'Chronicle' and 'History': The Medieval Origins of Postmodern Historiographical Practice?

'CHRONICLE' AND 'HISTORY': THEMEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF POSTMODERN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PRACTICE? In a recent A N Z A M R S conference session of which I was a participant, Gary Ianziti advanced with approval the claim that Leonardo Bmni was hardly the disinterested pursuer of truth that [Hans] Baron postulates. H e was, on the contrary, a shrewd political operator whose historiography was carefully calibrated to express themes dear to those in power. Critical perspicacity there certainly was, but it was not dictated by the rules of objective enquiry. Rather, it was put to work in the service of a political programme, one whose furtherance was of immense personal benefit to Bruni himself. [Bruni was] about as far away from 'critical history' as one can imagine, having systematically had uppermost in mind the creation of a flattering image of the city he had come to adopt as his own.2 Both in the presentation to which I refer, and in papers that he has lately prepared, Ianziti has insisted on Bmni's view of the historian as, in the first instance, basically a translator, and at a somewhat more elaborate level, as a rhetorical re-writer of others' narratives: with regard to his sources...Bruni follows a policy not of critical examination, but of selection, omission and highlighting...In short, what w e see in action is not critical scholarship but a re-ordering of textual potentialities in order to further an overall design...What w e 1 A N Z A M R S - A H M E M E combined conference, Brisbane 30/1/96-2/2/96. I would like to thank Walter Kudrycz and Rod Marsh for reading and discussing with me the present paper, making many valuable suggestions for ideas and reading. I should also like to acknowledge the stimulus to the re-writing of the paper provided by the readers to whom the original version was sent by the Parergon editors. While they were prevented, I believe, from really seeing what I was getting at because of their thorough steeping in the Styx of traditional readings of the dichotomy between 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' historiography, their acerbic comments certainly provoked m e to have another go at saying what I meant. I hope they will be more enthusiastic about the result. 2 1 am quoting from Ianziti's pre-print, which he was kind enough to send me. The views expressed in the quotation are those of Riccardo Fubini and Anna Maria Cabrini. 3 'Leonardo Bruni on Writing History', 'The hiatus that never was: Leonardo Bruni's early career in history'. PARERGON ns 14.2 (January 1997) 102 John O. Ward see then, when w e examine Bmni's discourse on history-writing in this period is a cluster of attitudes which are distinctly un-modern. This is not, indeed, to claim Bmni for the middle ages,4 but it is certainly a challenging view of a writer w h o m Eugenio Garin in 1947 called 'the first historian in the m o d e m sense of the word', and w h o m Peter Burke in 1969 called 'thefirstmodern historian'. It is additionally arresting, in view both of the traditional estimate of Bmni's claims as an historian, and in view of the revisionist position on this subject that Ianziti is himself pursuing, to learn that Bmni's early devotion to Plutarchan studies almost caused him to give up the writing of (more recent) history at all: times nearer his own, Bmni claimed, lacked the heroism and qualities to tempt an historian. Bmni was, it seems, so seduced by his devotion to antiquity and his feeling that history should only speak of the heroic, that he almost failed to emerge as an historian at all! One is reminded of Walter Map's denunciation in his twelfthcentury De nugis curialium of the writers of his own day, who failed to write up the deeds of the living (who thus 'died'), but lavished attention upon the glory of the ancients (who thus 'lived')!8 One is also reminded of a contemporary of Bmni's, Guarino da Verona, who wrote an elaborate letter to a friend (who...