In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

Chapter Two analyzes the rebirth of sortition in the West during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It explores the mutations of the medieval and Renaissance Italian republics, as well as the practices of sortition in Early Modern Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries. During these periods, sortition was widespread and took many different guises, though it was always combined with elections and cooption. It was above all a means to channel the competition for power and resources among groups, and especially among the elite. It was a key element of “distributive aristocracies” in different republican contexts, in which a relatively small subsections of elite citizens could develop self-government in the name of the common good and enjoy the privileges of administrating the polity. In the Italian Communes of the thirteenth century and for limited periods of time in Florence, republican self-government was extended to a larger circle of citizens. Practices of sortition in India are also described. Prior to modernity, although the scientific notion of representative sampling was still unknown, political sortition was linked to an empirical “taming of chance” and used as a rational instrument of government.

As the noble elites in Elizabethan England were preparing their anti-imperial and anti-papal strategies, they received welcome assistance from the civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, a protestant refugee interested in combining his Roman law expertise with the kind of humanist statesmanship that was appreciated by his English interlocutors and that had flourished among North Italian city-states at the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Gentili wrote on the need to combine insights from history with a critical “philosophical” attitude – an orientation he identified in jurisprudence. He insisted on limiting the jurisdiction of theologians to the internal world of the faithful and on the absolute duty of obedience to the king, even when he had turned a tyrant. But Gentili remained blind to the principles of good government that were being developed under the anti-legal vocabulary of the ragion di stato by Italian Counter-Reformation strategists such as Giovanni Botero.

Florentines were not simply avid readers of history; many also wrote historical works. Some motivations were personal and familial; a history of past service to the city was a marker of status. For others, history served as a form of political thought. The keeping of diaries of political events, often with the goal of developing them into modern histories, was already an established tradition and continued to expand during the sixteenth century. This experience made Florentine readers sharp critics of historical writings, and imposed high standards of accuracy and interpretation; major authors and their works enjoyed a high profile. Many died with their works unfinished, including Francesco Guicciardini, Benedetto Varchi, and the exile Jacopo Nardi. Florentines also took an avid interest in the city’s numerous medieval chronicles, editing with care the works of Giovanni Villani, Ricordano Malispini, and more. Several wrote works of medieval history, notably Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Cosimo Bartoli, Silvano Razzi, and Domenico Mellini.