During the Renaissance, four elements that pervaded much of the intellectual activity were generative of momentous consequences for future historiography. These were a true sense of anachronism, a renewed interest in antiquarianism, a critical stance towards the literary evidence from the past, and the attempt to understand the causation of historical events through reason.74 One must not, of course, assume that a majority of the educated and scholarly figures of the Renaissance period shared these perspectives, any more than one should assume that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species everyone gave up the idea that God created humankind in a paradise state.
As was noted earlier, medieval writers as a rule lacked a historical perspective on the past as past, as different in space and time from the contemporary. In the fourteenth century, a historical sensibility began to develop. This appears, for example, in Giotto’s fresco painting in the Arena Chapel at Padua (about 1305), which depicts Pontius Pilate clean-shaven, with garlanded head, and wearing a Roman robe embossed with a golden, imperial eagle. He appears as a figure from the past, not as a contemporary. Petrarch (1304–74) was well aware of the differences between his own day and those of his beloved Rome before the conversion of Constantine. So much so that he described his own times as barbarian and wrote ‘nostalgic’ letters to the classical authors expressing his longing to escape from the present and to find solace in those happier bygone days of old. Renaissance authors slowly recognized that everything had changed over time—laws, words, clothes, customs, arts, and buildings.75 There was, in other words, a historical relativity to all things.
Antiquarianism was a natural accompaniment to the revived interest in the past.76 In the Renaissance, men like Petrarch were not only interested in ancient literary works but in what would be called archaeological remains. Coins, inscriptions, and ancient ruins were of interest not just as relics from the past but as means to reconstruct the past. Petrarch used coins to discover what Roman emperors looked like and in his epic poem Africa drew upon the ruins of Rome, which he had visited, in describing the city at the time of the Carthaginians’ visit. In 1446, Flavio Biondo produced a topographical description of Rome dependent upon both the literary sources and his personal visits to the ruined sites. The fact that Renaissance scholars frequently misinterpreted antiquities or distorted their antiquarian knowledge is beside the point, for the issue is not their correctness in detail but their methodological procedure.
The discipline of documentary criticism was a speciality of many Renaissance scholars, The most outstanding and influential early Renaissance literary critic was Lorenzo Valla (about 1406–57). Petrarch, however, had already (in 1355) used internal and external evidence to prove that a document exempting Austria from the jurisdiction of the Emperor Charles IV was a forgery.77 In 1439, Valla disproved the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine in which Constantine had supposedly assigned temporal power over Italy to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. (Otto of Freising and other medieval authors had suspected that the document was a forgery, as did Valla’s contemporaries Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Pecock, independently.) “The significance of Valla’s declamation was neither in applying philological criteria, for Petrarch and others, including canonists, had taken this step, nor in denying the authenticity of the document, which had already been placed in doubt; rather it was in exhibiting the whole array of humanist weapons—polemic and personal vituperation as well as criticism stemming from grammar, logic, geography, chronology, history, and law.”78 Valla and others applied their literary criticism to numerous documents, both classical and Christian, to prove their inauthenticity or to elucidate their origin and history. “In 1460, Nicholas of Cusa wrote the Sieving of the Koran (Cribratio Alcoran) which treated the Koran as Nicholas had already treated the Donation. He identified three elements in its composition: Nestorian Christianity, a Jewish adviser of Muhammad, and the corruptions introduced by Jewish ‘correctors’ after Muhammad’s death. This was to treat the Koran as a historical document, and to write the history of its leading ideas.”79 The status of the Bible as the word of God exempted it from such treatment for the moment.
The literary legends about national origins and hagiographic legends about the saints were open to criticism by the humanists. Two examples will suffice. The Italian historian, Polydore Vergil, published a history of England in 1534 in which he took up the older attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s depiction of the Trojan Brutus as the founder of Britain. His basic argument rested on an appeal to the ancient sources: none of the ancient Roman authors and sources make any reference to this Brutus.80 In a short biography prefaced to his edition of Jerome’s works, Erasmus (in 1516) argued that many of the legendary traditions “contaminate the saints with their old wives’ tales, which are childish, ignorant, and absurd” and that the best source for knowledge about Jerome was the humandkind himself.
For who knew Jerome better than Jerome himself? Who expressed his ideas more faithfully? If Julius Caesar is the most reliable source for the events of his own career, is it not all the more reasonable to trust Jerome on his? And so, having gone through all his works, we made a few annotations and presented the results in the form of a narrative, not concealing the fact that we consider it a great enough miracle to have Jerome himself explaining his life to us in all his famous books. If there is anyone who must have miracles and omens, let him read the books about Jerome which contain almost as many miracles as they do sentences.81
The literary study of the early Renaissance humanists was not oriented merely to the detection of forgery and the exposure of many venerated traditions as nonhistorical legends. There was a very positive side to the focus on documentary evidence. “The mere problem of gaining access to the past began to supersede the problem of how to make use of it.”82 The humanists stressed that the recovery of the past through documentary sources had to depend upon philology and grammar. This meant a literal and realistic reading of the sources and at times textual criticism to restore the sources. Valla, in his Annotations on the New Testament published by Erasmus in 1505, came close to placing the biblical sources on the same footing with other ancient documents. Valla had also concluded that “none of the words of Christ have come to us, for Christ spoke in Hebrew and never wrote down anything.”83 Erasmus, who argued for a “return to the sources” (versetur in fontibus), defended Valla’s position on the need for textual criticism to restore the sources of theology.84 This meant that the reliability of the Old Testament versions must be established on the basis of Hebrew and the New Testament on the basis of Greek. (Pope Clement V and the Council of Vienne in 1311–12 had called for the training of teachers in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic or Chaldee.) In interpreting the Bible, Erasmus argued that the role of the grammarian was more important than that of theologian.
Nor do I assume that theology, the very queen of all disciplines, will think it beneath her dignity if her handmaiden, grammar, offers her help and the required service. For even if grammar is somewhat lower in dignity than other disciplines, there is no other more necessary. She busies herself with very small questions, without which no one progresses to the large. She argues about trifles which lead to serious matters. If they answer that theology is too important to be limited by grammatical rules and that this whole affair of exegeting depends on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then this is indeed a new honor for the theologian that he alone is allowed to speak like a barbarian.85
In spite of Erasmus’s emphasis on grammar in the understanding of the biblical text, he refused to disavow allegorical interpretation, although he warned that it should not be overdone, should apply everything to Christ, and requires a pious mind.86 Here he shows himself closer kin to Augustine than to Valla.
The trivial concerns of the grammarian or the “very small questions” grammar asks—to use Erasmus’s terminology—were part of a major revolution in thought. The difference between the medieval interpretative gloss on a text and the grammatical analysis of a text is enormous; they belong to two different worlds of thought. The humanists of the Renaissance openly broke with the scholastic method, caustically opposed it, and asserted the superiority of their new methods. Valla declared: “The discourse of historians exhibits more substance, more practical knowledge, more political wisdom . . . , more customs, and more learning of every sort than the precepts