Petrarca und die Geschichte: Geschichtsschreibung, Rhetorik, Philosophie im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (review)

384 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tional pursuits are framed by the claims of justice and reasonable behavior. But the analogy will not fully work. As Kenny concedes, "Virtue is something of which there cannot be too much" (p. 208). The phronimos is not someone who safeguards his personal conception of the good by observing the public requirements of justice. For the phronimos, a conception of the good amounts to no more and no less than his conception of being just and virtuous. The distinction between the claims of justice and the rational pursuit of one's good is at best vague. A third interpretation, perhaps the truest to Aristotle, does away with rigid priority rules and leaves the problem of a proper mix to the experienced judgment and perception of the phronimos. In cases of conflict, tradeoffs will occur, and though this does not preclude judgments of mistaken priority, still the phronimos is deemed a more reliable source of practical rationality than any fixed rule. But one gains no illumination from Kenny about these problems. He sidesteps the whole difficulty. Kenny concludes his discussion of eudaimon/a suggesting that the EE condemns the NE "theorizer" as "a vicious and ignoble character" (p. ~14). But if Kenny sees the entire program of the NE as relentlessly establishing that such a person is really virtuous, then on his view we are forced to hold a very low opinion of Aristotle; so low an opinion that we would be better off ascribing the work to someone else-certainly not to an author who prides himself in being the champion of common moral belief. Finally, Kenny argues for the later dating of the EE on the basis of its supposed backward references to the NE (p. 296). But there is no reason to discount that these are additions of an editor who uncompromisingly tried to unify Aristotle's writing. In the end Kenny's Aristotelian Ethics fails in its explicit goal. But even so, it will have accomplished a far more important goal--and that is, the reinstatement of the Eudemian Ethics as a worthy companion to the Nicomachean. 5 NANCY SHERMAN MARSHALL PRESSER Harvard University and Cambridge, Massachusetts Eckhard Kessler. Petrarca und die Geschichte: Geschichtsschreibung, Rhetorik, Philosophie ira Obergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Humanistische Bibliothek, series l, Abhandlungen , voi. 25. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, t978. Pp. 3o4. DM 8o. To his contemporaries, the "Father of Humanism" was a qualified historian. Petrarch 's coronation on the Roman Capitol honored specifically the poet and the historian and granted him the venia legendi for both subjects; Charles IV asked him for his "historical work" De Viris Illusttibus; and the translation of this work into Italian by Donato degli Albanzani was completed shortly after Petrarch's death. Historians of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, however, doubted Petrarch's quailWe would like to thank Martha C. Nussbaum for her criticisms of an earlier draft of this review. BOOK REVIEWS 385 fications as a historiographer, for he never reported "how things really were." More recent investigations on humanist historiography and individual humanists such as Salutati, Bruni, Poggio, B. della Scala, and Lorenzo Valla have developed a framework for the intentions of humanist historiography and concluded that from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries "rhetorical form and method and a moralistic -utilitarian aim" were its distinguishing features. Kessler's study investigates Petrarch's place in this humanist tradition. A formal textual analysis (werkimmanente Interpretation) of Petrarch's theoretical writings---especially the Praefationes A and B to De Viris Illustribus leads him to conclude that Petrarch did indeed establish a model for historiography to be followed by subsequent generations. Kessler's analysis goes further than that of previous authors. He attempts to recreate the "moment of genesis of the exemplary figure of Petrarch" that stands out against the background of late medieval thought and is part of the specturm of humanist thought (p. 17). He sets out to understand humanist thought as Oberwindung of late scholastic philosophy and to interpret humanist historiography as a function of the new consciousness of man within history. In five chapters Kessler investigates Petrarch's "New Historiography," its philological and philosophical foundation, and finally the relationship...