Ars historica

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Ars historica was a branch of humanist historiography in the later Renaissance. It treated history as an art and focused on how to write history well, bringing in philology and textual criticism. Cicero called history the magistra vitae and, in his De Oratore, said history sits at the top of ars rhetorica, where eloquence serves the truth of human experience. The ars historica aimed to add critical methods to historical writing and became important during the religious conflicts of the late 16th century.

The movement drew on classic historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus, and it also valued the works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Greek influences came from Lucian and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The effort to elevate history to a classical art was inspired by Aristotle’s Ars Poetica, which renewed literary criticism.

Key figures included Francis Robortello, known as the father of hermeneutics, who wrote the first De arte historica in 1548. Francesco Patrizi wrote ten dialogues on history in 1560. In 1566, Jean Bodin published Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, a foundational work that used humanist methods to examine both ancient and contemporary history. The idea of method became central, broadening the scope of ars historica to help organize knowledge in encyclopedias and bibliographies.

The genre spread beyond Italy and France to Basel (Simon Grynaeus and Theodor Zwinger) and to Protestant historians like David Chytraeus, François Baudouin, Sebastian Fox Morcillo, and England’s Thomas Blundeville. In Basel, Pietro Perna promoted Erasmian standards in religion, medicine, and history. He published illustrated editions of Paolo Giovio and assembled major works in two compilations: The Methodus historica (1576) and the Artis Historicae Penus (1579), totaling 18 works.

Perna’s compilations later informed Antonio Possevino in his critique of Bodin (1592) and his Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (1597), which updated Bodin’s bibliography and censured some works on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.

In the 17th century interest in the rhetoric of ars historica continued, but its intellectual core weakened as Cartesian and scientific thinking rose. Agostino Mascardi’s Dell’arte historica and Gerardus Vossius’s Historia (1623) kept the tradition alive, as did Degory Wheare’s De ratione et methodo legendi historias (1623).