HIstorical Conciousness Renaissance Historiography

1. RENAISSANCE/MODERN AGE
HISTORIOGRAPHY

2. Focus
1. Historiography and the foundation of Renaissance
2. Historian during the Renaissance/Modern Age

3. 1.Foundation of Renaissance Historiography
a. The term ‘Renaissance’ is a relatively modern idea. ( birth of new set of
scientific/investigative writing of history
b. Historical methodology
b.1 illustrated the development and progress of reason, and the
struggle of rationality against the forces of ignorance and superstition.
c. Developed a way of writing history which depended less on a narrative
series of events and more upon a comprehensive sense of the historical
field.
d. Simplification of the history into periods of relative darkness and
enlightenment and to the reduction of the history.

4. LORENZO VALLA
a. developed the technique of critical textual analysis through the use of language
(philology)
PHILOLOGY- The branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical
development, and relationships of a language or languages. ( Truth )
The Donation of Constantine (Latin: Donatio Constantini)-solid philological arguments
document's authenticity

5. NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
- He looked at the realities of histories/politics, not the ideal Christian moral
behavior
- MACHIAVELLIAN METHOD- system of collection of positive and negative examples
and their resolution.
- THEORY MAN-from his observation and omnivorous reading of history, he
concluded that man’s nature is changeless—were it not changeless,
generalizations about politics could not be made—and that it is essentially evil.

6. NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
- REALIZING HISTORY
Basic traits of man are the following:
he is a creature of insatiable desires and limitless ambition, and his primary desire is
for self-preservation; he is short-sighted, judging most commonly by the immediacy
of reward rather than the remote consequences of his actions; he is imitative,
inclined to follow the example of authority figures; and he is inflexible, so that
behavior patterns established through imitation can be changed only to a limited
extent.

7. FRANCISCO PETRARCH
-coined the term Dark Ages (It refers to the period of time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the
beginning of the Italian Renaissance)
- His genre fasciation is cultural history.
- collective reexamination of the question of who and what came between. ( Truth )
- HUMANIST historiography:
- The first is the nature of the reality the history is recounting.
- “What interests the writer?
- What is the substance of his narrative?
- What does he choose from his sources and what does he ignore
- What does he interpolate into the account by drawing on his own understanding of the nature of history
- The second is the various attitudes—moral judgments, historical conceptions, analytical views—with which
the historian approaches his narrative.
- The third is the historian’s narrative technique- identifies the difficulties involved in expressing historical
ideas in narrative form and describes the means the historians developed for overcoming those difficulties.
He emphasizes the positive value of rhetoric in their works and points out that they “sought by eloquence to
teach men virtue.”
historiography

8. JEAN BODIN
--Bodin’s techniques are- analysis and systematics as methods for organizing knowledge
& understanding history.
his work “Method”, he gave a new and definitive meaning to a word which previous
authors had used to signify both “division” and “ratio” or “the procedure” for learning a
discipline.
In Method, Bodin encourages his readers to use analysis, which he calls “that pre-
eminent guide to the teaching of the arts in order that understanding of history
(historiarum scientia) shall be complete and facile”
-According to Bodin, it is through analysis that one is able to divide universals into parts,
and to divide each part into subsections without losing the coherence of the whole.
Therefore synthesis, he states, is no longer necessary because the individual episodes of
nearly all historical accounts are already well adapted to each other, and the best
historians have carefully reconstructed these partial and regional accounts into the
tableau of universal history.

9. JEAN BODIN
- For Bodin, methodologies were visual representations of systems of knowledge.
- He makes this point in his work Exposition, where he states that the concept of
“division,” which Plato had called divine, is the “universal rule of the sciences”.
- If history is divided into divine history, natural history, and human history, then law
can be divided into natural law, human law, the laws of nations, public law, and civil
law. Here more than in the Method, the reader sees Bodin's pedagogical
preoccupation with brevity and conciseness.

10. JACQUES-Bénigne BOSSUET
- his sermons and funeral orations, he expressed profound psychological insights in a
very refined and effective style.
- He uses a curious but effective comparison in order to convey this truth to his
listeners/readers.
- highly optimistic view of the human condition by stressing the essential grandeur and
excellence of each person. This style develops extensively the opposition between
appearance and reality.
- A Discourse on the History of the Whole World, 1686- this book and other of his
extensive writings on the differences between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism

11. UNBIASED STORY
Strength ( Renaissance
Historiography )
Scientific/Rational/
Investigative
(Accurate interpretation
of data base on primary
source)
CONFLICT