HISTORIOGRAPHY. — The exposition of the whole of human events in their concrete configuration within the spatio-temporal coordinates.
I. **GREECE and ROME.** — In 6th-century BC Greece, a first form of historiographical consciousness may be identified, that is, a reconsideration and evaluation of history. This is revealed in Ionia (the culturally most advanced region) through the critique of the mythical world (whose most characteristic representative is Hecataeus), which constitutes an element distinguishing Greek historiography from the Eastern tradition; though this critique is limited in scope, being intended merely as a correction of traditional data, eliminating from it whatever contradicted the truth established by philosophical or naturalistic inquiry, or by direct personal observation, or by verification against the most reliable accounts. Moreover, there is an insatiable curiosity about the surrounding reality, which first manifests itself within the narrow limits of ethnographic-geographical description (the "logographers"), later expanding through early attempts at local histories and biographies into the broad canvas of Herodotus, where ethnographic interest is deliberately subordinated to the background, while a war, its distant origins, and its complex unfolding become the central theme. Finally, with Thucydides, all ethnographic residue having been burned away, another war—the Peloponnesian—becomes the subject of the historian’s passionate investigation, and, framed as it is in the conflict of two political systems, almost serves as a guiding thread for Greek history.
Between the realm of myth, subjected to the critique of tradition, and that of pure contemporary history, naturally open to comprehension, Herodotus identified an intermediate zone, of uncertain character, too recent to be subjected to critical revision yet too distant from the present to allow pragmatic understanding. Toward this zone the historian directs his attention in order to preserve its memory and to immortalize its glories. Thus he places himself, both chronologically and ideally, between Hecataeus and Thucydides, characterizing a third fundamental direction of Greek historiography. Indeed, the encomiastic character implicit in this approach would grow increasingly prevalent, as the ethical-rhetorical attitude in judging human actions—derived from Isocrates—spread through historiography after Thucydides. The works of Xenophon, Theopompus, and Callisthenes, influenced by this master, are synchronous histories (and even those who turned to the past—Philistus, Ephorus, Anaximenes—gave their narratives, as they approached their own time, broader dimensions), but within them operates an ethical-rhetorical conception in which Herodotean and Isocratean motifs converge, of which Theopompus is the most evident example. On the one hand, contemporary political ideals resolutely enter historiography, becoming interpretive and evaluative tools for the past, casting equivocal light of praise and blame upon it; on the other, interest—just as in practical and speculative fields—concentrates on individual personalities: from the anonymous history of two constitutions in Thucydides, we arrive at Theopompus’ Philippics, a vast framework for the history of one man. The desire—typically rhetorical—to hold the reader’s attention enriches the narrative with extravagant and fantastic details, but renders the boundaries between history and thesis-driven historical fiction quite uncertain, as already seen in Xenophon’s *Cyropaedia*.
When the vision expands from the *πλοῦς* to Greek civilization as a whole, and then to other peoples, and when analysis deepens into the characteristics of peoples and the humanity of individuals, the limits between the real and the imaginary blur: Callisthenes, Onesicritus, and Clitarchus create a biography of Alexander that is already, in embryo, a novel. Others (Aristobulus, Nearchus, Hieronymus of Cardia, etc.) will react against this tendency, but their concern for rigorous adherence to observed and known reality results in an exaggerated formal simplicity that diminishes their effectiveness.
By reconnecting with the strictest memorialistic tradition and the ideal of the “practical historian” that informed it, Polybius creates a historiography that, beyond rhetorical falsifications and chronological narrowness, grasps in their concrete form the political transformations and military events; with him, history recognizes its true center in Rome and becomes cosmopolitan history. Yet Polybius’ pragmatic vision is compelled to explain human events through the intervention of *τύχη*, fortune—a force both irrational and transcendent. Even though his successor, Posidonius, will attempt to reintroduce this force into the historical process as “fury” (*θυμός*), antithetical to *logos*, reason, yet driving events alongside it, and even though he sees barbarians as the embodiment of this “fury,” including them—thus rendering the framework more rigorous—within the scope of cosmopolitan history, in these two historians the transition from historiography to teleological reflection, to the philosophy of history, is already implied.
After Posidonius, Greek historiographical activity lives on the past without revealing original motifs: Theopompus, Posidonius, Xenophon, and above all Thucydides remain the great models; those who seek to react against the ever-flourishing rhetorical historiography turn to Thucydides, and he is present, as are the best Greek historiographical experiences, in Lucian’s *How to Write History*. The finest products of late Greek historiography arise from contacts with the Roman world, but the reciprocal relations of influence and dependence with Roman historiography have not yet been clarified. Polybius’ effort toward a pragmatic understanding of the Roman world finds continuators; the *Lives* of Plutarch, the most notable product of the imperial age, are at once an attempt to uphold the Greek world in relation to Rome and a recognition of the moral values of the latter.
The origins of Roman historiography are to be traced in the primitive pontifical records, in domestic traditions, and in popular memory linked to monuments, festivals, and folk songs. Yet the chronicle-style recording constitutes a kind of “prehistory” of Roman historiography, which arises from its overcoming. Its effort will therefore be directed toward transcending the annalistic framework, even in cases where it is formally accepted. Another fundamental trait of Roman historiography is its close relationship with Greek historiography: a relationship of mutual dependence and influence whose development is difficult to define throughout the pre-Livian production, of which several significant testimonies remain.
The earliest historical works seem to have been written in Greek for a twofold reason: first, under the influence of their models, and second, because they aimed to recount the history of the city more for Greeks than for Romans. Cato the Censor, who reacted violently against this historiography in a foreign language and for foreigners, nonetheless employed two Greek literary genres—the history of city foundations and contemporary history—to combat II. This shows that his critique was directed chiefly at the linguistic form and the narrative, that is, the annalistic, structure of that production. Since Cato’s work is lost, nothing can be said about the methods he intended to use in the *Origines* to gather, as if into a single corpus, the legendary archaic material on the individual cities of the peninsula, or about the ways in which he may have overcome the traditional arrangement when writing of his own time. Yet one can discern in him an attitude that would remain a constant feature of Roman historiography: the refusal to name the actors in the events he narrated, because the true agent of those events was the Roman people. This is an indication of a political passion that does not take pleasure in the objective consideration and exposition of facts but revives them with the spirit of one who participates directly in the events narrated. The constant presence of the “virtue” and “majesty” of the people as historical forces in the narration of their own deeds constitutes the perennial and suggestive charm of Roman historiography.
Hence the pronounced moralism on the one hand, and on the other the rhetorical character—so clearly defined by Cicero—as its informing principle; hence its connection, beyond the formal imitation of Thucydides, with the rhetorical-political historiography of the Hellenistic age. Yet this rhetoric does not consist, as in its more debased aspects, in an unjustified distortion of facts, but rather in their organization according to a context that reflects the writer’s sentiment toward them.
A history of Roman historiography can only be written on the basis of what survives, and it becomes a judgment on the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus, in which the attitude outlined above is revealed and modulated in different tones.
Thus Sallust turns to Thucydides and Cato as witnesses to an ancient austere virtue that he sees submerged by corruption and disappearing in the society of his time; Caesar identifies himself with the interests of the Roman people and transfers to the facts he narrates the clarity of design and the sure touch that characterized his political actions; Livy unfolds the history (or epic?) not of Rome but of its greatness or virtue, under the constant, looming threat of corrupting devastation; and finally Tacitus, in his bitter and unflinching analysis of the figures and designs of the tyrannical emperors, documents the desolating absence of those civic ideals, that original *virtus*, which he transfers—whether as a warning or as despair—into the barbarians of Germany. Each of them judges above all as a citizen, a citizen in whom is embodied the entire ideal patrimony and spirit of the Roman state. The impression of comprehending within oneself the reasons and ideals of this state, to make them a criterion of historical interpretation, is the sign of the decline of Roman historiography after Tacitus. Already to him the world of the provinces eluded him; to his contemporary Suetonius, history appears organized and confined within a series of imperial biographies, and as such it is handed down to continuators and reworkers whose labors culminate in the *Historia Augusta* of the fourth century CE; and even here the boundaries with the novel become quite uncertain. In the fourth century Ammianus Marcellinus, an Antiochene officer who seeks to infuse, in a continuation of Tacitus, that sense of Latinity recovered through military tradition and bookish experience, creates a singular work in which Roman historiographical thought fuses with Eastern suggestions. The epitomes of Livy and similar compilations, which become ever more frequent, are utterly devoid of thought, save for the single merit of preserving the sense of the unitary development of Roman history.
Meanwhile, Christian thought of the early centuries elaborates the seeds of a new historiographical vision, and in the *Ecclesiastical History* of Eusebius it represents the moment when the Church, opposing itself to the state, makes of its own history a self-contained narrative. But “the true work that opens and dominates the Middle Ages is the *City of God* 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 earthly city and the heavenly city” (A. Momigliano).
II. MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
With St Augustine, in fact, the historian was invited to consider not the vicissitudes of individual political organisms or aggregates, but those of humanity, operating through time, manifesting itself in a dramatic alternative of good and evil in individual empires. History became a moral problem, a drama of human conscience, and this problem and this drama became interpretative criteria of history itself. This vision was framed within schemes that underlie all medieval thought: the scheme of the six ages of the world, corresponding to the six days of creation or to the various ages of man, and the other, intertwined with the first, of the four monarchies (Assyrians and Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Diadochi, Romans), which Isidore of Seville and Bede would later give a precise chronological determination. Moreover, it is to the profound and lasting influence of Augustine that we must trace the sense of continuity between the new age and the Roman Empire (whose providential function in preparing for the advent of Christ he had celebrated); a sense that prevented the exact perception of the deep changes taking place among the peoples and that linked the Christian Empire of the 10th–12th centuries to the ancient one, despite their differences, by means of the formula of *translatio*. The great Augustinian construction would not survive intact in the writers who, in the following centuries, drew inspiration from it, simplifying and vulgarising its motifs, fragmenting its architecture. The sense of the dramatic conflict between the earthly and the heavenly, the thread of human events, would, for example, be transformed into the minute, occasional moralistic gloss inserted into the narrative. Yet some of the fundamental concepts of Augustinian thought continually resurface, constituting almost the constant characteristics of medieval historiography: the predominance of the moral-religious element in historical judgment (evil in history arises from human sins, especially the oldest and most deeply rooted, pride); peace as the supreme good for man on earth, yet only a pale image of the true peace, that of eternal life; the creation of the two types of the *rex iustus* and the *tyrannus*, to which the great protagonists would constantly be assimilated, resulting in a uniform stylisation of the intellectual and moral traits of individual characters, in contrast to the care taken to identify external particularities. Placed at the centre not only of the consideration of the present but also of the vision of the past, the problem of salvation reduced historical research to the subordinate role of handmaid to theological and moral speculation; and as such it assumed, within the hierarchy of the arts and sciences, that uncertain character which had been its own in antiquity, now *magistra vitae*, now *fabula*. By this route, and by the more direct one of the persistent fortune enjoyed by certain Roman historians (Suetonius, Justin, Eutropius), the influence of the ancient world, alongside the Christian-Augustinian influence, continued to operate; and this was evident both in the external modelling of countless *Vitae* and *Gesta* on Suetonius’ work and in the more general effort to approach, in tone and narrative style, the texts taken as models.This second influence was, in many respects, predominant in the historiography of the 6th–9th centuries: even though it is clear that the spiritual climate was different from that of pagan historians, the marked interest in political events and certain characteristics of the narrative lead back to them. Augustinian motifs, and even the moralistic stance, are absent in Paul the Deacon’s *Historia Langobardorum*, or remain in the background; for him, history is above all a fine tale, in which reality is veiled by a legendary tone, rich especially in epic-chivalric motifs: he admires his heroes complacently, and is still curious about what strikes him in the surrounding world. The radical wickedness of the earthly city is entirely 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 being an exaltation of a layman and of emphasising human factors in the events narrated reveals the suggestive power of the ancient model; on the other hand, his inability to fuse, in the portrait, physical characteristics with moral and spiritual ones already becomes evident. The picture becomes more complex in later historiography: on the one hand, the ability to grasp particular men and things, to represent certain aspects of reality “realistically,” and at times to judge political events with acuity grows sharper; on the other — and perhaps in the same person, as in Liutprand of Cremona — the religious-moral note likewise intensifies, recourse to the designs and judgments of Providence in explaining events and to moral reflections in judging them becomes more frequent. 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, is the object of the narrative; and this narrative sometimes even loses sight of the intrinsic sinfulness of human action, and at other times takes on a nascent national pride. The character of pure and simple testimony and recording of facts grows stronger in such works, while the task of giving them a value judgment shifts to the rich political pamphleteering that grew up around the problem of the relationship between regnum and sacerdotium, and so rich in new insights and presentiments. It is precisely within such pamphleteering, in fact, that the new conception begins to take shape and clarify itself, seeing human events articulated not in
The contrast between the earthly city and the heavenly city is now defined more clearly in the contrast between Church and State. This new conception matures in parallel within the pamphleteering of the Libelli and in the historiographical output of the nascent Annales, Vita, and Chronica concerning the Investiture Controversy. For historians, the central problem now becomes that of the relationship between Church and State, two institutions that, despite their otherworldly foundation, present themselves in earthly form and act in entirely human ways and terms. This makes possible a new unitary synthesis of world history, based on Augustinian principles, in the work of Otto of Freising (v. 1): but Otto’s *Civitas Dei*, insofar as it can still exist on earth, encompasses both Church and Empire together; and of the Empire, which through the *translatio* has become the Teutonic, its greatness is deeply felt and its mission ardently claimed. This curious intertwining of Augustinian conceptions with the imperial idea is, at once, the culmination of medieval historiography and a symptom of a new, profound crisis.
Alongside a revival and deepening of the concept of history as the unfolding of spiritual values—original but yielding little fruit—there emerges, in the chroniclers, a growing sense of national feeling, already present to some extent in Otto of Freising’s emotional engagement with the fortunes of his Empire. Above all in Norman historiography, we see the idea of a divine mission entrusted not to a universal power but to a state, to a particular nation; we see the city, its glories and its vicissitudes, take on the role of protagonist in municipal history, especially in Italy. In the production of the 13th and early 14th centuries, municipal pride soon intertwines with factional spirit; people take sides for the Guelph or the Ghibelline party, defending either the free communal regime or the emerging seigneurial power. The great universalistic ideas fade ever more into the background; in the concrete political reality that now stands at the center of historical treatment, the interplay of forces is increasingly discerned in its human components. When the vision broadens again beyond the city or regional sphere, the subject of narrative is at most the fortunes—and political fortunes—of Italy (A. Mussato, F. de’ Ferreti). This national character is accentuated, particularly in Italian historiography, by the use of the vernacular; yet this does not signify a rejection of classical tradition, nor the eclipse of Rome’s compelling idea, but rather its rethinking in new terms. Rome is above all the *caput Italiae*; the Roman tradition is seen as the root of the new municipal reality, and its republican moment is accordingly reevaluated at the expense of the imperial. Conversely, with regard to the more recent past, aversion and suspicion of decline grow stronger, and ever graver reservations are leveled against the glorification of the Empire. Thus the eschatological faith in an otherworldly conclusion to history is steadily eroded, in the sense that confidence grows in humanity’s ability to create, through its own efforts, better times; and among some (Villani) the conviction takes hold that, despite everything, the affairs of the world were going well. This confidence and conviction led the historian to focus ever more exclusively on human action in its earthly setting.
The ties between 14th-century Italian chroniclers and their predecessors are not, however, entirely severed; a whole series of traditional motifs persists in their works alongside the new ferment: a certain stylization in the portrayal of political strife, whose fundamental—and undifferentiated—motive remained human pride, and a vein of moralism of which Dino Compagni is the most notable exponent. Such links with the past are far more evident in historiography beyond the Alps. Here, too, the collapse of universalistic conceptions had strengthened the sense of national particularity, which was further accentuated by the adoption of the vernacular. Notable witnesses to this new trend in France between the 13th and 14th centuries are Villehardouin and Joinville. Yet the spiritual world reflected here differed markedly from that of Italy: while in Italy the emerging bourgeois world encouraged seeing in history—as in daily life—the effects of human reasoning and action, across the Alps, in a society still grounded in a chivalric-religious ethos and at the height of its splendor, a heroic-adventurous spirit passed from life into history.
Italian historiography of the 15th and 16th centuries, however, effected a profound revolution in the criteria of judgment and the overall attitude toward human events—a revolution that underpins modern historiography.
The return to the Latin form does not represent, as might at first appear, a loss of freshness or representational power. The cult of beautiful form, the vigilant attention to style that characterizes this—as well as 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 need to reconcile the demands of truthfulness with those of narrative efficacy—a problem that recurs from now on in historiographical thought. This awareness also results in a greater theoretical dignity for *historia* compared to the other arts, a first step toward its establishment as an absolutely autonomous discipline. The renewed admiration for Rome is not merely formal but extends to an admiring consideration of the spiritual and moral forces that animated it, and of the political organism it created. Moreover, this admiration for such an earthly *civitas* had been freed from any theological justification; it had neither metaphysical premises nor ends. The meditation and judgment of its events from this purely earthly perspective enriched the already lively political realism of communal and seigneurial historiography, broadening its scope and confirming its validity (L. Bruni, P. Bracciolini, F. Biondo). Finally, a more refined critical sense, first cultivated within the field of classical scholarship (philology and archaeology)—which humanism itself had helped to found—was applied to the study of more recent history. Though a systematic methodology was still lacking, judgment became more assured and the ability to distinguish the credible from the fantastic grew keener. A consequence of this critical spirit was the effort to gather the broadest possible documentation, to study not only chronicle material but also documentary sources—a practice that, from the second generation of humanist historians (Giustiniani, Sabellico, Simonetta, Calchi, Pontano), passed into such figures as Sleidan and Zurita. In Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the first great historians of the modern world, all these “new” motifs reach full maturity after long gestation, leading to the confinement of history within purely human boundaries, from which any providential intervention seems excluded—or at least not invoked to explain events.
The historian no longer needs, as if to clarify the meaning and direction of history, to retrace it entirely from its most distant origins, but only to illustrate, within more restricted chronological limits and in all its living richness, a specific moment of civic or national history. This marks the end of the Augustinian conception: there is no general principle for explaining the world; each event contains within itself its own explanation, and the historian’s interest is exhausted in identifying and clarifying the interests and passions that gave it life. For Machiavelli, every state and every people follows its own fatal cycle of development, from birth to death; yet each of these cycles is self-contained and distinct, not articulated by an eternal, divine law governing history—each fragment lives on its own. The only common bond between the various ages and cycles is the unchanging nature of human impulses and passions; a shared destiny for societies is to traverse the aforementioned cycle. These are the premises from which Machiavelli proceeds to affirm the possibility of a “lesson from antiquity,” that is, a pragmatic value of history. Yet this value does not restore unity to history, for the “lesson” is not inherent in the very unfolding of human events but is instead drawn only from certain events, selected by the historian.
Guicciardini, in whom historical sensibility and adherence to the concrete were more acute, denies any value to the “lesson”: every historical event is “particular,” an unmistakable and unrepeatable individuality, and thus a problem unto itself. With this, the Renaissance reached its discovery—the sense of “historical individuality,” the sense of history as human creation whose individual moments each constitute a complete event in themselves. Christian-medieval thought had emphasized the element of “continuity” in the historical process, focusing more on the “value” of individual events in relation to what came before and after; Renaissance thought, by contrast, highlighted the element of “momentariness” and “particularity,” concentrating on the single event while neglecting its significance for universal development. The attempt to reconcile these two fundamental demands of historical thought would become a constant preoccupation of the modern era.
The merely empirical concept of historical individuality that animates these writers leads them, however, to focus almost exclusively on human figures and personalities, on the individuals around whom the entire narrative revolves. In this lies the limitation of their approach, which overlooks both the value of moral forces and ideas and the influence of economic and environmental factors in historical development. In the strictly “political” history they offer, few forces and basic instincts drive the entire mechanism: war and diplomacy, the clash of parties, the succession of governments are the almost exclusive “times” of the narrative. What this historiography loses in reconstructive capacity, it regains in descriptive efficacy, precision of judgment, and power of characterization. The “lesson” of Florentine historiography of the early 1500s becomes exemplary for subsequent historiography through the 1600s, guiding writers across Europe—directly or through Italian treatments of events in other countries, which assume paradigmatic value.
Meanwhile, a similar need had led—with the decline of the state and the religious-chivalric ideal—historiography in other directions toward analogous positions. The work of the Frenchman Commynes at the end of the 15th century is likewise a vigilant portrayal of a purely political reality, though with less decisive rejection of providential interventions and within a narrative form still largely “medieval” in many respects.
The new historiographical direction also influenced the historical-polemical production of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras. If religious history now becomes the central focus of historical consideration—if, as shown in the Magdeburg Centuries, it could serve as the guiding thread for a new universal history—it nonetheless does not escape a process of “politicization.” The perspectives remain unchanged: the same method, mentality, and concerns that animated 16th-century Florentine historiography are transferred from political problems to ecclesiastical questions; these too are examined and discussed alongside the former in political terms, as is evident even in the most significant figures of this current, Sarpi and his opponent Pallavicino. In this literature, where historical and controversial elements are inextricably intertwined, humanistic criticism is applied to religious history, and the demand for extensive documentation of one’s claims becomes urgent. In the first direction, the Centuriators made early, unsuccessful attempts; in the second, the monumental *Annales* of Baronius represent an important moment in the formation of an erudite tradition.
III. MODERN ERA — At the dawn of the modern age, the landscape of historiographical production becomes more complex; only its main directions can be schematically outlined. By the early 18th century, the divorce from the humanistic conception of history is evident in two principal ways: the extension of “criticism” to ancient historians, who had been unquestioned authorities in earlier thought, and the application of empirical method to historical research. The phase of gathering and verifying factual data—drawn from sources, especially documentary ones—takes precedence over their literary reworking. This immense labor of research and verification, initially confined to ecclesiastical history (Maurists, Bollandists), expands into literary and political history, while the so-called auxiliary sciences (paleography, chronology, diplomatics) refine their methods.
The vast new material brought to light, spurred by other immediate interests, also calls for a move beyond purely political history: customs, culture, moral life, and past institutions are investigated. Yet there arises a pressing need to trace a unifying principle that allows the myriad facts to be organized into a coherent design. Here, Vico’s solitary meditation asserts the necessary integration of philological research and philosophical interpretation of data, offering a comprehensive vision of human events in which Providence operates through the collective forces of “nations.” The prevailing tendency of the 18th century, however, is one that sees history progressing in a straight line from barbarism to a state of reason. This leads to a devaluation and misunderstanding of past values, which, precisely as past, are judged a surpassed and unworthy moment in human development. This developmental process is always viewed in a schematic and naturalistic manner: the effort is to give meaning to universal history through a wholly secular “philosophy of history.”
Individual historians, however, offer other points of interest. In depicting the age of Louis XIV, Voltaire abolishes every annalistic scheme and seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the life of a state; Robertson offers the first unified treatment of the history of European states; Gibbon seeks to clarify the reasons for the fall and decline of the Roman Empire and for the rise of Christianity.
The Romantic reaction against Enlightenment thought also influenced historical thinking: Herder theorized, against the abstract concept of humanity posited by the Enlightenment, the harmonious operation in history of a plurality of nations, organic, irreducible individualities, according to a mysterious unitary plan arranged by Providence. The “nation” thus became the center of historical consideration, which now tended to reconstruct the phases and developments of this nation, of its “spirit,” both vertically through time and horizontally across all spheres of human activity—economy, literature, law and institutions, folklore. Moreover, the contemporary problems of individual nations in various ways provided a continuous stimulus to historiographical activity, prompting inquiry into their historical “precedents” and offering occasion to identify in the past issues that were still being debated in the present.
The Hegelian system spread the concept of a dialectic immanent in history itself: ideas are the forces at work within it, and their conflict is the engine of reality; history is in fact a phase of the cosmic process by which the Spirit, having lost itself in nature, regains its own self-awareness. The application of these principles to historiographical activity made the connections between individual events and the links between different periods clearer, but it risked hardening the living variety of reality into overly rigid schemas and reducing it to an extreme simplicity. Hence, a reaction arose among philologists, for whom history was above all the elucidation of individual facts through the aid of an ever more refined methodology. The first approach emphasized the need for synthesis, the second for analysis; the balance between critical method and narrative synthesis would be achieved only by Ranke, to whom we owe the consequential assertion that the historian’s task is to understand and narrate how things actually happened, without judging or taking sides.
For the time being, however, the political issues of the day guided European historians in their choice of themes and manner of treatment: German historians were intent on tracing in the past the various manifestations of the “German national spirit,” or else, in light of this principle, rewove the history of the Hellenic peoples; French historians saw in the history of their country the rise of the Third Estate and in its development the inescapable premise of the revolutionary outcome, and they rewrote the history of the French Revolution to highlight what they judged to be its indelible achievements and to uncover the deep motivations of their present stance; in Italy, thanks especially to the Neoguelf historians, the Middle Ages were rediscovered as the epic moment of the Italian nation, and its institutions, spiritual life, and social structures were investigated. In England, the conflicts between Whigs and Tories passed from the political plane to the historiographical one, infusing new insights into the interpretation of the nation’s modern history.
The crisis of 1848 opened up new prospects for historical studies, and a reconsideration of the past in light of new experiences followed the revision of ideals; greater attention was paid to social questions. The antithesis between bourgeois liberalism and radical democracy shifted from the political plane to that of historical reconstruction, especially in French scholarship; in Germany, different orientations regarding the solution to the national question exerted their influence both in the framing and judgment of certain fundamental problems of the ancient world (the Macedonian and Roman Empires) and in the treatment of the history of the Germanic peoples. Yet in this most lively and problem-rich historical scholarship in Europe, there was a growing weariness with approaches centered on the problem of the state, evident both in Burckhardt’s evasion toward a reconstruction of the Renaissance chiefly as a moment in the history of civilization and as a celebration of individualism, and in the contrast between a cultural history (*Kulturgeschichte*) and the dominant state-centered history (*Staatsgeschichte*).
At the same time, Catholic historiography broke free from polemical and controversial positions, reweaving the internal and external history of the Church and Catholic culture with modern methods and sensibilities.
Yet a deeper weariness ran through the field of historical studies in the last decades of the 19th century. The spread of positivist doctrine reinforced the never-dormant opposition of philologists to incursions of grand conceptions into what they regarded as the domain of minute, circumstantial research. Historical activity now reduced itself to the editing of documents and chronicles, to inquiries into “sources,” and to the preparation of ever more reliable and comprehensive materials for a future, still uncertain synthesis—envisioned, by analogy with the natural sciences, as the sum of the greatest possible number of “scientifically” verified facts. History, understood as the reconstruction of a moment in the life of humanity, thus degenerated into erudition: individuality, the unity of a period, a figure, a nation, or a state—all the great themes of historical research—disappeared, fragmented into an infinity of uncoordinated special studies.
After the attempt to restore meaning, direction, and unity to research through the schemas of positivist sociology had failed, the crisis was addressed by historical materialism and historicism, understood in the broadest sense: the first encompassing all research that sought to use the data gathered by erudite philology to reconstruct the economic and social aspects of human history (studies on population, social classes, agricultural, industrial, and banking activity, production, prices); the second embracing the effort, common to much scholarship of the early 20th century, to integrate and surpass such reconstructions of reality by reaffirming the value of ideas, ideal forces, and ethical-religious life. These tendencies should not be seen as absolutely opposed or without reciprocal influence; they reopened, on the historiographical plane, the profound problem of the relationship between necessity and freedom in human action.
BIBL.:
Manitius, Gesch. der latein. Liter. des Mittelal., 3 voll., Munich 1911-31 (up to and including the 12th century); cf. also J. De Ghellinck, L’essor de la littérature latine au XIIe siècle, Brussels-Paris 1948. The following volumes supplement the above for individual nations: W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts, 6th ed., 2 vols., Berlin 1893-96; O. Lorenz, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit der Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts, 3rd ed., 2 vols., Berlin 1886-87; A. Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France des origines aux guerres d’Italie, 6 vols., Paris 1901-1906; U. Balzani, Le cronache italiane del Medio Evo, 3rd ed., Milan 1909; A. Sanchez Alonso, Historia de la historiografía española, I, Madrid 1947. Cf. also L. J. Paetow, A Guide to the Study of Medieval History, New York 1931. On the influence of Augustinian doctrines: P. Brezzi, La concezione agostiniana della “Città di Dio,” Galatina 1947. Further: J. Spörl, Grundformen mittelalterlicher Geschichtsanschauung, Munich 1932; B. Schmeidler, Italienische Geschichtschreiber des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1909; A. Del Monte, La scuola fiorentina dei secc. XII e XIII, in Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 62 (1930), pp. 175-282.
On the Renaissance: E. Fueter, Storia della storiografia moderna, trans. it., 2 vols., Naples 1944; in particular, B. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti, Florence 1920; H. Baron, Das Erwachen des historischen Denkens im Humanismus des Quattrocento, in Historische Zeitschrift, 147 (1932), pp. 3-20; B. L. Ullmann, L. Bruni and the humanistic historiography, in Medioevo e Umanesimo, 4 (1946), pp. 43-61; E. Garin, Il concetto della storia nel pensiero del Rinuccini, in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia italiana, 6 (1951), pp. 128-18.
On the modern age: besides Fueter, op. cit., add A. Brandi, Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft (1310-1514), Bonn 1947, and for certain major themes of the same: A. Rein, Das Problem der europäischen Expansion in der Geschichtsschreibung, Hamburg 1929; W. Rehm, Der Untergang Roms im abendländischen Denken, Leipzig 1930; G. Ritter, La polemica sul Medio Evo, Turin 1933; F. Meinecke, L’idea della ragion di Stato nella storia moderna, trans. it., 2 vols., Florence 1942-44; W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Boston 1948.
On the 18th century: F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols., Munich-Berlin 1936.
On the 19th century: G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, new ed., London 1952.
On the most recent trends cf.: Historiens et historiens depuis cinquante ans (1876-1916), 2 vols., Paris 1928; E. Valsecchi, Di alcune correnti della più recente storiografia tedesca, in Rivista storica italiana, 4th ser., 2 (1934), pp. 86-140; M. Petrocchi, L’uomo e la storia, Bologna 1944; the reports of the VIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Paris 1940, and the IXth Congress, I (Rapports) and II (Actes), Paris 1950-51; C. Antoni, Dallo storicismo alla sociologia, 2nd ed., Florence 1951.
See also the cross-reference: V. chiesa, IV. La storiografia della Chiesa. Francesco Natale