Ars Historica was a genre of humanist

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...

 historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

 in the later Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

. It produced a small library of treatises underscoring the stylistic aspects of writing history as a work of art, but also introducing the contributions of philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 and textual criticism

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

 in its precepts and evaluations.

Background

At the summit of his ars oratoria Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

 had celebrated history as the magistra vitae

Magistra vitae

Historia est Magistra Vitae is a Latin expression, taken from Cicero's De Oratore, which suggests that "history is life's teacher"...

. In his De Oratore

De Oratore

De Oratore is a dialogue written by Cicero in 55 BCE. It is set in 91 BCE, when Lucius Licinius Crassus dies, just before the social war and the civil war between Marius and Sulla, during which Marcus Antonius Orator, the other great orator of this dialogue, dies...

 he proposed history as the summit of ars rhetorica, the rhetorical culture in which eloquence is at the service of the truth of human experience.

Within the context of the rhetorical culture of humanism, the ars historica was an attempt to introduce critical and scholarly criteria into historical literature. Its significance was great during the period of confessional struggle between Protestants and Catholics in the later sixteenth century. In addition to the examples of the classical historians (Herodotus

Herodotus

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...

 and Thucydides

Thucydides

Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...

, Livy

Livy

Titus Livius — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...

 and Tacitus

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...

), the contemporary works of Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...

 and Guicciardini enhanced the prestige of historical writing. Two further Greek writers were classical sources for the ars historica: Lucian of Samosata and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

The sixteenth century

The attempt to raise history to the status of a classical ars derived impetus from the mid-century critical renewal brought about by the Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica is a term meaning "The Art of Poetry" or "On the Nature of Poetry". Early examples of Ars Poetica by Aristotle and Horace have survived and have since spawned many other poems that bear the same name...

 of Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

. The text of Aristotle's Poetics was an inspiration in Italy, renewing the critical discourse about literature. Francis Robortello

Francis Robortello

Francesco Robortello was a Renaissance humanist, nicknamed Canis grammaticus for his confrontational and demanding manner.-As scholar:...

, known as the father of hermeneutics and an Aristotelian exponent, also wrote the first treatise De arte historica in 1548.

Francesco Patrizi wrote ten dialogues on history in 1560. In 1566 Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of sovereignty; he was also an influential writer on demonology....

 published his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, a seminal work. Using the critical apparatus of humanist historiography Bodin reviews and evaluates the classical and contemporary bibliography of historical writing. The idea of method was also a leading systematic concept of the era, expanding the scope of the classical ars. Bodin's Methodus reflects the search for new historical principles based on intellectual reform of textual criticism. Such an attempt speaks for the elevation of history as a pre-scientific organizing principle for the contemporary encyclopedia and its bibliography.
The vogue of the genre was international, stretching beyond the Italy of Robortello, Patrizi and their followers and the France of Bodin to the Basel

Basel

Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

 humanists (Simon Grynaeus

Simon Grynaeus

Simon Grynaeus , German scholar and theologian of the Reformation, son of Jacob Gryner, a Swabian peasant, was born at Veringendorf, in Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.He adopted the name Grynaeus from the epithet of Apollo in Virgil...

 and Theodor Zwinger

Theodor Zwinger

Theodor Zwinger the Elder was a Swiss physician and humanist scholar. He made significant contributions to the emerging genres of reference and travel literature...

. Further it reached Protestant historians such David Chytraeus

David Chytraeus

David Chytraeus or Chyträus was a German Lutheran theologian and historian.His real surname was Kochhafe, which in Classical Greek is χυτρα, from where he derived the Latinized pseudonym "Chyträus".Chytraeus was professor of the University of Rostock and one of the co-authors of the Formula of...

, Flanders (Francois Baudouin

François Baudouin

François Baudouin , also called Balduinus, was a French jurist, Christian controversialist and historian. Among the most colourful of the noted French humanists, he was respected by his contemporaries as a statesman and jurist, even as they frowned upon on his perceived inconstancy in matters of...

), Spain (Sebastian Fox Morcillo

Sebastian Fox Morcillo

Sebastian Fox Morcillo , a Spanish scholar and philosopher, was born in Seville between 1526 and 1528. Around 1548 he studied in Leuven. Following the example of the Spanish Jew Judas Abarbanel, he published commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, in which he endeavoured to reconcile their teachings...

) and as far as England (Thomas Blundeville

Thomas Blundeville

Thomas Blundeville was an English humanist writer and mathematician. He is known for work on logic, astronomy, education and horsemanship, as well as for translations from the Italian. His interests were both wide-ranging and directed towards practical ends, and he adapted freely a number of the...

). In Basel Pietro Perna

Pietro Perna

Pietro Perna was an Italian printer, the leading printer of Late Renaissance Basel, the Erasmian crossroads between Italian Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation. His books promoted the Italian heretical thinkers at the origins of Socinianism and the theory of Tolerance...

 distinguished himself as a promoter of a new cultural and religious model rooted in Erasmian critical standards in religion and medicine but also in historical scholarship. As a historical printer he is best known for his illustrated editions of Paolo Giovio

Paolo Giovio

thumb|Paolo Giovio.thumb|Monument to Paolo Giovo by [[Francesco da Sangallo]], in [[San Lorenzo di Firenze|San Lorenzo]] Basilica, [[Florence]].Paolo Giovio was an Italian physician, historian and biographer, and prelate.He is chiefly known as the author of a celebrated work of...

, but also for editions of standard and contemporary works, including Protestant chronicles and histories. Perna brought together all the major authors and works of the ars historica in two compilations. The Methodus historica (1576) featured Bodin followed by another dozen titles. The Artis Historicae Penus

Artis Historicae Penus

thumb|rightArtis Historicae Penus is a compilation of 18 ars historica works brought out in 1579 by the late Renaissance Basel printer Pietro Perna. This compendium in octavo appeared in 2 volumes with a copious index. A third volume adds the final work by Antonio Riccoboni, often missing in...

 (1579) adds another five titles for a total of 18 works.

Subsequently, Perna's work served the Jesuit Antonio Possevino

Antonio Possevino

Antonio Possevino was a Jesuit protagonist of Counter Reformation as a papal diplomat and a Jesuit controversialist, encyclopedist and bibliographer...

 for his critique of Bodin [1592] and as the target and textual source for his Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam

Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam

Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam 1597The author of this bibliographical guide is Antonio Possevino, a major fugure in the diplomatic and intellectual life of the Counter Reformation...

 (1597). It plagiarizes Bodin, but also updates his bibliography (Lipsius

Justus Lipsius

Justus Lipsius was a Southern-Netherlandish philologist and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia...

, Baronio

Caesar Baronius

Cesare Baronio was an Italian Cardinal and ecclesiastical historian...

, Carolus Sigonius

Carolus Sigonius

Carolus Sigonius was an Italian humanist, born in Modena.Having studied Greek under the learned Franciscus Portus of Candia, he attended the philosophical schools of Bologna and Pavia, and in 1545 was elected professor of Greek in his native place in succession to Portus...

, Tasso

Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...

) and censures works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church. A first version was promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559, and a revised and somewhat relaxed form was authorized at the Council of Trent...

.

The seventeenth century

In the century that followed, interest in the rhetoric of the genre continued, though its intellectual content was exhausted. The literary focus of Agostino Mascardi's Dell’arte historica reflects the intellectual demotion of the magistra vitae

Magistra vitae

Historia est Magistra Vitae is a Latin expression, taken from Cicero's De Oratore, which suggests that "history is life's teacher"...

 concepts with the advent of Cartesian and scientific rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

. Gerardus Vossius published a work in 1623 by this title that had subsequent editions, including the one pictured above from 1653. Degory Wheare

Degory Wheare

Degory Wheare, also spelt Digory Whear was an historian, the first Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford.-Life:...

's Oxford contribution, De ratione et methodo legendi historias, also appeared in 1623.