Chronicle Into History

In Florence in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the essentially medieval values of the age of Dante were transformed into the intellectual attitudes characteristic of the early Renaissance. Mr Green examines this change as it was reflected in the works of the city's vernacular chroniclers. These merchant historians evolved out of the traditional universal chronicle of the Middle Ages an embryonic form of the modern history, exemplified at the beginning of the fifteenth century by the Istoria di Firenze of Goro Dati. In the course of this transition from chronicle to history, the world-view expressed by the chronicle - which assumed that all that happened contributed to a divinely inspired historical plan - yielded before a more selective conception of the significance of events as possible natural causes of change. At the same time, the ideals underlying the medieval sense of cosmic order, with their other worldly overtones, gave way before the more secular, humanist values of the emerging Renaissance.