Renaissances and Reformations

The chapter begins with History’s place in Renaissance Italy. Then it shows how the historiographies of various states were influenced by tendencies in Italian humanism, as well as by the Reformation. France is accorded special attention, then more briefly England and parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Then the chapter addresses the historiographical battles that corresponded to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were battles of ecclesiastical History, centring on ancient sources. The polemical nature of some of the disagreements reinforced existing scepticism about the reliability of historical knowledge. Yet an increasingly bipartisan critical methodology developed, based on a combination of humanist philology and new palaeographical techniques, with established religious hermeneutics playing their part. Here the dictates of self-serving confessional History as Identity sometimes stood in tension with the demands of a proceduralist History as Methodology even as all sides agreed on the importance of History as Communion. The chapter concludes by addressing a ‘scientific’ seventeenth century for whose dominant intellectual figures historical enquiry supposedly had little use. Like previous chapters, this one addresses conceptual concerns of a general nature as they arise. Different sorts of contextualization are addressed, along with their implications for thinking about the past. Particular consideration is given to how a heightened attention to historical contextualization could be reconciled with ongoing demands for the relevance of History as Lesson for the present. Topical reading was one established solution, but another was resurrected with the ancient doctrine of similitudo temporum.