Humanistic Historiography Under the Sforzas

Humanistic Historiography Under the Sforzas
Author: Gary Ianziti
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN:

Seeking to establish the city of Milan as a major center of Renaissance Italian humanism, this book explores the methods, concerns, and attitudes that influenced the humanist approach to the writing of history there. Ianziti focuses on the two works about Francesco Sforza written by his chancery employees, Crivelli and Simonetta, and considers the radical and innovative features of their work that evolved in response to a specific set of political circumstances. This unique focus provides not only a convincing argument for the evolution of humanist methods of historical writing in the latter half of the 15th century, but also a fresh look at the relationship between politics and culture in the Renaissance.

Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle

Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle
Author: Christian Thorsten Callisen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317071298

Featuring work by researchers in the fields of early modern studies, Italian studies, ecclesiastical history and historiography, this volume of essays adds to a rich corpus of literature on Renaissance and early modern historiography, bringing a unique approach to several of the problems currently facing the field. Essays fall into three categories: the tensions and challenges of writing history in Renaissance Italy; the importance of intellectual, philosophical and political contexts for the reading and writing of history in renaissance and early modern Europe; and the implications of genre for the reading and writing of history. By collecting essays that cut across a broad cross-section of the disciplines of history and historiography, the book is able to offer solutions, encourage discussion, and engage in ongoing debates that bear direct relevance for our understanding of the origins of modern historical practices. This approach also allows the contributors to engage with critical questions concerning the continued relevance of history for political and social life in the past and in the present.

Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Author: Giuliano Mori
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2024-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198885938

While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasseâ€"those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.

The Information Master

The Information Master
Author: Jacob Soll
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2011-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472034642

"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager." ---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge "Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long overdue and compelling." ---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles "Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs." ---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University "Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state." ---Keith Baker, Stanford University When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines. Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history. Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin

The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin
Author: Sarah Knight
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0190273348

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book printing and new literary and cultural dynamics. Latin also entered into a complex interplay with the rising vernacular languages. This Handbook gives an accessible survey of the main genres, contexts, and regions of Neo-Latin, as we have come to call Latin writing composed in the wake of Petrarch (1304-74). Its emphasis is on the period of Neo-Latin's greatest cultural relevance, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its chapters, written by specialists in the field, present individual methodologies and focuses while retaining an introductory character. The Handbook will be valuable to all readers wanting to orientate themselves in the immense ocean of Neo-Latin literature and culture. It will be particularly helpful for those working on early modern languages and literatures as well as to classicists working on the culture of ancient Rome, its early modern reception and the shifting characteristics of post-classical Latin language and literature. Political, social, cultural and intellectual historians will find much relevant material in the Handbook, and it will provide a rich range of material to scholars researching the history of their respective geographical areas of interest.

Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza

Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza
Author: Jeroen De Keyser
Publisher: Georg Olms Verlag
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3487152460

Die Sphortias des Humanisten Francesco Filelfo (15. Jd.) war das erste veritable neulateinische Epos, das einen zeitgenössischen Helden in Szene setzte. Das Gedicht, das Filelfos Gönner Francesco Sforza, Herzog von Mailand, gewidmet ist, stieß fast sofort auf die heftige Kritik des Galeotto Marzio, eines Zeitgenossen Filelfos. Marzio prangerte in zwei polemischen Briefen die angeblichen literarischen und metrischen Schwächen der Sphortias an. Obwohl Filelfo Abschriften an mögliche Gönner in ganz Italien sandte, litt die Rezeption der Sphortias unter dem Fehlen einer Druckausgabe, was auch die moderne Forschung behindert hat. Der vorliegende Band bietet die editio princeps der Sphortias, ergänzt durch kritische Editionen der anderen bedeutenden, aber gleichfalls kaum erforschten Werke Filelfos, in denen Sforza im Mittelpunkt steht: das unveröffentlichte Gedicht De Genuensium deditione, das 1464 anlässlich der Unterwerfung Genuas unter die Herrschaft des Herzogs von Mailand verfasst wurde; die Oratio parentalis de divi Francisci Sphortiae Mediolanensium ducis felicitate, ein anspruchsvolles biographisches Lobgedicht, das 1467 aus Anlass des ersten Jahrestages von Sforzas Tod geschrieben wurde; und der vollständige polemische Briefwechsel mit Galeotto Marzio. The Sphortias by the Quattrocento humanist Francesco Filelfo was the first full-blown Neo-Latin epic staging a contemporary hero. Devoted to Filelfo’s patron, Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, the poem almost immediately met a fierce critic in Filelfo’s contemporary Galeotto Marzio, who wrote two polemical letters denouncing the Sphortias’ alleged literary and metrical flaws. Although Filelfo sent out copies to possible patrons all over Italy, the Sphortias’ reception suffered from the work’s failure to appear in print, which has not served modern scholarship either. This volume contains the editio princeps of the Sphortias, accompanied by critical editions of Filelfo’s other major Sforza-centred writings, all of them equally understudied: the unpublished poem De Genuensium deditione, written in 1464 on the occasion of Genoa’s submission to the Duke of Milan’s rule; the Oratio parentalis de divi Francisci Sphortiae Mediolanensium ducis felicitate, an ambitious biographical eulogy written in 1467 on the occasion of the first anniversary of Sforza’s demise; and the complete polemical epistolary exchange with Galeotto Marzio.

Chronicling History

Chronicling History
Author: Sharon Dale
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271045582

Literally thousands of annals, chronicles, and histories were produced in Italy during the Middle Ages, ranging from fragments to polished humanist treatises. This book is composed of a set of case studies exploring the kinds of historical writing most characteristic of the period. We might expect a typical medieval chronicler to be a monk or cleric, but the chroniclers of communal and Renaissance Italy were overwhelmingly secular. Many were jurists or notaries whose professions granted them access to political institutions and public debate. The mix of the anecdotal and the cosmic, of portents and politics, makes these writers engaging to read. While chroniclers may have had different reasons to write and often very different points of view, they shared the belief that knowing the past might explain the present. Moreover, their audiences usually shared the worldview and civic identity of the historians, so these texts are glimpses into deeper cultural and intellectual contexts. Seen more broadly, chronicles are far more entertaining and informative than narratives. They become part of the very history they are describing.

Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance

Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance
Author: Patrick Baker
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2016-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110472392

The portrayal of princes plays a central role in the historical literature of the European Renaissance. The sixteen contributions collected in this volume examine such portrayals in a broad variety of historiographical, biographical, and poetic texts. It emerges clearly that historical portrayals were not essentially bound by generic constraints but instead took the form of res gestae or historiae, discrete or collective biographies, panegyric, mirrors for princes, epic poetry, orations, even commonplace books – whatever the occasion called for. Beyond questions of genre, the chapters focus on narrative strategies and the transformation of ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors, as well as on the influence of political, cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. Four broad thematic foci inform the structure of this book: the virtues ascribed to the prince, the cultural and political pretensions inscribed in literary portraits, the historical and literary models on which these portraits were based, and the method that underlay them. The volume is rounded out by a critical summary that considers the portrayal of princes in humanist historiogrpahy from the point of view of transformation theory.

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humannists / by Susanne Saygin

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humannists / by Susanne Saygin
Author: Susanne Saygin
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004120150

This study reconstructs the relations between the fifteenth century English patron of Italian Renaissance humanism, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447), his Italian middlemen, and several Italian humanists with regard to the social and political context of their shared literary interests.

The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians

The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians
Author: Andrew Feldherr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2009-09-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0521854539

An introduction to how the history of Rome was written in the ancient world, and its impact on later periods. It presents essays by an international team of scholars that aim both to orient non-specialist readers to the important concerns of the Roman historians and also to stimulate new research.