Renaissance Historians: Bruni, Machiavel

What was History in the Renaissance? This class tries to answer this question by focusing on three great historians and political philosophers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century: Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini. Analyzing their local and peninsular histories, we will learn how Renaissance scholars read, learned from, and rewrote Greek and especially Roman History. We will dive into Bruni’s reading of Florence’s distant and recent past, including historical events discussed in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Also, we will learn how Machiavelli transformed his reading of Livy in a laboratory to understand the tragic events of Renaissance Italy, and how Guicciardini narrates and analyzes contemporary Italian history. Dialoguing with Renaissance Historians, we will learn how creative and problematic is the reading of the past for the understanding of the present. We will discuss the many functions of History and reflect upon big ideas such as fortune, virtue, tyranny, freedom, and truth.          In English.