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Guarino's Views on History and Historiography

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Guarino's Views on History and Historiography GUARINO'S VIEWS ON HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY Ian Thomson Indiana University, Bloomington Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) was the most influential educator of the second generation after Petrarch (d. 1374). His career as a teacher of the Latin and Greek humanities began at Florence (1410-14), developed at Venice (1415-19) and Verona (1420-29), and culminated at Ferrara (1430- 60), where after five years as tutor to Leonello d'Este he became Public Professor of Rhetoric in 1436. 1 He also taught many private students (socii or contubernales) in his own boarding school (contubernium). To this "workshop of eloquence," compared by his student Lodovico Carbone to the Trojan horse from which poured forth princes without number/ came students of all ages, including some from England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and even Cyprus. 3 In the middle decades of the fifteenth century, it was undoubtedly the most famous center of humanist education in Europe. Like Vittorino da Feltre, his only peer as a teacher, Guarino never wrote a treatise on education. We must, therefore, rely on the reminiscences of pupils and friends, as well as the few remarks about education that Guarino made in his letters, for what we can deduce about his teaching theory and practice. This article deals with his views on the writing of history and the place of history in a liberal education. For the first our main source is a letter4 he wrote in 1446 to his ex-pupil, Tobia dal Borgo, who had been appointed historiographer to Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini. Its contents are interesting not only as the mature reflections of the greatest professor of his time, but as a blend of what have been called the "rhetorical" and "scientific" approaches to the writing of history. The idea that fifteenth-century historians could be divided into two main groups originated with Burckhardt and was developed at much greater length by Fueter. 5 The "rhetorical" historians, such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Benedetto Accolti, Marcantonio Sabellico, Giovanni Pontano, Lodrisio Crivelli, and Giovanni Simonetta, have generally been classified as stylists whose aim was to glorify individual patrons or states. Their interest in style led, according to Fueter, to carelessness over fact and chronology. The "scientific" group, including Flavio Biondo, Tristano Calchi, Lorenzo Valla, and Pomponio Leto, has been thought of as 49 EXPLORATIONS IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE pursuing history for its own sake, objective in weighing and presenting evidence, and avoiding the use of history as a vehicle of political propaganda or the laudation of individuals. Ever since Burckhardt singled him out for special mention, Biondo has usually been the most admired for his objectivity, especially in two of his works, Italia ilIustrata and Historiarum ab anna CCCCVII, id est ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii, usque ad annum MCCCCXL decades. Ernest F. Jacob, for example, has stated: "Biondo had learned from Guarino of Verona both relevance and extreme attention to accuracy, and if he did not follow Guarino's advice to the historian about beauty of form, he practices the detachment advocated by that teacher. ... Bruni, who was the leader of the rhetorical school, refused to admit him as an acquaintance. In a way, Biondo was a lonely figure.,,6 This requires some qualification. First, although Biondo was fourteen years younger than Guarino, he was never his pupil, nor, so far as I know, is there any proof that he learned his methods from Guarino. The two men and their wives became friendly in 1422 or a little earlier. Their correspondence continued fairly regularly until about 1432, after which the acquaintance seems to have lapsed. 7 In 1423 Biondo had discovered a codex containing Sextus Aurelius Victor's Caesares, and called Guarino's attention to it. Guarino's reply is that of one equal to another and shows that he respected Biondo's judgement as to the importance of the new discovery.8 By 1446 Biondo was an established historian. Since letters from great humanists often circulated as models of style, it is possible that in that year or soon after he saw a copy of Guarino's letter to Tobia, but it is unlikely that it changed his thinking in any way. Biondo was very much his own man and capable of thinking for himself. The truth may be that Guarino formed some of his more valuable ideas about historiography from Biondo. Both men respected the historian's duty as impartial recorder of the events of the past, but the idea was not unique to them; they could have had it from reading the same Classical sources. Both, too, had a conception of Italy as a unit, but again this is something they could have absorbed independently from the classics, and in neither case did it go very deep. In his letter to Tobia, Guarino deplores the incessant squabbles that keep Italian states from uniting against their real enemies, the Turks. But this idea had been implicit in every call for a crusade, and it must have been present to Guarino's mind in 1446 when the infidel was poised to capture Constantinople. He is not so much castigating the Italians for their blind internal struggles for local and temporary advantages as showing his anxiety for the preservation of an empire in which he had traveled and learned Greek. The thought of a political unification is far from his mind, 50 .
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