historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 2. Intellectual context
aware that the time he lived in differed from antiquity and that the knowlegde
of the ancients, who were generally held in high esteem by humanists and
early modern scholars, had not always been correct. 9
In early modern Europe history was regarded as a literary genre. 10 The
ideal was to write a narrative in the eloquent and fluent style of the Roman
historian Titus Livius (59/64 BC-17). From the later sixteenth century onwards
the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c.55-c.120) and his difficult
variated style became popular, also amongst Dutch scholars. Daniel Heinsius
(1580-1655), who was professor of history at Leiden University, and Grotius,
but also the Dutch poet and historian Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581-1647),
all sang Tacitus’s praises and tried to imitate his style. 11
In imitation of the classics, early modern writers of narrative history
divided their works into books, followed a chronological order, and incerted
their texts with invented speeches. 12 The topics they dealt with were ‘political’:
the affaires of kings and queens; the doings of popes, emperors, and independent
city-states; revolts and wars, negotiations and battles. 13 In the Dutch
Republic the attention went out to the Dutch Revolt and the resulting war
with the king of Spain, church history, and the question ‘whether the stadholders
had benefitted or harmed the Dutch Republic’. 14 An important goal
for a religion or a republic to endure, it has to be taken back frequently toward its origins’ (Discorsi, III.1,
p. 259), a theory that is closely connected to another principle Machiavelli adhered to, namely ‘that men
who are born in a country conform more or less to the same nature for all time’ (Discorsi, III.43, p. 370).
For the difference between Machiavelli’s and Guicciardini’s approach to history and politics, see the
introduction by James Atkinson and David Sices in The Sweetness of Power, esp. xx, xxx-xxxii.
9 In his Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561) Guicciardini observed that the ‘new invention’ of
gunpowder artillery ‘rendered ridiculous all former weapons of attack which had been used by the
ancients …’. He also noticed that the voyages of the Portuguese and the Spaniards, which had led to a
sea route around Africa to Asia and to the discovery of America, ‘have made it clear that the ancients
were deceived in many ways regarding a knowledge of the earth …’. Francesco Guicciardini, The History
of Italy. Translated, edited, with Notes and an Introduction by Sidney Alexander (Princeton University
Press; Princeton, 1 st ed. 1969, 1984), I, p. 50, and VI, pp. 177-82, with quotes on p. 50 and p. 182
respectively. See also John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles and Inquiries from Herodotus and
Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (Penguin Books/Allen Lane; London, 2007), p. 294, who quotes the
same passages.
10 Burrow, A History of Histories, p. 300. ‘History was a literary genre in which truth took second
place to rhetorical effectiveness in the provision of inspiring examples of good and great conduct.’
11 See, amongst others, E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “Grotius, Hooft and the Writing of History in the
Dutch Republic”, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, Vol. 8: Clio’s Mirror:
Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands (Walburg Pers; Zuthpen, 1984), pp. 55-72; Lesley Gilbert,
“Hooft as Historian and Political Thinker”, in Dutch Crossing, No. 49 (1993), pp. 130-45; Jan Waszink,
“Hugo Grotius’ ‘Annales et historiae de rebus Belgicis’ from the evidence in his correspondence, 1604-
1644”, in Lias, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2004), pp. 249-67; idem, “The Ideal of the Statesman-Historian: The Case of
Hugo Grotius”, pp. 101-23. For Heinsius, see chapter 3.
12 Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (W.W.
Norton and Company; New York/London, 1 st ed. 1965, 1984), pp. 208, 211.
13 For the ‘exclusively political focus’ of humanist narrative historiography, see Burrow, A History
of Histories, p. 300, and Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 209.
14 For these last two topics, see E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “A Repertory of Dutch Early Modern His-