From Valla to Facio, from the practice to the rhetorical theorization of historical writing

Abstract

At the end of the fifteenth century, in the Aragonese court of Naples, the reflections about the writing of history produced precise rhetorical laws, summarized in the Actius by Giovanni Pontano, but those reflections started up in 1447, with an inflamed controversy among two of the most important humanists of that time: Lorenzo Valla and Bartolomeo Facio. That controversy presented many innovative elements in the invention of political strategies and in the definition of rhetorical rules: the description of contemporaneity and the reorganization of memory found legitimacy through a new professional attention to the analysis of sources and to the use of rhetorical form. About these problems, latin antiquity did not offer specific theoretical models, which were instead adapted from the judicial oratory. In short, the connection between the description of the contemporary, the rhetorical reflection, the need to celebrate and legitimate the royal majesty found a very fertile field in the court of Naples. The discipline of historical writing found there a privileged space: there the historians were well paid, there they were professionally recognized and, subsequently, there they invented a precise regulation of arguments, forms and methods in the historical writing.