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Humanism, Historical Consciousness and National Sentiment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
Under the impact of humanism the historical sciences were placed in a paradoxical situation: philology, publishing, archaeology brought with them an enormous increase of factual knowledge, but the ancient universal and abstract perspectives still provided the necessary framework. If one compares a mediaeval chronicle to an Italian history from the 15th or 16th century, whether it be humanist or claims to be pragmatic, such as the work of Machiavelli, one is generally struck by an essential difference: the chronicler relates the events as a simple succession of facts, but for the Renaissance historiographer there is always an underlying theme, “human nature,” “the lessons of history,” the model of Rome.
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- Copyright © 1963 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 This essay is an extract from a volume on the culture of the Renaissance, entitled L'Europe Humaniste (to be published, Éditions des Deux Mondes, Paris).
2 After four and a half centuries, the manuscript of the second centuria of the Miscellanea, which had disappeared in 1494, and was mentioned by all Poliziano's friends, was found and presented by V. Branca in La incompiuta seconda centuria dei "miscellanea" di Angelo Poliziano, Florence, 1961.
3 Polybius and other historians of antiquity also contributed, with their theories on the cycles of evolution, to the humanist idea of an internal logic of history.
4 See D. Hay, Polydore Vergil, Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters, Oxford, 1952.
5 Against the hasty assimilation of the ideas by rationalist free-thought, see E. Garin, "Renovatio e oroscopo delle religioni," in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento Italiano, Florence, 1961, pp. 155-59. The appearance of Luther was also, to the indignation of the reformer, explained by astrology; though Me lanchthon was less hostile to the idea.
6 The idea that gothic architecture was a "stylization" of Nordic wood cabins was expressed in a letter to Pope Leo X and attributed to Raphael. For more than three centuries it met with great success; see J. Baltrusaitis, in Aberrations, Paris, 1957.
7 Three "genre scenes" of the life of primitive men (New York and Oxford), also the History of Vulcan (Florence and Ottawa) and Prometheus (Munich and Strasbourg). The iconographic interpretation is due mostly to Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, New York, 1939.
8 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass., 1952; H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape-Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, Studies of the Warburg Institute, XX, 1952.
9 Franco Simone, Il Rinascimento francese, Turin, 1961, pp. 47-54.
10 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton, 1955.