2. Historical Criticism in the Fifteenth and Six-
teenth Centuries. In the humanist writing of fifteenth-
century Italy there seems to be something like a gen-
eral advance in historical criticism, so that amongst
the Italian cities there is less credulity about implaus-
ible “myths of origin” than one finds in the rest of
Europe. Italian humanists abroad—Polydore Vergil in
England, for example, as we have seen—showed a
certain distrust of such legends in other countries,
though it was no doubt more easy to deprecate the
cherished fables of another nation. While the natives
of the country concerned were inclined to attribute
the criticisms to the jealousy of the foreigner, it would
seem that at this extreme point the Italians had reached
a higher degree of critical awareness. On the other
hand, though there existed a fervor for ancient history,
the scholars of the Renaissance did not attempt to
reconstruct for themselves the narrative that had been
handed down from classical times. They believed—and,
in general they were right, as yet, in believing—that
they could not improve upon what a distant generation
had reported about itself. At this point in the develop-
ment—when, in any case, one tended to compile the
story of the past from previous narrators, whether
ancient historians or medieval chroniclers—there ex-
isted, in a harder form than we should accept, the
assumption that the older source was always the better
authority. Amongst other things, it was normally taken
for granted, and one finds it explicitly stated, that a
medieval source called for criticism while a classical
one did not. The reliability of Herodotus came to be
questioned, but even this was a further example of the
subservience to antiquity; for the doubts about this
writer were taken over from the scholarship of the
ancient Greeks, the resulting controversies becoming
a factor in the development of early modern criticism.
Flavio Biondo completed in 1453 a work chiefly on
Southern Europe since the decline of the Roman
Empire, which, owing to its disregard of the rhetorical
canons, failed to qualify as a piece of humanist litera-
ture, though it could be used as a quarry and was both
important and influential. It drew attention to the
medieval period as a whole and tried to vindicate it
in the face of current prejudices. It set out to present
the best of the source material, and then to produce
from this evidence an account of the period from about
410 to 1442 A.D. Biondo used not only chronicles but
documents—letters for example; and he was able to
keep closer to earth because he based himself on
the evidence that came earliest, though he lost a
point sometimes by dismissing a later tradition. In
other works on Roman topography and antiquities,
he contributed to the development of classical
archaeology.
In fifteenth-century Italy, however, there appeared
a kind of critical endeavor of which there had been
some traces in Ibn Khaldūn—a full-dress affair, exhila-
rating and clever—a case of calling up the troops and
marshalling all the arguments to dispose of a widely-
accepted legend. This kind of work brings us closer
to the genuine technical issues but it suggests—what
many other things confirm—that there is nothing like
violent partisanship for setting criticism alight and
driving it to ingenuity. The case is illustrated by the
famous work of Laurentius Valla who in 1440 set out
to prove that—as some had previously believed—the
Donation of Constantine had been a forgery. The work
appeared at a time when Valla was secretary to a king
who was at war with a pope. It was avowedly part
of a bitter publicistic campaign.
His treatise presents first of all a whole series of
arguments that might be said to rest on common sense
or ordinary experience—that no emperor would disin-
herit his children so shabbily, for example, and the
Roman Senate would never have agreed to the aliena-
tion of the western lands of the empire. Secondly, there
is a wide range of arguments to show that the Donation
cannot be squared with what is otherwise known of
the history of that time. Thirdly, Valla examines the
status of the document itself, the contradictions and
absurdities in the text, the barbarity of its Latin and
the mistakes in terminology. Bernardo Giustiniani,
whose career was spent in public service in Venice,
brought his practical knowledge of affairs to the criti-
cism of source-material even in early Venetian history,
showing, for example, what was militarily impossible,
and doing this in a manner that was remarkable at the
time. Over a century later, and at a date when the
massing of big guns was perhaps no longer necessary
for the purpose in France, L. V. de la Popelinière
produced with great humor and ingenuity a large-scale
attack on the legend that the Franks were descended
from the Trojans. He followed something like the pat-
tern of Valla: firstly, arguments from common sense
and from his own military experience; secondly, objec-
tions arising from the fact that the story could not be
squared with other things that were known about the
history of the relevant periods; and thirdly a destruc-
tive analysis of the supposed evidence for the belief.
More clearly than Valla, however, he dealt with a point
that is of some importance, if the critical task is to
be completed and the argument clinched. Granted that
the Trojan story was untrue, he made a point of en-
quiring how the legend could have arisen.
But, though the humanists did something to alter
the general outlook in Italy for a time, it cannot be
said that either Laurentius Valla or Bernardo Giustin-
iani or La Popelinière established a standard or brought
new methods into general currency. It cannot be
asserted that, now, at last, this much ground had been
gained for scholarship or science. As yet, at least, there
could be no organic story of the development of his-
torical technique, and the battles that had been won
for a moment would have to be fought over again in
the future. Even during the Renaissance, the attempt
of the writers in Northern Europe to answer the ques-
tions that preoccupied them—questions about the ori-
gins of nations, place-names, institutions, arts and
crafts, etc.—was often based on wild inferences from
flimsy evidence or from etymological speculations,
where it was not due to the easy acceptance of forger-
ies. It is perhaps curious that one of the most disastrous
and influential of literary forgeries—a compilation
associated with Annius of Viterbo, which was soon
detected in Italy, but almost dominated German
writing—should have been so closely associated with
the Renaissance.
It is possible that, in spite of the nascent criticism,
the weight of fabulous matter in the world was actually
increased in the sixteenth century. The great exception
in Germany is Beatus Rhenanus (1486-1547), who
travelled widely in search of inscriptions and antiqui-
ties, rejected the Annius forgery, and set himself to
work critically at the sources of early German history.
In this and in his further unfulfilled ambition for an
adequate treatment of German antiquities, he was a
follower of Flavio Biondo.
Amongst those who wrote “contemporary history”
Guicciardini has come to have a special interest be-
cause of what came to be learned later about his
sources and method. His working papers have shown
the wide range of his primary materials, and particu-
larly of the official documents, including archives of
the Council of Ten which he had taken into his posses-
sion a few years before. It has also been possible to
see how he worked over these papers, abridging and
copying, and then redrafting, until he had turned them
into narrative. It transpires that even a Ranke had been
unable to detect how much was behind this History
of Italy, for sources have been found for one or two
speeches, as well as for statements and events, which
Ranke had accused Guicciardini of inventing. A proper
system of footnoting would have made the position
clear from the first.
A significant impulse was given to history on the
technical side by the work on Roman Law conducted
on the part of humanist writers, particularly in France.
The law that they studied threw light on the institu-
tions and conditions of the ancient world, and in order
to recover the exact meaning of the texts it was neces-
sary to examine many aspects of Roman life and activ-
ity, interpreting the legal terminology in the light of
the social arrangements that then existed. This led—as
in the case of Guillaume Budé—not merely to an
attempt to recover the realities of ordinary life in
ancient times but also to a study of the transition to
feudal times, an enquiry and then a controversy as to
the role of Roman Law in the transition to the medieval
order of things. At a much later date, as will be seen,
this interest in the feudal order of society passed to
England, where it had an important influence on his-
toriography.
John Bodin produced in 1566 his Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History. His ideas on criticism were
vague. He ratified Aristotle's view that authorities were
likely to be unreliable if they were either too ancient
or too recent; yet, when they clashed with one another,
he preferred the more recent, provided it supplied
effective proofs of its assertions. He thought it better,
where possible, to follow a writer who was interme-
diate, i.e., neither a hostile nor a friendly witness. He
considered geographical factors in history and said that
people who lived under extreme climates were prone
to vice; but he allowed also for the influence of the
heavenly bodies. In his chapter on chronology he gave
a lengthy proof that the world had had a beginning.
One of his ideas was to study the beginnings, the
flourishing, and the downfall of empires—comparing
the ancient with the modern and confronting the views
of philosophers with those of historians in order to get
a better grasp of universal history. Here we see that
modernism of the sixteenth century which is so often
still mixed with medievalism.
