Between Historiography and Rhetoric: Perspectives in the Later Italian Middle Age

Abstract

This monographic section assembles in a widely re-elaborated way the reports presented during the workshop The trade of Writing History: the Birth and Evolution of the Historiographic Job between 13^th and15^th Century that took place in Potenza in April 2016. In the following essays it is recalled a wide chronological period focusing on three moments where a meeting between high cultural education of the writers and historiographical works took place. The path starts at the beginning of the 13^th Century with the analysis of the chronicle of Boncompagno da Signa, magister of ars dictaminis who wrote when the secular chroniclers of the same years had a professional education that included the rhetoric study. In the second stage attention is given to the writings of Albertino Mussato, crowned poet and historian in the Padua University, who tried to use in the historiographical contest the renewed knowledge of the Latin literature reached at the threshold of the 14^th Century. The arrival point is made by the analysis of historiography writend in the Neapolitan court of Alfonso il Magnanimo during the forties of the 15^th Century, when Lorenzo Valla and Bartolomeo Facio, beyond composing the historiographical works, clashed in a harsh controversy that had as its object in the correct way of writing history