The period stretching from the mid-1500s to the early 1700s constituted the last phase in the piecemeal modification of the traditional historiographical model. In the case of political historiography, stiU the strongest of history’s genres, its uses differed little from those in previous centuries, except that in France the analysis of institutions brought new insights and that some authorities came to distrust the tendency of history writing to open the arcane act of governing to improper observers. Much more important was the beginning of the struggle, still going on today, for history’s place in the house of learning. While Aristotle had separated history from philosophy as the mere study of the contingent and particular, some of those who now redefined the world and the methods for its study wished to deny history any value in comparison to philosophy and the new world of science. Such a challenge inevitably brought about considerable adjustments in historiography.
Historians and politics in France and England. The wars and revolutions which ravaged Europe from the late 1500s to the late 1600s raised questions about the proper order of the body politic. What once had seemed an organically ordered entity, arranged in a stable hierarchy, now became the subject of theoretical treatises and even the target of revolutionary action.
Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History was written in preparation for his great work on politics. The Republic. The profound crisis gripping France between 1550 and 1600 made concerns with proper narration and individuals secondary to the description and analysis of social institutions, customs, and laws. Only that and a comparative history of societies seemed capable of providing the needed answers. Theologians, philosophers, and lawyers also argued over the proper form and power of the state, but while a few of them used history as a quarry for their arguments, most of them preferred ahistorical legal discussions. On their part, historians had no difficulties with the debate because history’s link with politics had been firm ever since Thucydides.
Bodin and other politiques contributed their share to the restoration of a strong France. Then, after the Bourbon monarchs gained control, discussions of political theory lost fervor as well as favor. Historians once more preferred to write elegant histories of France which narrated, glorified, celebrated, but did not question. None was better at it and became more popular for it than Fran9ois Eudes de Mezeray, the royal historiographer. But even he, who kept so many of the rhetorical features, such as speeches, witticisms, and an elegant style, showed in his History of France that new lessons could not be ignored. He paid careful attention to the new criticisms and the discovery of institutional history. The same held true for a work by another royal historiographer, Gabriel Daniel’s History of France. It, however, adulated the king to a much higher degree than Mezeray’s work, a fitting practice for the period of Louis XIV.
After the death of Elizabeth I, English events presented historians with an abundance of material for reflections on politics, what with the Civil War, the Commonwealth, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and finally the constitutional settlement of 1688. But for many years English historians did not engage much in discussions on power and the state since-as Raleigh had put it earlier—“whosoever, in writing a modem history, shall follow the truth too near its heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.”® Isaac Dorislaus, the first holder of Cambridge’s Greville chair of history, found out that lectures on Tacitus with “inappropriate” commentaries brought silencing. In fact, the turbulent events of this period produced not even good narratives, with one exception. Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, who held high office but once and was exiled twice, created out of that experience a History of the Rebellions and Civil Wars. It was finished in 1671 but published only in 1702-4. The author knew the affairs of state, had access to important private documents, and was free of official historiography’s obligations. The reading public loved his work, because in it history writing remained focused on personalities and events, all of them vividly described, and impersonal institutions played only a minor role.
Italian historiography and its muted controversies. After 1559, in the tranquil Italy of principalities, Rorentine historiography lost its vigor. For a brief period historians still reflected on the recent struggles between Medici and republican partisans, but gradually such Rorentine historians as Jacopo Nardi and Jacopo Pitti wrote histories with a longer time-range, until Scipione Ammirato summed it all up in a multivolume set, full of facts, laid out not for easy reading but for reference. With the grand dukes as patrons, some historians led comfortable lives, and historiography was characterized either by livian narrative history or by antiquarian history. Together, the two approaches depicted the totality of life, whether the subject was laws, rituals, buildings, or social relationships. In the main, the concerns of public policy, once the source of great vigor, yielded to those of the private or municipal life.
Neither was the Italy of princely rule and the Counter-Reformation a good host to the contemporary European debate on the nature of the state. Scholarly tradition and a measure of caution pushed that discussion into the arena of rhetoric, where it emerged as the controversy over whether Tacitus or Livy should be the model for historians. The Tacitists were in general anticlerical, opposed to the Catholic church as it had been shaped by the Council of Trent, and sympathetic to lay authority. They considered Tacitus the model for deciphering the arcane art of politics.
Tacitus had slipped into contemporary thought gradually when Machiavelli used him slightly, Bodin and Francesco Patrizi praised him, and Justus lipsius, beginning in the 1570s, made him well known. Authorities, however, distrusted Tacitists even when these scholars, unlike Fran9ois Hotman, downplayed the power of early tribal councils to limit the king’s power or, unlike Paolo Sarpi and Arrigo Davila, did not consider Tacitus as the precursor of a new “realistic” politics.
Those who opposed the Tacitists formed an even more vaguely defined group. Most of them cherished the Ciceronian notion that history could teach the individual valuable lessons and foster virtue. They chose livy as their model.
Livy had supported both the Roman tradition and the new authority of Augustus, much as the anti-Tacitists generally supported the traditional powers—the Roman Curia, Spain, and the new intellectual and religious order of Trent. Their strength rested less on their famous representatives than on the dozens of now nameless scholars who propounded traditional views in books and discourses. The most effective anti-Tacitist center was the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano. One of its famous scholars, Famiano Strada, condemned Tacitus’s description of Roman politics, which blamed the improper motives and machinations of those in power for undermining the respect of subjects for governmental authority and tradition, livy, with his love of stability, tradition, and religion, was seen as a better model for historians. Agostino Mascardi’s Ars hhtorica of 1636 codified that attitude.
In the end it was not the Jesuits’ distrust of Tacitus which mattered but rather their distrust of history as the story of the merely contingent. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1559, the binding curriculum for the numerous and influential Jesuit schools, assigned history no significant role at all. In a Christian version of the Aristotelian view of history’s limited usefulness, the Jesuits gave preference to philosophy, philology, and theology as disciplines centered on the timeless and essential features of faith, and to logic and dialectic as approaches to truth. Historians in Catholic Europe continued to write histories, but they-like those in Protestant countries-were not equal in status to theologians and, later, legal scholars.
The Italian ars historica detefe. A group of sixteenth-century Italian scholars, often referred to as the trattatisti, asked direct questions about the nature and goals of history writing. The modern lack of appreciation for their work stems from the fact that the trattatisti chose to argue the case of history within the traditional confines. Within these limits, where the influence of rhetoric, with its rules for how and what to question, was still strong, history had a clear identity and a theoretical basis that was sufficiently sophisticated to be an are, or “art,” a term best understood here as an accepted intellectual discipline with its own methodology.
The ars historica scholars were, to a degree unusual for historians, professors: Sperone Speroni, Francesco Robortello, Francesco Patrizi, and Alessandro Sardi. Others held public office, such as Giovanni Viperano (a bishop, a historian, and a legal advisor to King Philip II of Spain) and Uberto Foglietta (a lawyer at the Roman Curia and at the court of Savoy). Of Dionigi Atanagi we know only that he was a free-lance poet and poor. These men argued fervently for an ars historica with close links to the ars rhetorica in the manner of Aulus Gellius and Cicero, but Western intellectual development turned their effort into a splendid “last hurrah” of rhetorical historiography and left them among the forgotten losers.
Few of these scholars would have disagreed with Viperano’s dictum that “to write history means to narrate human events in a wise and attractive form; it is a task as difficult and laborious for the historian as it is useful and pleasant for the reader.”® But why should it be written in the first place? “Because it taught moral examples,” said some; “the truth,” said others; none discerned any friction between the two aims. Since any unread truth was ineffective as a lesson, the historian must aim to teach and to delight (docere et delectare). There was nothing to fear from a concern with etocwn'o—that is, colorful word devices, elegant figures of speech, and dramatic exposition—as long as the historian distinguished carefully between facts and rhetorical “additions,” such as speeches, and between effective presentation and partisanship. A history which gracelessly enumerated events (narratio nuda) was a horror, not because it bored people but because it had no effect. A historical work packed with facts served only to satisfy idle curiosity, but this was the type of history that was gaining favor, and not only among antiquaries.
When the trattatisti dealt with the problem of electio—in modern parlance the way to select properly the important data from among the infinite number of past events—they frankly admitted that one could never be quite sure of one’s selection; this was an admission that provided just the right argument to those seventeenth-century scholars who attacked history for its supposed inability to yield certain knowledge. These critics could point, for example, to Foglietta’s statement that the writing of history was an ongoing process and that therefore historical narratives were never verum (true) but at best verax (truthful). Patrizi, a Hatonist for whom truth was the supreme aim of history, not just a subsidiary one, reminded those troubled by the subjective element in the selection process that the only absolute truth available to mankind was the message of Holy Scripture. And Atanagi argued that history’s lessons were sufficiently true to relieve every generation of the need to redesign anew the rules of communal life, true enough to instruct the present by the past, to strengthen religion as the foundation of human civilization, and to free human beings from the fear of change.
History was so potent an instrument for enlightening humans on the affairs of the world that some trattatisti thought it suitable for only a few. Viperano would have barred youths from access to historical accounts because they lacked the wisdom and maturity necessary for such grave matters. Speroni went even further and would have closed all history books to the “people,” since such books contained too much analysis of the working of the state. Knowledge of that kind would disturb the obedience of subjects. Only historians and leaders of communities should be permitted to read history books.
In line with the humanist idea of the relative autonomy of human affairs, the trattatisti never doubted that human events have order and that, except in those cases where God or fortune intervened, human actions were shaped by motives and situations. Would a knowledge of human motives, then, explain history? Patrizi thought so and set out-as many have done since then—to catalogue all possible human motives; he filled the seventh and the eighth of his
Dialogues with just such a list. He, like later compilers, found the list useless in explaining why specific human events occurred and why they turned out the way they did. But in his pursuit of patterns of explanation Patrizi encountered the cycle. It had been revived for all to see when Machiavelli had echoed Polybius’s talk of a cycle of government. While some trattatisti spoke vaguely of the eternal repetition of similar events, Patrizi talked directly about a cultural cycle when he related an old Egyptian and Greek myth, which told how the world had so far been destroyed and “reborn” twice. The first destruction was wrought by war, famine, pestilence, earthquakes, floods, and fires and was followed by a thousand years of chaos, after which God recreated the world. When God had finished his reconstruction, the world moved—by its own dynamics—toward another destruction, and so on.
The trattatisti also pointed with pride to the long line of distinguished historians and their lists of historians even conveyed a sense of development in historiography. Atanagi, for example, noticed a decline in the historical art during the Middle Ages. Patrizi even understood that history writing was influenced intimately by the society in which it occurred, and Viperano proceeded to a critical assessment of some of past historiography. The pride in past achievements and the trattatistVs sincere affection for history were reflected in Atanagi’s resolute statement: “It seems to us that our life without you [history] would not only be poor and of a much diminished scale, but that, while we might still be alive, we might just as well be dead.”1®
The trattatisti had done well by the cause of traditional rhetorical historiography, but the imminent changes in the very structure of learning would outdate their views completely. Historians, who were soon to be forced to counter entirely new ideas on the world and Its structure, would find in the ars historica armory an insufficient supply of intellectual arms.
History and the radical redefinitions of methods and truth. By the seventeenth century the ars historica discussions in the vein of the trattatisti had lost their relevance. The intellectual changes occurring and looming ahead were too radical to be contained within traditional confines. One essential force pushing for change originated in the seemingly conservative world of humanist thought. Humanists had exalted the ancient models as timeless guides but had at the same time evoked a sense of the transient nature of all human creations. Thus, on the basis of the accumulation of knowledge and the confidence derived therefrom, contemporaries eventually began to view the ancient models, too, as the products of just another, although brilliant, phase of human history. In the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns in Western literature, for example, the main arguments were that contemporary works surpassed the ancient ones because the Christian faith gave them nobler subjects and because contemporaries, having come later in human history than the Greeks and the Romans, simply had more knowledge. With growing doubts about the validity of the ancient models and with the fading of scholasticism, interpretations of the world became numerous, limited in scope, and devoid of a generally accepted authority. The confusion of views produced Pyrrhonism, a radical skepticism named after the ancient philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, which despaired of the human ability to gain any certain knowledge either through reason or the senses. Pierre Bayle tried to rescue the possibility of knowledge through the aggregation of “facts,” and earlier in the 1600s, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes had made more ambitious attempts to rebuild the house of knowledge. Although each of these three men ascribed a different role to history, all of them still saw the world in God’s hands. Within that world, however, human phenomena represented a network of forces and bodies whose functioning did not involve God at every step. God planned, created, and governed the world and its events in a general way, but he gave much home rule to human beings. That opened the workings of the autonomous world to exploration and explanation.
For Bacon the quest for truth was no mere endeavor of curiosity; it held the promise of improving the condition of the world, even of restoring it to the condition it had been in before Adam’s Fall. He advocated studying the world by the inductive method. This involved the observation of phenomena, including typical and atypical instances of every event, and then the compilation of insights in order to make possible generalizations. The “experimental philosophy,” with its exclusion of speculation and system building, was quite compatible with the spirit and some of the practice of historiography. Indeed, Bacon had a well-defined place for history in his structure of knowledge (see fig. 12.1).
Figure 12.1
Bacon’s Structure of Knowledge 2 1
History clearly had the limited purpose of bringing together the “factual” material which could be used by philosophers and poets for formulating general insights and lessons. In a thoroughly traditional manner Bacon also kept the writing of history separate from the search for its sources (memorials and antiquities). That explains why his History of the Reign of King Henry VII did not employ his empiricism, which a search for sources could have partially satisfied. Instead it remained a compilation of existing accounts, refashioned in the humanist manner.
Some intellectual kinship with Bacon’s views existed in the ideas propounded by Pierre Bayle late in the seventeenth century. However, his empiricism was considerably more radical than Bacon’s. It centered on “facts,” which Bayle viewed not as the building stones to be fitted into an edifice of generalizations by the method of induction but, rather, as the truth itself. In history “facts” put next to “facts,” not subordinated to each other by induction or deduction, portrayed in their sheer aggregation the human past. Bayle demonstrated the illusions and errors of other ways of historiography, with their overall plans and meanings, in his Historical and Critical Dictionary. Such a view, however, ran counter to the developments of the subsequent two centuries that stressed interpretations of the whole. Only the disenchantment with overall historical explanation in the twentieth century created a favorable climate for a revival of Bayle’s ideas, as in the neopositivist views of history.
Historiography was much less compatible with the views of Bacon’s younger contemporary, Rene Descartes, who anchored his sense of certainty in human consciousness: “I think, therefore I am.” That thinking “I,” a part of the world of the mind, confronted the world of moving, extended bodies. In intellectual inquiries the two worlds encountered each other as the inquiring subject and the investigated object. Such inquiries would yield trustworthy knowledge and certainty if they proceeded from self-evident axioms by way of deductive reasoning and the mathematical method. That process of inquiry fitted the “real” world of abstract substances and causes but not the everyday world of smells, sounds, colors, love, and hate—the very world that historians investigated and found full of phenomena unique, unpredictable, and impervious to such deduction. Instead of using logic and mathematics, which proceeded from a few self-evident principles to more and more detailed insights, historians needed to observe and to interpret.
For such impurity historians were exiled to the fringes of the Cartesian world: to the wasteland of recording trivia and of chronicling the follies of man before Descartes, like Aristotle before him, Descartes expelled history from the haU of philosophy, the place of proper truth and truth-seeking. In effect, he also severed history’s connection with the newly emerging scientific disciplines, which found the mathematical method congenial. What then were historians to do in a Cartesian age?
The erudite answer. Most historians went their accustomed ways unaware of the problems that the new intellectual developments posed. Fortunately, historians without planning to do so, had been formulating over many decades a partial answer to those who doubted the truth of history. The main elements of tliis answer were derived from Italian humanist historiography (a rigorously criti-ciil attitude toward texts and undocumented traditions), French legal history (the importance of primary sources), and antiquarianism (the widening of the repertoire of sources to physical remains, the enlargement of subject matter to institutions and nonpolitical matters, and the cultivation of the ancillary disciplines). The use of at least some of these elements characterized a type of history best called erudite history. The cause of erudite historians is best served if not too much is claimed for them, such as their being protoscientific historians. They demonstrated that since 1400 history had overcome some important strictures of traditional historiography by relying on primary sources, by widening the scope of these sources, and by critically assessing them. When they then kept interpretation to a minimum, the erudite historians could think that they had made historiography impervious to its contemporary critics.
Shortly after 1600 two scholars, who had excelled in antiquarian studies, published their last works; the Frenchman Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s History of His Time and the Englishman William Camden’s Annals of England in the Reign of Elizabeth. Both books were contemporary histories, the last segments of which were withheld from publication until after the death of their authors. English historiography of the early 1600s still existed at the border shared by antiquarianism and erudite history. Sir Robert Cotton went on quietly collecting books, manuscripts, documents. Yet when he not only lent research materials to scholars but also engaged in politics he eventually paid the price of other politically active historians—imprisonment. Controversy also was the fate of John Selden, to whom Cotton’s material was available. Selden, who had absorbed most of the available historical knowledge together with a knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, put all of it to good purpose in his History of Tithes. There he described, with the support of meticulous research, the practice of tithing throughout the centuries as if it were a neutral topic and not one that touched on a vital nerve in the English church. An equally learned man. Sir Henry Spelman, treated other sensitive issues in his various tracts, especially in his History and Fate of Sacrilege. Posthumously published, the work decried the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, an attitude contrary to the prevailing one.
More typically for erudite history, most of Selden’s and Spelman’s works evoked little controversy even though they revised time-honored traditions when they made readers aware that the Norman Conquest in 1066 had brought a distinct change in law and, by implication, in society. Although the two scholars spoke strictly in terms of how specific features had changed and not of a systemwide change, they came close to defining a feudal period in the English past. That made it possible, later, for others to gain a clear sense of development and an appreciation of the Middle Ages. Erudite history, however, became neglected in the decades of turmoil, until the constitutional settlement of 1688 reinvigorated erudition, a revival manifested by the works of Thomas Hearne and signaled above all by Thomas Madox’s The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (1711).
On the Continent a group of erudites chose a surprising topic for a critical historical investigation—the life stories of saints. Such biographies were numerous and, although often contradictory or imaginary in detail, had become, through centuries of pious reading, precious to believers. Now the Bollandists, a line of Jesuit scholars that was to span four centuries, undertook the task of purging these biographies of fanciful elements to make them immune to modern criticism. A young Jesuit professor, Herbert Rosweyde, decided to collect all the source material for each saint, to assess it critically, and then to write well-documented lives of all the saints. The calendar was to guide the sequence of work, beginning with the saints associated with January 1 and ending with those of December 31. After Rosweyde’s death in 1629, John Holland continued the project, gained the necessary material support, and secured the assistance of two excellent scholars, Godefroid Henskens and Daniel van Papenbroek. Thus began the Acta Sanctorum, a collective historical endeavor of unexcelled continuity, intensity, and thoroughness.
After 1670, scholars from the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur also tried to blend piety and the new criticism. Unlike the Bollandists, the Maurists had only a loose work-program centering on a new history of the Benedictine order, the stories of Benedictine saints, and critical editions of some medieval works. Actually, the brilliant Maurists who served the cause of erudition went well beyond that program. Luc D’Achery collected a substantial library and sponsored talented Maurists, among them Jean Mabillon. The latter edited with D’Achery the Acts of the Benedictine Saints and published documents, collections, and a liturgical history. But most important of all for historiography, Mabillon published his De re diplomatica (1681). This was a handbook that contained a summary of his methods of assessing medieval sources—including the internal and external criticisms of documents—and an analysis of and guide to Latin paleography. It became the trusted guide of scholars for nearly two hundred years.
The Maurists’ link to the eigliteenth century was Bernard de Montfaucon, who created the science of Greek paleography, edited works by Greek church fathers, and pioneered in archaeological studies. He and other French scholars were favored by a situation which saw Louis XIV’s France internally peaceful and the church, secure in its position, sympathetic to intensive and prolonged critical scholarly studies. The harvest was rich. Aside from the Maurists’ work, Sebastien Le Nain de TiUemont brought forth an Ecclesiastical History of the
First Six Centuries and then a corresponding History of the Roman Emperors. Etienne Baluze, a fervent Gallican, edited documents from the Frankish kingdom and wrote a history of the Avignon popes. Sieur Du Cange (Charles du Fresne) compiled handbooks for the study of medieval Latin and Greek that proved invaluable to historians.
World History
