, and for Cicero (the theorist of history as opus oratorium maxime) lead to an awareness of the artistic character of the historical work, and of the necessity of a reconciliation between the requirement of truthfulness and that of effectiveness in the narrative; which is a recurring problem, from then on, in historiographical thought. This awareness is moreover resolved into a greater theoretical dignity of historia with respect to the other arts, a first step toward its constituting itself as an absolutely autonomous discipline. The renewed cult of Rome is not merely formal, but extends to the admiring consideration of the spiritual and moral motifs that had had life in it, of the political organism it had created. The admiration for such an earthly civitas, moreover, had freed itself from every theological justification, had neither metaphysical premises nor ends. The meditation upon and judgment of its vicissitudes from this purely terrestrial angle of vision enriched that vigilant sense of political reality already alive in the historiography of the communal and seigneurial age, broadened its breath, confirmed its validity (L. Bruni, P. Bracciolini, F. Biondo). Finally, a more refined critical sense, matured first within the sphere of that science of antiquity (philology and archaeology) which owes its foundation precisely to humanism, is applied to the study of the more recent past; although a systematic methodology is still lacking, judgment becomes more sure, the capacity to discern the acceptable from the fantastic, more ready. A consequence of this critical spirit is the effort to procure the widest possible documentation, to study, alongside the chronicle material, the documentary material, which from the second generation of humanist historians (Giustiniani, Sabellico, Simonetta, Calchi, Pontano) passes over into a Sleidan, into a Zurita. In Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the first great historians of the modern world, all these "new" motifs reach full maturity, after long travail, leading to the closing of history within its purely human boundaries, from which every providential intervention seems excluded, or, at least, in which such intervention is not invoked to explain its events.

The historian must no longer, as if to clarify the meaning and direction of history, retrace it all from its most distant origins, but only illustrate within narrower chronological limits, in all its living richness, a specific moment of civic or national history. It is the end of the Augustinian conception: there is no general principle for explaining the world, every event has its explanation within itself, and the historian's interest is exhausted in identifying and clarifying the human interests and passions that gave it life. Every State, every people, for Machiavelli, follows its own fatal cycle of development, from birth to death; but each of these cycles is in itself concluded, clearly distinct from every other, and does not articulate itself from an eternal, divine law governing history: every fragment lives for itself. The only common bond between the various ages and the various cycles is given by the immutability of man's impulses and passions; common destiny of the various societies is their having to pass through the aforementioned cycle; these are the premises from which Machiavelli starts in order to affirm the possibility of a "lesson of ancient things," that is, of a pragmatic value of history. Such value does not, however, reconstitute its unity, since the "lesson" is not inherent in the very unfolding of human facts, but is entrusted only to some of them, chosen by the historian. Guicciardini, in whom historical sensibility and adherence to the concrete were more exacerbated, denies the "lesson" any value: every historical fact is "particular," is an unmistakable and unrepeatable individuality, is, therefore, a problem unto itself: with this the Renaissance reached its discovery, that is, the sense of "historical individuality," the sense of history as human creation whose individual moments constitute, each in itself, a complete event. Christian-medieval thought had identified in the historical process the element of "continuity," had paid attention, more than to individual facts, to their "value" with respect to a "before" and an "after"; the Renaissance one emphasized, in the same process, the element of "momentariness," "particularity," concentrated on the consideration of the single fact, neglecting its significance for universal development. The attempt to reconcile these two fundamental demands of historical thought will be the constant preoccupation of modern historiography. The merely empirical concept of historical individuality, which animates such writers, leads them, however, to center their attention almost exclusively on the human figure and personality, on the single individuals around whom the entire narrative moves: herein lies the limit of their historiography, which escapes both the value of moral forces and ideas and the influence of economic and environmental factors in historical development. In the rigorously "political" history that they offer, few forces, few elementary instincts, move the whole game: war and diplomacy, the clash of parties, the succession of governments are the almost exclusive "themes" of the narrative. What this historiography lost in possibility of historical reconstruction, it regained, however, in effectiveness of description, in precision of judgment, in capacity for characterization. The "lesson" of Florentine historiography of the early 16th century becomes exemplary for subsequent historiography down to the entire 17th century, and guides the hand of writers throughout a good part of Europe, whether directly or through the treatment, by Italians, of the events of other countries, a treatment that assumes paradigmatic value. On the other hand, an analogous demand had brought — with the decline of the State and of the religious-chivalric ideal — historiography beyond the Alps to similar positions: the work of the Frenchman Commynes, at the end of the 15th century, is also a vigilant picture of a purely political reality, even if with less decisiveness in rejecting providential interventions, and within a narrative form in many respects still "medieval." The new historiographical direction also influences the historical-polemical production of the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. If religious history now becomes the center of historical consideration, if it — as the Magdeburg Centuries show — could become the guiding thread of a new universal history, it does not, however, escape a process of "politicization." The perspectives do not change: the same method, the same mentality, the same preoccupations that animated the Florentine historiography of the 16th century are transferred from political problems to ecclesiastical questions; and these too are considered and discussed, alongside the former, in political terms, as is evident even in the most significant figures of this current, Sarpi and his adversary, Pallavicino. With such literature, in which the historical element and the controversialistic one are inextricably confused, humanistic criticism is applied to religious history and the demand becomes alive for the same documentation for one's own affirmations: in the first direction, the Centuriators make the first, unhappy attempts; in the second, the monumental Annales of Baronio constitute an important moment in the formation of an erudite tradition.

III. MODERN AGE

At the opening of the modern age, the picture of historiographical production becomes more complex: one can indicate, schematizing them, only its main directions. At the beginning of the 18th century, the divorce from the humanistic conception of history becomes evident principally in two ways: the extension of "criticism" to the ancient historians, undisputed authorities in previous thought, and the application of the empirical method to historical research. The moment of collecting and checking the facts — offered by the sources, and especially by documentary ones — becomes predominant over that of their literary reworking. This enormous labor of research and verification, at first limited to the sphere of ecclesiastical history (Maurists, Bollandists), extends to literary and political history, while the so-called auxiliary sciences (paleography, chronology, diplomatics) go on refining their methods. The very rich material that came to light prompts, also under the impulse of other immediate interests, an overcoming of purely political history: the customs, the culture, the moral life, the institutions of the past are investigated: but there also becomes alive the need to trace a vivifying principle that allows the myriad of facts to organize themselves according to a coherent design: here is Vico's solitary meditation asserting the necessary integration of philological research and philosophical interpretation of the datum, and offering a comprehensive vision of human vicissitudes in which Providence operates through the collective forces of the "nations." The prevailing tendency of the 18th century is nevertheless the one that sees history moving, in a rectilinear progress, from barbarism to the state of reason: this leads to a devaluation and misunderstanding of the values of the past which, precisely as such, is esteemed as a surpassed moment, not worthy of consideration, of human development. And this process of development is always seen in a schematic and naturalistic manner: the effort is to give meaning to universal history by means of a "philosophy of history" that is entirely secular. Individual historians nevertheless offer other suggestions worthy of interest: tracing the picture of the age of Louis XIV, Voltaire abolishes every annalistic scheme and seeks to give a comprehensive picture of the life of a State; Robertson offers the first unified treatment of the history of the European States; Gibbon seeks to clarify for himself the reasons for the fall and decline of the Roman Empire, and those for the establishment of Christianity.

The Romantic reaction to Enlightenment thought also influences historical thought: Herder theorizes, against the abstract human race postulated by the latter, the harmonious operation in history of a plurality of nations, organic, irreducible individualities, according to a mysterious unitary plan disposed by Providence. The "nation" thus becomes the center of historical consideration, which now tends to reconstruct its phases and developments, its "spirit," both through the ages, vertically, and horizontally, in all the zones of human activity: economy, literature, law and institutions, folklore. Not only that, but the current problems of individual nations constitute in many respects a continuous stimulus to historiographical activity, in the sense of prompting inquiry into their historical "precedents" and of offering an occasion to identify in the past questions agitated in the present. The Hegelian system spreads the concept of a dialectic immanent in history itself: ideas are the forces operating in it, in their conflict lies the motor of reality; history is indeed a phase of the cosmic process, whereby the Spirit, having lost itself in nature, recovers its own awareness. The application of such principles to historiographical activity makes the connections between individual facts, the links between individual periods, appear clearer, but risks stiffening the living variety of the real within overly rigid schemes, of simplifying it to the extreme. There arises, therefore, an ever more alive reaction on the part of the philologists, for whom history is above all clarification of the individual fact by means of the aids of an ever more refined methodology. The first attitude posed the need for synthesis, the second that for analysis: the balance between critical method and narrative synthesis will be achieved only by Ranke, to whom is owed the assertion, pregnant with consequences for the future, that the historian's task is to understand and narrate how things happened, without judging, without taking sides. For the moment, however, the political questions of the day direct European historiography in the choice of themes and in the manner of treating them: German historians are intent on tracing in the past the various manifestations of the German "national spirit," or else in the light of this principle reweave the history of the Hellenic peoples; French historians see in the history of their country the rise of the Third Estate and in its development the ineliminable premise of the revolutionary outcome, and they rewrite the history of the French Revolution in order to distill its conquests, in their judgment indelible, and to trace therein the profound motivations of their present attitude; in Italy, especially through the merit of the Neo-Guelph historians, the Middle Ages are rediscovered, as an epic moment of the Italian nation, its institutions, its spiritual and social life are investigated. The contrasts between whigs and tories pass in England from the political plane to the historiographical one, animating with new suggestions the interpretation of the nation's vicissitudes in the modern age. The crisis of '48 opens new perspectives for historiography; to the revision of ideals there follows a reconsideration of the past in the light of new experiences: broader attention is given to social questions. The antithesis between bourgeois liberalism and radical democracy is transferred from the political plane to that of the reconstruction of the past, especially in French production; on German production there operate the different orientations concerning the solution of the national problem, which project their influences both in the field of the framing and judgment of certain fundamental problems of the ancient world (the Macedonian Empire, the Roman one) and in the treatment of the history of the Germanic people. There is felt, however, in this historiography — the most alive and richest in problems in Europe — a weariness toward framings centered on the problem of the State, evident both in the Burckhardtian evasion toward a reconstruction of the Renaissance above all as a moment of the history of civilization, and as a celebration of individualism, and in the counterposing of a Kulturgeschichte to the prevailing Staatgeschichte. In the same period Catholic historiography frees itself from polemical and controversialist positions, reweaving with modern methods and sensibility the internal and external history of the Church and of Catholic culture.

But a deeper weariness runs through the field of historical studies in the last decades of the 19th century. The spread of the positivist creed lends strong support to the never-extinguished opposition of philologists toward the intrusions of general conceptions into what for them was only the field of a minute, circumstantial investigation. The historian's activity is now reduced to the editing of documents and chronicles, to inquiries into "sources," to the preparation of ever more reliable and ever more complete materials for a future and highly problematic synthesis, understood, by analogy with the natural sciences, as the sum of the greatest possible number of facts "scientifically" ascertained. Historiography, understood as the reconstruction of a moment in the life of humanity, thus declined into erudition: individuality, the unity of a period, of a figure, of a nation, of a State, all the great themes of historical research disappeared, broken up into an infinity of particular investigations without coordination. Once the attempt to restore a meaning, an orientation to research, a unity to investigations through the schemas of positivist sociology had failed, the overcoming of the crisis is attempted by historical materialism and by historicism, understood in the broadest possible sense: including in the first direction all the research that attends to the utilization of the data gathered by erudite philology for the reconstruction of the economic-social aspects of human history (studies on population, on social classes, on agricultural, industrial, and banking activity, on production, on prices); and in the second, that effort, common to somewhat all of 20th-century historiography, to integrate and surpass such a reconstruction of reality by reaffirming the value of ideas, of ideal forces, of ethical-religious life. Tendencies that are not to be considered in absolute opposition, and without mutual influences, and that re-pose, on the historiographical plane, the grave problem of the relations between necessity and freedom in human action.

Manitius, Gesch. der latein. Liter. des Mittelalts., 3 vols., Munich 1911-31 (up to the whole of the 12th century); cf. also J. De Ghellinck, L'essor de la littérature. lat. au XIIe siècle, II, Brussels-Paris 1946. They supplement the preceding volumes for the individual nations: W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelal. bis zur Mitte des XIII. Jahrh., 6th ed., vols. 2, Berlin 1893-96; O. Lorenz, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelal. seit der Mitte des XIII. Jahrh., 3rd ed., 2 vols., Berlin 1886-87; A. Moliner, Les sources de l'hist. de France des orig. aux guerres d'Italie, vols. 6, Paris 1901-1906; U. Balzani, Le cronache ital. del Medio Evo, 3rd ed., Milan 1909; A. Sanchez Alonso, Hist. de la historiogr. española, I, Madrid 1947. Cf. also L. J. Paetow, A guide to the study of mediaeval hist., New York 1931. On the influence of Augustinian doctrines, P. Brezzi, La concez. agostin. della città di Dio, Galatina 1947. Furthermore: J. Spörl, Grundformen buchmittelalterl. Geschichtsanschauung, Munich 1935; B. Schmedler, Italien. Geschichtsschreiber des XII. und XIII. Jahrh., Leipzig 1909; A. Del Monte, La s. fiorentina del sec. XII e XIII. in Bull. dell'Ist. Stor. Ital. per il Medio Evo, 62 (1930), pp. 175-282. Renaissance historiography: E. Fueter, Storia della s. mod., Italian trans., 2 vols., Naples 1944; in particular, R. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti, Florence 1920; H. Baron, Das Erwachen des histor. Denkens im Humanismus des Quattro., in Hist. Zeitschr., 147 (1932), pp. 3-20; B. L. Ullmann, L. Bruni and the humanistic historiogr., in Mediev. et Human., 4 (1946), pp. 45-61; E. Gann, Il concetto della star. del pensiero del Rinascimento, in Riv. crit. di stor. della filosofia italiana, 6 (1951), pp. 108-18. Modern historiography: to Fueter, op. cit., add K. Brandi, Gesch. der Geschichtswiss. (1900-1914), Bonn 1947, and for certain "great themes" of that historiography: A. Rein, Das Problem der europäischen Expansion in der Geschichtsschreibung, Hamburg 1929; W. Rehm, Der Untergang Roms im abendl. Denken, Leipzig 1930; G. Faleo, La polemica sul Medio Evo, Turin 1933; F. Meinecke, L'idea della ragion di Stato nella storia moderna, Italian trans., 2 vols., Florence 1942-44; W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in History, Thought, Boston 1948. For the 18th century: F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols., Munich-Berlin 1936; For the 19th century: G. P. Gooch, Hist. und historien in the nineteenth Century, new ed., London 1952. For the most recent trends cf. Hist. et historien depuis cinquante ans (1876-1926), 2 vols., Paris 1928; E. Valsecchi, Di alcune correnti della più recente s. red., in Riv. stor. it., 4th series, 5 (1934), pp. 86-140; M. Petrecchi, L'uomo e la storia, Bologna 1944; the Actes du XVIIIe Congrès Intern. des Sciences Histor., Paris 1940, and IXe Congrès Intern. des Sciences Histor., I (Rapports) and II (Actes), Paris 1950-51; C. Antoni, Dallo storicismo alla sociologia, 2nd ed., Florence 1951. See also the v. CHIESA, IV, La storiografia della Chiesa.

Francesco Natale