The Historical Method. The comparison and critical
evaluation of these two interpretations, which in their
extreme or simplified form are antithetical, can be
made not by expounding merely the ideas of the
humanists but also and above all by considering if and
how far they form a turning point in the civilization
of their time, and if they have indicated the directions
along which civilization developed in the centuries that
followed. The crucial problem of Italian humanism can
be expressed then as follows: has this humanism made
a decisive contribution to the history of the ideas that
still today constitute the patrimony of western civili-
zation, and in what does this contribution consist?
Put in this form the problem becomes susceptible
of a solution which takes account of all the funda-
mental facts. Let us begin by considering the primary
and most obvious aspect of humanism: the rebirth of
classical studies. These certainly had not been
neglected in the preceding centuries, which had indeed
used them as the principal source of their culture. But
when Lorenzo Valla, in his celebrated De falso credita
et ementita Constantini donatione Declamatio (1440),
proved the falsity of the donation that the Emperor
Constantine was supposed to have made to Pope
Silvester, the donation of the supreme political author-
ity over the whole Roman Empire. In order to show
the “stupidity of the concepts and words” which
emerged from this document, that is, their incongruity
and inexactitude, he made use of the lack of reliable
testimony or other historical sources which would have
validated it and of its contrast with Roman, Hebrew,
and Christian law. He thus showed that he knew how
to make use of all the instruments of which modern
historical investigation still avails itself. The discovery
and use of these instruments was the first great conquest
of Italian humanism.
The humanists did not accept classical antiquity in
the form which it had assumed during the preceding
centuries. They wished to discover its authenticity and
its original sources, both in their true perspective. The
medieval writers ignored this perspective, just as me-
dieval painting ignored optical perspective, which was
developed in the great painting of the Renaissance. For
them, the “ancients” were contemporaries or, better,
were out of time and history, as, in fact, they felt
themselves to be. The perception of historical distance,
which is an indispensable condition of historiographical
work, hence of the situation of a work, of a person,
of a fact of any sort, in a determinate time and place,
was lacking almost entirely. The humanists acquired
this perception and made the best possible use of it.
The humanists found medieval language “barbarous,”
because it was a deformation or corruption of classical
Latin. They saw that the interpretation which medieval
writers had given of ancient works was weakened by
ignorance of the genuine texts, and of many works
which they did not possess or of which they took no
notice, by their confusion of doctrines and diverse
points of view, and by their inability to recognize in
their true nature the writers (or the works), of classical
antiquity. They continued, it is true, like all medieval
authors, to esteem such writers as the masters of all
wisdom, as models of all art, of all poetry, and of all
human achievement. But they were far from accepting
them just as they stood, from attempting to imitate
them. They wished to rediscover them as guides and
masters of a kind of work which had been initiated
by them, and which, interrupted by “barbarism,”
should be taken up again and carried forward.
There is no doubt that these demands have been
answered at times adequately and at times inade-
quately. But there is no doubt either that these de-
mands, just as they were formulated, still constitute
the directives today of historiography.
