Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti ed. by Christian Thorsten Callisen (review)

This is a most valuable book and should be on the shelves of all persons interested in western historiographical efforts. Gary Ianziti is certainly a great figure in the reassessment of Renaissance historiography, and other matters too, and especially so in the Anglophone world. The editor and John Gagné (of the University of Sydney) provide an excellent introduction to the career and writings of Ianziti and well summarise the diverse contributions within the present volume and what unites them. I have myself experienced the scholarship and friendship of Ianziti, having had many fruitful discussions with him concerning the origins of modern historiographical patterns (on which now see the challenging observations of Walter Kudrycz, in his The Historical Present, Medievalism and Modernity, 2011). As Callisen stresses, what distinguishes Ianziti’s approach is his link-up between an individual’s historiography and the local pressures, constraints, and contexts, which produced both innovation and compliance with the major political objectives of the ruling groups of the time.

The essays in the present volume are diverse, and cover Quattrocento translations and ideas about the same, moving from translating Greek into Latin, and into the vernacular, with evaluative comments including: Bruni’s own views and translations (Andrea Rizzi); a wide-ranging expansion of Cochrane’s historiographical categories for history-writing generally in the Renaissance, and in particular in Milan after the French occupation of 1499, concluding that ‘the political discourse over history had diversified … to permit propaganda and history to meet in new and unexpected venues in a variety of media’ (John Gagné, p. 55); a further broadening consideration of historiography in Milan 1400–1540, covering in particular Guicciardini (Jane Black); an examination of Bruni’s constitutional ideas, concluding ‘Only a popular regime like the Florentine one can guarantee the kind of freedom that emerges when no citizen has a superior he must fear and obey; when there is a government of laws and not of men’ (James Hankins, p. 86); an examination of Machiavelli and humanist historiography showing how Machiavelli used prevailing humanist historiographical methodology to pervert the life of Castruccio Castracani and to construct his Istorie Fiorentine (contrasts with Il Principe and the Discorsi are pointed out; Robert Black). Callisen himself has contributed a chapter on Georg Calixtus’s views on the study of history (Calixtus was Pro-Rector of the University of Helmstedt in Brunswick, and a professor of Theology, 1586–1656). Ian Hunter has a chapter on the uses of natural law in early modern Germany (concentrating on Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who suffered much criticism from his home University of Leipzig). Chris Hanlon has a chapter on medieval sacred biography, while Catherine Dewhirst seems the furthest from Ianziti and Bruni with her examination of a particular letter collection produced by Italian migration to Australia in the years 1900–15. Sue Keays maintains the distance from Bruni and Ianziti by examining in close and fascinating detail the relationship between fact and fiction in the ancient accounts of the Emperor Claudius, and in Robert Graves’s epic novels on the subject. John M. Headley’s final chapter is quite remarkable, and again, far from Bruni and Ianziti. He sees western civilisation marked by, and to be congratulated for, its long-term search for global universality of community and equal opportunity, excluding no-one. In the current climate of tension between the West and the Muslim world this contribution is very well worth reading, however much the particularism of Islamic fundamentalism rejects its thesis. I warm to Headley as he considers the twelfth century ‘the most creative and constructive century in the entire Western development’ (p. 209, a view much supported by R. I. Moore in his The First European Revolution c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)). Headley assigns an intriguing role in the construction of the western global community to the Jesuits and stresses...