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

Chapter 2. Intellectual context
of these kinds of political narrative histories was to give moral and political
instruction to the reader. Another goal was to legitimise or delegitimise a certain
historical event or a certain contemporary situation on historical grounds.
What position did history occupy among the arts and sciences? Aristotle,
that great authority from antiquity, considered history to be less important
than poetry. He believed that poetry was ‘a more philosophical and more
serious thing than history’, since ‘poetry tends to speak of universals’, i.e. of
‘things that may happen’, while history speaks ‘of particulars’, i.e. of ‘things
that have happened’. 15 Aristotle’s view did not go uncontested. Already in
the fifteenth century the Italian humanist Lorenza Valla (1407-1457) disagreed
with the great Stagirite. Valla held that ‘history is more robust than poetry …
because it is more truthful. It is oriented not toward abstraction but toward
concrete truth … teaching by example’. 16
Another humanist, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), believed that historical
examples had a greater value ‘than the general precepts of the philosophers’.
The past contained material from which ‘universal lessons’ could be drawn. 17
With this feeling, Lipsius, who was professor of history and law at Leiden
University between 1578 and 1591, placed history on the same level, if not a
higher one, as philosophy.
One of the scholars of the early modern period who went the furthest in
exalting history was Vossius. In his De historiae utilitate oratio (Oration on the
Usefulness of History, 1632) Vossius claimed that ‘no study, no science can be
found that is more important than history’, since it ‘lays the foundations’ of
‘the science of civic prudence’ and ‘the study of piety or religion’, which, on
their turn, ‘tower far above all the other sciences’. 18 Yet, although Vossius
toriography: Some Considerations on Intentions and Content”, in Storia della Storiografia, No. 20 (1991),
pp. 120, 123, with quote on the latter.
15 Aristotle, Poetics I with the “Tractatus Coislinianus”: A Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II: The
Fragments of the “On Poets”. Translated with Notes by Richard Janko (Hackett Publishing Company;
Indianapolis/Cambridge; 1987), 51b1 [I:9], p. 12.
16 Quoted from Kelley, “Humanism and History”, p. 242.
17 Mark Morford, “Tacitean Prudentia and the Doctrines of Justus Lipsius”, in T.J. Luce and A.J.
Woodman (eds.), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton University Press; Princeton, 1993), p. 136.
18 Vossius, Geschiedenis als wetenschap, p. 70. ‘Ongetwijfeld bent u het er vanzelfsprekend mee eens
dat er in het privé-leven niets beters is dan op de juiste wijze over God te denken, en in het openbare
leven niets verhevener dan als Gods plaatsbekleder op aarde leiding te geven. Daar volgt uit dat dan
ook twee wetenschappen ver boven de andere uitsteken, enerzijds de bestudering van vroomheid of
godsdienst die leert wat passend is te geloven van God en Christus en hun beiden de vereiste eer te
bewijzen, en anderzijds de wetenschap van de bestuurskunde, die de staat richt op het welzijn van de
burgers, zowel het tijdelijke als het hemelse welzijn. Welnu, zoals wij gezien hebben, legt de geschiedenis
de fundamenten van de ene en van de andere, zodat zonder haar geen van beide tot ontluiking
kan komen. De geschiedenis voert dus tot vroomheid, zodat wij ware christenen zijn, wat het beste is.
De geschiedenis brengt de bestuurskunde voort, zodat wij in Gods plaats aan anderen leiding kunnen
geven, wat het grootste is. Zo kan er geen enkele studie, geen enkele wetenschap, gevonden worden,
die belangrijker is dan de geschiedenis.’ Idem, De historiae vtilitate oratio, p. 18. ‘Procul dubio enim facilè
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