THE ARTIS HISTORICAE PENUS

This study takes as its focus the eighteen Neo-Latin treatises included in the anthology Artis Historicae Penus, edited by the German jurist, diplomat, translator, historian, and theologian Johann Wolff (1537–1600) and printed in its final version in 1579 by the prestigious Basel publisher Pietro Perna (1519–82).Footnote ⁹ For many reasons, this particular anthology provides an ideal point of departure for exploring the Renaissance art of history.

From a geographic as well as a confessional point of view, the Artis Historicae Penus is remarkably diverse, uniting nine Catholic, seven Protestant, and two pagan texts by two French, seven Italian, one Spanish, two Greek, two Swiss, one Hungarian, and three German authors (in addition to the Swiss, German, and Hungarian Protestant translators and the German Protestant editor, each of whom wrote a paratext).Footnote ¹⁰ Furthermore, most of the contributors to the anthology were Renaissance polyhistorians in the true sense of the word, practicing jurisprudence while teaching theology or philosophy at universities or working as diplomats, civil servants, ministers, medical doctors, counselors to princes, or private tutors to aristocratic families. The authors’ multifaceted occupations illustrate the important point that in the sixteenth century, history was not yet clearly demarcated as an independent discipline practiced by specialists but, rather, was shaded into an array of other artes, theoretical as well as practical.Footnote ¹¹ Finally, while the Artis Historicae Penus must have been intended as a collection of the most up-to-date theory in the field, contemporaneous contributions actually span a good eighty years, from Giovanni Pontano's De Historia (On history, 1499) to Theodor Zwinger's homonymous 1577 treatise. Wolff's anthology also includes two ancient Greek texts: Dionysius of Halicarnassus's De Thucydidis Historia Iudicium (Περὶ τοῦ Θουκυδίδου χαρακτῆρος [On Thucydides]) and Lucian of Samosata's De Scribenda Historia (Πῶς δεῖ Ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν [How to write history]), from the first century BCE and the second century CE, respectively, in András Dudith's and Jacob Molzer's 1560 and 1538 Latin translations.Footnote ¹² Indeed, the Artis Historicae Penus's chronological diversity constitutes another element of its suitability as a lens through which to study the Renaissance art of history—not as the product of a specific decade or a particular place, but as an epochal, supranational, supraconfessional, and supradisciplinary phenomenon epitomizing sophisticated and cosmopolitan humanist culture.

Through the medium of Neo-Latin, the humanist lingua franca, the Artis Historicae Penus creates a virtual dialogue across time and space between beacons past and present of European historiography. In its pages, giants of contemporaneous historical theory such as Jean Bodin (1530–96) and Francesco Patrizi (1529–97) rub shoulders with ancient writers in Renaissance translation as well as with contemporaries who are less well known in the present day but were certainly no less erudite. Indeed, as its title suggests, the Artis Historicae Penus is a treasure trove of cutting-edge historical-method texts, at once a point of departure for theoretical discussions and a useful vade mecum for historical writers. In its first version (1576), comprising twelve texts, the anthology bore the title of its most prestigious contribution, Bodin's groundbreaking Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (Method for the easy comprehension of history, 1566).Footnote ¹³ However, for the second and more comprehensive two-volume edition of 1579—which constitutes the focus of the present article—Wolff changed the title to Artis Historicae Penus.Footnote ¹⁴ The following analysis implicitly interrogates the meaning of this shift, for the foregrounding of the term ars in the title of the second edition is conspicuous and invites examination of the weight attached to artistry in the artes historicae.

STATE OF THE ARTES

A rich body of literature has explored the ars historica and Renaissance historical theory using the traditional hermeneutic tools of close reading and contextualization. The current article seeks to build on these studies using methods of distant reading.

Early twentieth-century studies by Eduard Fueter and Benedetto Croce underscored continuities and discontinuities between Renaissance historiographical theory and practice.Footnote ¹⁵ In his study of English seventeenth-century historical thought, John Greville Pocock traced the roots of the Renaissance ars historica in studies of Roman law by French Renaissance jurists.Footnote ¹⁶ Fifty years later, Girolamo Cotroneo's work traced the development of the “ragione storica” from its fourteenth-century Italian humanist origins through Bodin's Methodus.Footnote ¹⁷ George Nadel, in an important article, discussed the role of the genre in the development of the philosophy of history.Footnote ¹⁸ In other studies, Bodin translator Beatrice Reynolds described the ars historica's gradual approximation of political philosophy, on the one hand, and juridical theory, on the other;Footnote ¹⁹ Giorgio Spini discussed the Italian artes historicae as prisms of Counter-Reformation dogmatism;Footnote ²⁰ Manuela Doni Garfagnini read them in the light of Machiavelli's Istorie Fiorentine (Florentine histories, 1532).Footnote ²¹ George Huppert emphasized the importance of erudition and philosophy in the French artes historicae, as did Daniel Woolf and John Salmon for kindred English materials.Footnote ²² Donald Kelley studied the alliance of law and history in French historical thought;Footnote ²³ Astrid Witschi-Bernz emphasized the element of pyrrhonistic skepticism in (primarily) German and French “historical-method literature” between 1500 and 1800;Footnote ²⁴ and Arno Seifert examined the relation between the early modern concepts of history and epistemology.Footnote ²⁵ In the most comprehensive study of the Renaissance ars historica, Anthony Grafton explored sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artes by Reiner Reineck, Francesco Patrizi, and Jean Bodin;Footnote ²⁶ Cesc Esteve, in different works, focuses on Spanish specimens of the genre as part of a contemporaneous scientific paradigm sanctioning ideological “narratives of origin” and in relation to censorship.Footnote ²⁷ Finally, Silvana Vida addresses the skeptically rooted “obsession with method” underlying the artes historicae in general and Wolff's anthology in particular.Footnote ²⁸

The aesthetic dimensions of the ars historica—the more specific object of interest in the present context—have also been studied by other scholars. In the introduction to his study of Italian Renaissance historiography, Eric Cochrane problematizes the fact that quite a few of his predecessors held views about historiographical form that directly contradicted those of the Renaissance theorists of history whom they studied.Footnote ²⁹ In the preface to his edited volume of artes historicae, Eckhardt Kessler ponders the essential unity of a “demand for truth . . . with the idea of a magnificent and sumptuous representation of past events.”Footnote ³⁰ In the 2005 prelude to his 2007 monographic study of the artes historicae, Anthony Grafton pays a great deal of attention to Renaissance theoretical discussions of invented orationes and conciones.Footnote ³¹ And, most recently, Florian Neumann examines the relation between the ars historica, the ars poetica, and the ars rhetorica in the work of the historian, rhetorician, and poet Famiano Strada (1572–1649), implicitly revising Spini's unbenign presentation of the same Jesuit as “champion of the new crusade.”Footnote ³²

The present article builds especially on these latter studies, and in complementary fashion: the distant reading of computational philology augments what other scholars have done via close reading and contextual study. Essentially, the present article proposes, first, that the current understanding of the ars historica could benefit from a new approach to its aesthetic dimensions and, second, that further focus on the aesthetic dimensions of the ars historica could help stimulate fruitful exchange between scholars of Renaissance historical theory and method and Renaissance scholars outside the circle of specialists in intellectual history—aesthetic scholars and literary historians in particular. The relation of the ars historica to contemporaneous poetical theory or the period's various artistic forms of historical representation—historical drama, historical prose, historical epic and lyric poetry, historical painting, historical tapestry, and historical sculpture—has, for instance, not been examined, though such cross-disciplinary studies would be valuable on both sides.Footnote ³³

The assumption of this investigation is that the treatises collected in the Artis Historicae Penus express ideas about the compositional and stylistic aspects of history writing that resemble those appearing in coeval poetics and in the various artistic forms of historical representation listed above.Footnote ³⁴ In fact, several of the contributors to the Artis Historicae Penus penned artes poeticae, or works on poetic imitation, including Francesco Robertello (In Aristotelis Poeticam Explicationes [Explications of Aristotle's poetics], 1548), Sebastián Fox Morcillo (De Imitatione [On imitation], 1554), Giovanni Viperano (De Poetica Libri Tres [Three books on poetics], 1579), Antonio Riccoboni (Poetica [Poetics], 1585), and Francesco Patrizi (Della poetica [On poetics], 1586). Indeed, as Nicholas Popper has pointed out, in the Renaissance, history was not yet “compartmentalized as its own unique discipline” but “shaded into poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and other arts.”Footnote ³⁵ Or, as Paulina Kewes put it, “[Renaissance] history plays are rightly interpreted as a form of history writing, alongside prose historiography, historical poems, historical ballads, and historical pamphlets.”Footnote ³⁶ In other words, the sixteenth century did not distinguish clearly between historical cognition and historical representation, or between the historian's inquiry into the past and exposition of the facts uncovered by this inquiry. Thus, in their attention to historiographical style, some Renaissance artes historicae are almost indistinguishable from the period's artes poeticae—except, of course, for their contradicting views on which art was the better: that of poetry or that of history. In sum, the semantic diversity of the term ars invites further examination of the nature of the Renaissance ars historica.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND ARS

The 1579 edition of the Artis Historicae Penus appears to want to settle, once and for all, the question posed by Sperone Speroni (1500–88) in his 1560 Dialogo Della Istoria: Fragmento (Dialogue on history: fragment), which was not included in Wolff's anthology. The question is whether or not history should be considered an art.Footnote ³⁷ The title of Speroni's volume draws a clear connection between the concepts of ars and historia, yet what did sixteenth-century theorists mean by art? And which concept(s) of historia did they apply?

According to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short's A Latin-English Dictionary, there are many different connotations of the term ars in classical Latin.Footnote ³⁸ Upon closer inspection, though, these connotations can be grouped into two broader categories: one relating to the cognitive and epistemological sphere and denoting, among other things, “the theory of any art or science” and “science, knowledge” and the other designating any practical form of artistry: “skill in joining something, combining, working it, etc.”; “skill in producing any material form, handicraft, trade, occupation, employment (τέχνη)”; or “any physical or mental activity, so far as it is practically exhibited; a profession, art (music, poetry, medicine, etc.).”Footnote ³⁹

Authoritative reference works support the notion that there may be more to learn about the artistic element of the Renaissance ars historica, though A Latin-English Dictionary and the Oxford Latin Dictionary are of course thesauri of classical Latin. However, Johann Ramminger's Neulateinische Wortliste: Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700 (Neo-Latin glossary: a dictionary of Latin from Petrarch to 1700), which is based on an archive of approximately 500 million words, registers artistic meanings of related lemmata such as artifex (“artifex, -icis, adj.—kunstreich, raffiniert: VIVES disc I 4,1 p. 157 de hoc artifice et utili dolo ingesserunt praeceptores, quae aperte tradita respuissent discipuli”) and artista (“artista, -ae, f.—Handwerker: CAMPANELLA synt 2,5 cum in officinis artistarum plus philosophiae realis et verae habeatur quam in scholis philosophorum, consulendi sunt diligenter pictores, tinctores, ferrarii, . . .  auriductores, . . . bombardarii, pannifici, destillatores et id genus reliqui”). On this basis, it may reasonably be supposed that the term ars had both artistic and cognitive connotations in Neo-Latin.Footnote ⁴⁰

In this article's quantitative analysis of the weight attached to historical cognition and historiographical artistry in the Artis Historicae Penus, two semantic clusters are established, and the relative presence of both in the texts is examined. These two clusters are the result of a hermeneutical process in which close readings of similar materials and the consultation of scholarly literature generated a specialized knowledge of terminology in the field. In particular, Sofie Kluge's work on the Spanish ars historica tradition—including close readings and contextualizations of texts by Juan Páez de Castro (“Memorial de las cosas necesarias para escribir la historia” [Memo of things necessary to writing history], 1555), Sebastián Fox Morcillo (De Historiae Institutione Dialogus [Dialogue on the instruction of history], 1557, included in Wolff's anthology), Juan Costa y Beltrán (De Conscribenda Rerum Historia [How to write history], 1591), Luis Cabrera de Córdoba (De historia para entenderla y escribirla, 1611), and Jerónimo de San José (Genio De La Historia [Genie of history], 1651)—has provided the present investigation with a basic vocabulary and a fundamental idea of the period's scholarly conversation about history.Footnote ⁴¹

First and foremost, the examinations of Spanish historiographical texts listed above have made visible a complex poetry-history binary rooted in the classical rhetorical tradition, where “historia and fabula,” in Bietenholz’s words, “still were a team” yet were at the same time pitted against each other as kindred but different forms of narrative.Footnote ⁴² Like the Latin theorists they leaned on, Spanish historical-method authors applied the classical tripartite distinction between poetry, rhetoric, and history, recommending a type of history writing that was neither a compilation of dry facts nor a succession of poets’ lies but, rather, a balanced presentation of artistic and cognitive elements. Pondering the notion that “many truths do not make a history” and that history should not be “without wit,” Royal Chronicler Juan Páez de Castro (1510–70), author of the 1555 memo on the writing of history that propelled the Spanish ars historica, urged a break with the local historiographical tradition, which contained “little artifice and delicacy.”Footnote ⁴³

The Spanish materials constitute, of course, an empirical basis too narrow and too geographically specific to make even moderate claims about the artes more generally. Our analysis tests ideas about the artes historicae that were generated by applying digital tools to a limited set of texts, most of them noncanonical and sparsely studied—namely, the texts included in Wolff's anthology. A fundamental supposition of our study, however, is that the intricate poetry-history binary advanced in the abovementioned Spanish texts on historical theory and method could be more globally relevant to the Renaissance ars historica.

In order to clarify the assumptions about the Renaissance understanding of ars underlying the present investigation and to make clear how and why the word stems in the two clusters were selected, we have chosen a few passages from the Artis Historicae Penus as illustrations of the kind of historiographical discussions that permeate Wolff's anthology. Because our point of departure was the Spanish ars historica, Sebastián Fox Morcillo's De Historiae Institutione Dialogus was a natural choice. As its title suggests, this text takes the form of a dialogue on the “instruction” of history.Footnote ⁴⁴ To be sure, Fox Morcillo is no Bodin and no Patrizi. He could be termed a marginal contributor to Wolff's anthology—an outsider, even—because of his Iberian heritage. Nevertheless, Fox Morcillo, a philosopher and Plato scholar who trained in Leuwen with Petrus Nannius (1496–1557), is a stringent thinker, whose cogent theoretical vocabulary provides this investigation with a helpful conceptual basis. In terms of examining the interplay between cognitive and artistic elements in the Renaissance ars historica, his can be seen as more relatable than the volume's more original, but perhaps also more idiosyncratic, contributions. Sometimes, as the German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1944) argued in his study of the Baroque mourning play, the nature of a historical phenomenon is more clearly visible in its “marginal form” than in the consummate specimens.Footnote ⁴⁵ In terms of the Renaissance understanding of history as ars, then, what does the Dialogus bring to the table?

Fox Morcillo's work illustrates how the Renaissance conversation about the art of history revolved around a history-poetry binary. Taking the Latin rhetorical tradition's tripartite division of narrative as a starting point, Renaissance theorists of all stripes measured historia against other forms of narrative discourse, often following Quintilian's definitions in The Orator's Education 2.4.2 to the letter. Against the “fictitious” narrative of tragedy and epic, on the one hand, and the “realistic” and “verisimilar” narrative typical of comedy, on the other, history was generally seen as the “exposition of actual fact.”Footnote ⁴⁶ So, too, in the Dialogus—as a form of discourse that distinguishes itself through its commitment to truth, history is compared with various forms of poetry that are “verisimilar” at best and “false” at worst: “Thence Quintilian's opinion that there are three forms of narrative: One false; another verisimilar but fictive; and a third which is mixed and extended. Indeed, a fable is that narrative which, as he says, moves in tragedies and epic songs, not truthfully but remotely from the truth. An argument is that which, though it be false, resembles something true, as in comedy. History, then, is the exposition of things that actually happened.”Footnote ⁴⁷

It is true, of course, that the Dialogus tends to dissolve this binary, confirming the hypothesis about the complementary relationship between cognition and artistry in the Renaissance ars historica. Notably, the section “On the Definition of History” posits historia as a form of narrative both eloquent and true, clear and embellished, balancing the focus on historical truth with artistic appeal in order to enhance the audience's receptiveness toward history's many profitable lessons, lessons that make it the most—morally—“useful” thing to the human race: “History, finally, as we said before, is the full, eloquent, true, lucid and ornate exposition of deeds. Thus, nothing could indeed be more useful, excellent, divine or more necessary to the human race.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Indeed, according to Fox Morcillo, the historian should cultivate a style that is both “lucid and ornate,” simultaneously clear and pleasant. He even goes so far as to position historia “somehow in between” poetry and philosophy, as a narrative that combines the “gravity, moderation, force, and reason” of the latter with the “elegance, passion, and pleasantness” of the former:

However, as its last section, “Against the Poets and Their Study,” makes clear, the Dialogus does not dissolve the history-poetry binary; instead, it complicates it, juxtaposing the historian's ideal philosophical-poetic discourse with the negative image of poets who invent things “far from all reason,” bringing forth “the most disgraceful fables that are most harmful to the character of the young.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In short, according to Fox Morcillo, history is artistic—not in the (bad) sense of seeking to gratify the senses, but in the sense of applying skillfully constructed discourse to search for truth.

GENERAL METHODOLOGY

On the basis of the understanding of the ars historica reached through close readings of Spanish artes, two semantic clusters were established, delineating a set of conceptual pairs that responded to the history-poetry binary found in Fox Morcillo's Dialogus and other Spanish historical-method texts.Footnote ⁵¹ This was accomplished by listing all conceivable concepts related to history as representation (the writing of history) and history as cognition (reading of history) and then searching for these concepts in the Artis Historicae Penus text file using BBEdit, an open-access multi-file text searching application, noting how often and in what contexts they came up. In this process, concepts such as praeceptum (precept) and doctrina (doctrine) had to be discarded, due to the fact that they did not occur often enough in the text. Then followed a process of lemmatization, whereby inflected or variant forms of the same concept were grouped together—a not entirely unproblematic operation in some cases because of irregular Latin inflections, as in the cases of scribe (write), fingo (invent), and cognosco (know). In these three cases, searches had to include both present and perfect stems. In the end, the following two word-stem clusters were settled on:

The semantic field circumscribed by cluster A (encompassing notions of creativity, writing, imitation, fiction, poetry, fable, narrative, ornament, oratory, and harangue) variously contrasts with the semantic field circumscribed by cluster B (encompassing notions of cognition, reading, comprehension, method, study, science, reason, proof, argument, and perspicuity). The stem poe, for example, found in cluster A, presents a counterpoint to the stem scienti, one denoting the literary approach to historiography and the other a scientific take. The stem fab, from cluster A—associated with literary terms such as fabella (fable, story) and fabula (fable, story, tale) and derived forms such as fabulosus (fabulous, storied), as well as the entire semantic field relating to faber (worksman, craftsman, artisan), which includes fabre (ingeniously)—contrasts with prob, from cluster B, which denotes demonstrability, approvability (probabilitas), and its derived meanings. On a more detailed level, perspicu, in cluster B, which represents an array of forms signifying transparency and clarity of style (the adjectives perspicuus, perspicua, and perspicuum, and the adverb perspicue), responds to the stylistic stem orn, in cluster A, which represents a group of forms (ornatus, ornata, and ornatum, as well as the adverb ornate) connected to the aesthetic embellishment of historiographical discourse.

Though they belong to a slightly different and more specific register, the final two word stems in cluster A (concio, orat) have been included because the phenomena they refer to—the speeches and harangues with which historians had invested kings, military leaders, and other historical protagonists since the time of Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War (1.85–86; 2.35–46)—epitomize the artistic element of the Renaissance ars historica.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, in their undeniable capacity as inventions of the historian, these speeches blurred the boundary between systematic cognition and imaginative re-creation of the past. In the present investigation, they contrast with the stems argum and ratio, which oppose an affective, imaginative approach to history and endorse logical argument and reason.

Our examination of these clusters and their relative presence in the Artis Historicae Penus was guided by the following research questions:

1. 1. What is the occurrence of stems relating to ars historica as a systematic practice of understanding?

2. 2. What is the occurrence of stems relating to ars historica as an artistic writing practice?

Considering how basic these research questions will seem to Renaissance scholars, it is all the more surprising that they have not been posed before. Even the most comprehensive and in-depth studies consider only a few of the texts in Wolff's anthology from a comparative angle.Footnote ⁵³ This is likely due to the text's inaccessibility, which was touched upon above and will be further discussed, from a digitization perspective, below. Indeed, the poor quality of most extant copies and the lack of modern philological editions and translations of the contributions to Wolff's anthology place limitations on the design and scope of studies addressing them. The simplicity of our questions does not make the present investigation of the conception of ars in the Artis Historicae Penus unambitious. It merely means that the intention is not to discover as-yet-unknown patterns but, rather, to ascertain patterns that are presumed to exist but have not yet been revealed. In other words, our computer-assisted reading tests partially substantiated ideas about what the Renaissance theorists of history included in the Wolff corpus may have meant when they employed the term ars. Based on the knowledge attained through traditional close readings of Spanish artes and, more broadly, the study of scholarly literature pertaining to the genre, the following hypotheses may be advanced:

1. 1. Word stems relating to cognitive and artistic conceptions of ars are equally represented in the corpus considered as a whole, suggesting complementarity rather than opposition.

2. 2. Word stems relating to the artistic conception of ars recur across the corpus, suggesting their general importance to the Renaissance ars historica.

While the Artis Historicae Penus is of the scale required to test these hypotheses and to make a more general statement about the Renaissance ars historica, reading 1,500+ pages of Renaissance Latin is not within the reach of most modern scholars, especially considering the abovementioned dearth of modern critical editions. In a situation such as this, computationally assisted reading provides a viable approach to what Franco Moretti, in “Conjectures on World Literature,” famously termed the “great unread.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It offers the possibility to read not only Bodin, Patrizi, and Fox Morcillo but also Celio Secondo Curione, Giovanni Pontano, Theodor Zwinger, David Kochhafe, and the rest of the contributors to Wolff's anthology, who are less known today. Not to read them closely, of course, but, instead, to let the computer count the relative occurrences of the two groups of word stems in their texts. However, the present examination does not stop at numbers. It proceeds to link the findings reached through computational analysis with ideas about the materials generated through hermeneutical readings and proposes a tentative concept of the role of aesthetics in the Renaissance ars historica.

Alluring as this all sounds, there are a few issues that need to be addressed at the outset. The first relates to the creation of an adequate textual basis. Establishing a reliable and machine-readable text from the digitized versions of the Artis Historicae Penus available at different research libraries and through Google Books proved to be a major challenge. In the end, the scan of the copy in the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, with signature Hist. 8022/2, was deemed the most suitable. However, pages 19–21 of volume 2 in this copy turned out to be from volume 1 and were therefore replaced with the corresponding pages from the copy owned by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, signature 65.Y.26 (vol. 2). Indeed, producing the OCR scan—turning digitized images into machine-readable text—and correcting the text constituted the largest portion of the digital-humanities work that went into this article. A series of follow-up procedures then had to be performed to make the text readable and searchable. In order to enhance optical character recognition, for example, images were binarized with the package image.binarization, version 0.1.1, available at Vrije Universiteit Brussels and maintained by Jan Wijffels.Footnote ⁵⁵ Machine-readable files of the two volumes were subsequently produced using the open-source tool OCR4all, and abbreviations were expanded with o4asolver and partially corrected with EML-spellchecker, both developed by Johann Ramminger and available at his GitHub.Footnote ⁵⁶ A number of other changes were made using the lemmatizer Collatinus, maintained by Yves Ouvrard, including the removal of word divisions (when identified); the markup of Greek words with “gr”; correction of the computer's misreadings of a long s as an f; correction of the ligature for enclitic -que as “q” or “q;”; and emendation of the loss of hyphens and, where appropriate, their replacement with periods.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, all pages were given a headline in order to facilitate easy navigation of the corpus. But even despite these considerable efforts, the overall quality of the text made it necessary to downscale scholarly aims. There are still quite a few textual problems that need to be corrected manually, including inaccurate word divisions and misplaced orthographic signs. The focus was therefore limited to, first, determining the quantitative occurrence of terms related to artistry in the artes historicae as compared to terms related to cognition and, second, identifying any (geographical, confessional, temporal) patterns or trends across the corpus in regard to artistry and cognition. Our approach is thus emphatically explorative and aims principally to identify patterns and noteworthy exceptions that can be the focus of future research, analogue or digital, some suggestions for which will be proposed at the end of the article.

Once the text was ready for a rudimentary computational reading, we conducted a keyword analysis, even though this procedure is not uncontentious. It is, for example, unclear whether the presence of keywords relating to cognitive and artistic conceptions of ars actually tells us anything about the meaning attached to these conceptions. A word indicating artistry or cognition could easily be negated in the very same sentence, which would reverse the meaning, and, due to Latin's flexible word order, the computer would not be able to recognize this by means of, for example, collocation or keyword-in-context analysis. For this reason, computational keyword analysis of the two semantic clusters cannot address qualitative questions such as the value ascribed to artistry in the Artis Historicae Penus. It simply registers the relative quantitative weight attached to the artistry cluster and the cognition cluster in the texts.

COUNTING COGNITION AND ARTISTRY

Our computational analysis consisted of the following steps: First, numbers were extracted from the digitized and OCR-scanned version of the Artis Historicae Penus. The initial goal of this exercise was to assess the distribution of various word stems across the individual texts that comprise the full corpus. The word stems were drawn from the two semantic clusters. In each document, the number of words that began with these stems was counted. These values were then entered into a spreadsheet showing how often each stem appears in each document.

Yet while the raw frequency with which a word stem appears in a document can be informative, it can also be skewed by a document's length. In other words, a longer text is more likely to contain certain word stems simply because it is longer. It is therefore more informative to consider a stem's normalized frequency, calculated as the number of occurrences per 10,000 words. The significance of this distinction becomes clear if one looks at results for 1_743_837_Foxius.txt and 1_838_890_Viperanus.txt (see appendix 2). These file names refer to De Historiae Institutione Dialogus, by Sebastián Fox Morcillo, and De Scribenda Historia (On writing history, 1559), by Giovanni Viperano, respectively.Footnote ⁵⁸ The stem narra appears 117 times in the text by Fox Morcillo and only 57 times in the text by Viperano (raw frequency). Considering these figures, it would seem that the Spanish theorist focuses more on the concept of narration and narrative than his Italian colleague. However, if the normalized values are considered, Viperano's score is only slightly lower—in this case 36.65 occurrences of narra per 10,000 words compared to 39.85 per 10,000 words in Fox Morcillo. The following discussion of the computational analysis considers both raw and normalized numbers in order to ensure that what is being compared can actually be compared.

Our research questions concern the occurrence of word stems relating to the idea of history as a systematic practice of reading and as an artistic writing practice in the Artis Historicae Penus. After determining the normalized frequencies of word stems from each category, the numbers were scrutinized to test our hypotheses about the general complementarity of artistry and cognition in the Renaissance ars historica and the equal distribution of word stems pertaining to artistry across the corpus. We also scanned the results for significant outliers, unexpected patterns, and other results that could challenge the scholarly narrative and necessitate a different approach.

Subjecting the results of the computational keyword search to an initial superordinate analysis yielded a total raw frequency of 4,637 for word stems included in cluster A, the artistry cluster. This figure is slightly smaller than the total raw frequency of word stems from cluster B, the cognition cluster, which was 5,057. Looking at the normalized frequency values, the situation is the reversed, with a slightly higher occurrence of word stems from the artistry cluster (3,031.58) compared to word stems from the cognition cluster (2,935.16). Of course, when considering the entire corpus at once, there is no need to normalize values. Yet the normalized values underscore the balanced representation of the two clusters and have therefore been included here. With no more than an approximately 10 percent difference in raw numbers, the frequency values for stems relating to artistry and cognition are quite similar, confirming our first hypothesis—namely, that these two sematic clusters have a largely complementary relationship through the corpus as a whole. Examining specific values, however, yields some thought-provoking findings, which we describe and discuss in the following.

Comparing the frequency values for the stems crea (164 raw, 54.34 normalized) and cogn|cogi (831 raw, 567.33 normalized) points to a large discrepancy, suggesting the irrelevance of the modern notion of creativity to the Renaissance ars historica. Indeed, excepting Foglietta's De Ratione Scribendae Historiae (How to write history, 1574)—which has 4 raw and 13.74 normalized occurrences of crea, and high scores on almost all cluster A search terms—occurrences of crea in the corpus are quite few. However, our initial analysis indicated a balanced representation of the two clusters throughout the corpus. Thus, perhaps crea itself is the problem. One possible conclusion is that sixteenth-century theorists of history did not conceive of the imaginative side to history writing in terms of creativity. Like modern-day narrative historians, who similarly refrain from labeling their practice creative, the Artis Historicae Penus contributors apparently preferred to talk of the artistic dimension of history writing in terms of narration.Footnote ⁵⁹ The stem narra appears in the corpus a total of 523 times, and 470.16 times per 10,000 words.

While these results run counter to the idea of a “creativity-cognition” binary proposed at the outset of this project, it would also not be appropriate to label cluster A the “narration” cluster. In accordance with the Latin rhetorical tradition and its tripartite distinction between “false,” “verisimilar,” and “true” narratives, the Renaissance concept of narratio was polyvalent, lending itself equally to the discourses of the poet and the historian. It is therefore impossible to say that one cluster is more closely connected to narration than the other. This conceptual polyvalence was clearly a factor in the work of Fox Morcillo discussed above, but one must also consider in this context the anthology's uncontested champion of narra, Uberto Foglietta.

Taking the polemic surrounding his Della Repubblica di Genova (On the republic of Genoa, 1559), which centered on the nature of historical narrative, as a starting point, Foglietta's De Ratione Scribendae Historiae utilizes the stem narra a total of 84 times (222.25 normalized frequency) in about forty pages. Foglietta's discussion of narrative is aimed at vindicating the style of his own historiographical work. To answer criticism of his attempt to reconcile the historian's narrative with that of the epic poet, the Genoese historian launches a defense of historiographical artistry based on the idea of decorum: “At the same time that the narrative should be apt, ornate, plentiful and elegant . . . it should put dangers and calamities before the eyes, inspire the attention of the readers, make spectators out of listeners, and finally be full of all eloquence and arts; yet if truth is desired in it, it would need to be a decorous and appropriate narrative.”Footnote ⁶⁰

As long as the writing is in keeping with good taste and propriety, the distinction between epic and history need not be upheld, for the kind of truth that history represents is always moral. On this point Foglietta and his fellow Renaissance theorists unanimously agreed.Footnote ⁶¹ Therefore, Foglietta argued, if the historical writer makes all the edifying examples of the past come alive before the reader's eyes in a “decorous and appropriate narrative,” his discourse can also be “ornate” and “plentiful.” However, while Foglietta may have been able to balance cognition and artistry in his own ars historica, his text simultaneously confirms the history-poetry binary as the backdrop of this balance. His De Ratione Scribendae Historiae came under attack precisely because of its attempt to unite the truth of historical narrative with the beauty of epic narrative in a single discourse.Footnote ⁶² By bringing the inner tensions of the Renaissance concept of narratio to light, Foglietta offers further evidence of the problematic nature of “narration” as a label for the word stems comprising cluster A.

The shortcomings of narratio as an umbrella concept for cluster A are further underscored by the fact that the words this term covers do not necessarily or at least do not fully describe the multifarious craftwork dimension of the semantic cluster.Footnote ⁶³ One practical aspect of ars that is not covered by narra is the dimension of writing known as τέχνη (craft): the meticulous putting into words of what happened when, where, how, and why; the painstaking labor with pen and paper that every historical scholar recognizes; the laborious materialization, in letters, of thoughts and ideas reached through study and cognition. To capture this central aspect of ars, we initiated a search for the stem scrip|b, which yielded 2,085 raw occurrences and a normalized frequency of 1,158.31 per 10,000 words, accounting for roughly 50 percent of the total occurrences from cluster A. Our next step was to compare these results with the occurrences of the stem leg, covering words relating to legio in the broad sense of “reading” but also the entire semantic field relating to laws (leges), systems, and order. In all, there were 1,253 raw occurrences of leg, and a normalized frequency of 666.39 per 10,000 words, accounting for about 25 percent of the total occurrences from cluster B. The difference is notable indeed, and would appear to indicate heavier emphasis on the idea of history as an artistic writing practice. Here again, however, the possibility needs to be taken into account that reading as a metaphor for cognition may not have been prevalent in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is impossible to obtain a definitive answer, of course, but the numbers suggest that it was not, perhaps because the development of the Renaissance ars historica—“an art cast as a guide not to writing, but to reading history,” in Grafton's words—was still in its nascent stages, at least when the earliest Renaissance contributions to Wolff's anthology were penned.Footnote ⁶⁵ Or perhaps, as Ann Blair has pointed out, Renaissance scholarly reading could not be so sharply distinguished from writing, because it was always accompanied by extensive note taking, meaning that, in effect, it did not exist as a distinct activity.Footnote ⁶⁶ Either way, a clearer picture is offered by considering the prevalence of stems from cluster A versus cluster B throughout the corpus as a whole. As mentioned above, viewing the data in this way suggests equal emphasis on artistry (cluster A) and cognition (cluster B) in the Renaissance ars historica.

Concerning the occurrence of single word stems, one noteworthy data point is the overrepresentation of the stem method in 1_000_Praefationes.txt as compared to the other texts in the corpus, calling to mind what Silvana Paula Vida has termed the editor's “obsession with method.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This is rather striking, because only four other texts in the anthology—Bodin's Methodus, Francesco Patrizi's Dialogi X de Historia (Ten dialogues on history, 1560; Latin translation by Johann Nikolaus Stupa, 1570), Sebastián Fox Morcillo's Dialogus, and Francesco Robortello's De Historica Facultate (On the power of history, 1548)—have occurrences of method at all, and very few at that (7, 3, 2, and 3 raw and 0.59, 0.66, 0.68, and 6.03 normalized, respectively). These numbers suggest that establishing an operative methodological vade mecum was first and foremost the agenda of Wolff and not of the contributors, who—numerically, at least—preferred the term ratio (1056 raw and 528.22 normalized in total), aligning with the top-down synthesizing approach later epitomized by the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum (Plan of studies, 1599).Footnote ⁶⁸ Even Bodin's treatise, which bears the term methodus in its title, has almost forty times more occurrences of ratio than of method (7 against 251 raw, and 0.59 against 21.19 normalized).

From this perspective, Wolff's preface to volume 1 could be construed as evidence of the emergence of an entirely new approach to historiography, an approach focused on the intricacies of history writing. Concretely, this preface addresses the challenges facing the historian who seeks to establish not only what happened but also when, where, how, and why it happened: “The historical treatise is indeed challenged by maximal difficulties, wherefore it is necessary that the person who does not diligently and constantly strain the mind incurs multiple errors: not only concerning what happened, but when, where, in what way, by which means and by whose council, for what reason, and to which end something was done; what came before, what followed.”Footnote ⁶⁹ These difficulties, the editor argues, make evident the need for a book like the Artis Historicae Penus, in which erudite scholars share their ideas about historical method. For method is the answer to the challenges involved in understanding what is irrevocably lost and can only be (partly, deficiently) retrieved through “infinite labor with the remnants of the past”: “For as it was perceived that this could not be understood by the common intelligence of everyone, erudite men who had devoted much study and much time to history began to exhibit the method of their infinite labor with the remnants of the past. And that which they had perceived after a long period of time using the highest diligence they brought forth by the light of their own genius, and with great praise, against the shadows of the histories, in these books which are not unjustly entitled Historical Method.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Indeed, with its suggestive description of how the scholars in Wolff's anthology have brought out the “lights” of their intellects against the “shadows of histories,” the preface virtually anticipates Anthony Grafton's description of the Renaissance ars historica as an “Ariadne thread through the frightening, demon-haunted labyrinths of historical writing, ancient and modern, trustworthy and falsified, that every learned man must explore.”Footnote ⁷¹ On the whole, Wolff's opening text suggests a rather close connection between the Renaissance methodological vogue exemplified by the publication of the Artis Historicae Penus and germinating ideas about enlightenment, which, unfortunately, exceed the scope of the present study.Footnote ⁷²

In terms of occurrences of stems from cluster B in individual texts, Christophe Milieu's De Scribenda Universitatis Rerum Historia (On writing the history of the universe of things, 1551) is in a class of its own, with 1531 raw and 630.51 normalized occurrences, followed by François Baudouin's De Institutione Historiae Universae (On the instruction of universal history, 1561), with 440 raw and 308.15 normalized occurrences, and David Kochhafe's De Lectione Historiarum Recte Instituenda (On the proper reading of histories, 1563), with 161 raw and 268.26 normalized occurrences. Interestingly, Milieu's piece is also among the top three texts utilizing stems from cluster A, with 777 raw and 313.91 normalized occurrences of stems from the artistry cluster, second only to Foglietta (263 raw and 493.14 normalized) and Kochhafe (245 raw and 307.58 normalized). This suggests that the Swiss-born humanist saw the ideal Renaissance ars historica as a, in Kessler's words, “true and ornate representation of human action to the benefit of humankind,” balancing cognition and artistry.Footnote ⁷³ Or, in Milieu's own phrasing, “the profession of historians is not only to pursue the knowledge of all remarkable internal and external events but also to restore, through faithful accounts, the public memory of everyday things.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, as Donald Kelley writes, Milieu was devoted to “the capturing and ordering of past experience in written form”—not just to apprehending and systematizing history but also to laying down, in writing, what was apprehended and systematized.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is all the more thought-provoking, then, that Milieu is practically unknown today, even taking into account Cochrane's perspicacious remark about Renaissance and modern historians’ opposing valorizations of style.Footnote ⁷⁶

In sum, our analysis confirms the first of the two hypotheses we laid out—namely, that word stems relating to cognitive and artistic conceptions of ars would generally be balanced in the corpus when taken as a whole. It also partly confirms the second hypothesis—that word stems relating to artistry would recur across the corpus—albeit with some modifications. Of course, the texts are not uniform in their tendencies. Prefaces and introductions to individual contributions, for instance, contain comparatively few stems from either cluster.Footnote ⁷⁷ Deviations in paratextual material were expected, however, and do not invalidate the study's heuristic design.

CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

We mentioned at an earlier point that Renaissance historical writers enjoyed penning ferocious harangues and eloquent orations, and it has been suggested that this taste for the rhetorical essentially blurred the boundary between cognitive and artistic conceptions of history. Did the same intertwinement of cognition and artistry apply to the authors of the artes historicae included in Wolff's anthology?

Our computer-assisted examination of cognition and artistry clusters in the Artis Historicae Penus indicates that in the Renaissance ars historica—at least as defined by this weighty anthology—the artistic reimagining of the thoughts and feelings that ignited the actions of history's protagonists and spilled over into their well-wrought discourse was not incompatible with the rational, systematic understanding of these actions. The computational analysis suggests that for the contributors to the Artis Historicae Penus, the practice of writing history was neither one of pure factual reporting nor one of pure imagination. Such a conception accords with orat top scorer Milieu's comment on Herodotus's style. Milieu praises Herodotus's use of beautiful language while also criticizing his loose relationship with facts: “For when Herodotus turned to writing history, he practiced it excellently with ornate, candid, and sweet oration, so as to pursue public Athenian honors; but his rather stupid proclivity for the joy of things rather than the truth caused him to be called the father of lies.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Milieu's enjoyment of eloquent orations fundamentally agrees with David Kochhafe's discussion in De Lectione Historiarum Recte Instituenda (1563)—the text with the second highest score for orat (43 raw and 51.85 normalized)—of Thucydides, who is said to have been most diverse in his historiographical devices, using orations, maxims, advices, and exempla: “Thucydides illustrates his many advices about life and actions done prudently or rightly not only with orations and the most serious sententiae, but also with remarkable counsels and examples of consequences, which much more effectively than bare precepts move and compel the minds of humankind.”Footnote ⁷⁹

As the above quotation makes clear, Kochhafe saw stylistic elegance as something that could stimulate audiences’ appetite for the deep truths and profitable lessons encrypted in the great deeds of the past. According to Kochhafe, eliciting admiration of “life and actions prudently and rightly done” required much more than “bare precepts,” orations, and other embellishing devices. Again, the taste for stylistic adornment is closely connected with moral exemplarity: in what George Nadel aptly termed the “heyday of the exemplar theory of history,” beauty must serve a purpose, must be put in the service of moral truth.Footnote ⁸⁰

Passages like these in the texts of Milieu and Kochhafe essentially confirm the underlying poetry-history binary of the Renaissance ars historica that was first observed in Fox Morcillo and that formed the basis of this investigation. They also confirm the intriguing complexity of this binary, which does not present a duality between historical truth and poetic embellishment but, rather, unites these two facets in the multisemantic concept of ars. In the light of our computer-assisted distant reading of Wolff's anthology, the Renaissance art of history may be seen as part of a sophisticated historiographical paradigm in which the cross-breeding of truth and beauty was understood as a productive agent of historical reflection and moral contemplation—a paradigm with which contemporaneous historical drama, historical prose, historical epic and lyric poetry, historical painting, historical tapestry, and historical sculpture, flourishing in an array of European contexts, obviously also aligned. Additionally, if only indirectly and cautiously, the present study suggests a necessary revision of the Enlightenment narrative of modern historiography coming into itself by outmaneuvering the fictions and fables and sumptuous rhetorical embellishment—invented speeches, metaphors—intrinsic to much artistic reimagination of the past.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, our findings suggest that, in the sixteenth century, historical cognition was—to a certain degree, at least—seen as dependent on artistry, not adulterated by it, though this point clearly begs a much more comprehensive investigation.

Within the framework of the present article, these assertions cannot be further pursued, though they have the potential to advance current knowledge both of the Renaissance artes historicae and of the prehistory of the modern historical paradigm. Moreover, the possibilities opened up by the production of a decent machine-readable version of the Artis Historicae Penus, which, until now, lay dormant in research libraries and archives, are far from being fully explored. Quite a few stones remain unturned, and aspects of this material that could yield interesting results from a number of different scholarly perspectives have not been explored in depth. For example, the metadata collected beforehand have not been put properly to use. Systematically comparing the numbers extracted from the corpus with information about the authors’ lives, nationalities, confessions of faith, and primary geographical locations, or with the texts’ generic affiliations and years of publication, could reveal geographical, confessional, and temporal patterns or discursive trends across the corpus.

As a provisional test of the metadata's potential to offer new insights, a series of small experiments were conducted, none of which produced any clear results. It was not possible to detect any clear geographical, confessional, or temporal patterns in the distribution of word stems belonging to the two clusters. While one would, for example, have expected to find an overrepresentation of cluster A in texts by Catholic authors—who would presumably have been less influenced by Protestant iconoclasm and, hence, less critical toward the use of rhetorical imagery—no such pattern was observed.Footnote ⁸² While the Basel-based Italian Protestant Celio Secondo Curione's De historia legenda sententiae and the Rostock German Protestant David Kochhafe's De Lectione Historiarum Recte Instituenda predictably aligned with the Protestant editor's dominantly cognitive understanding of ars, it was actually a Catholic author, Christophe Milieu, who scored highest on cluster B (and by far). On cluster A, two Catholics—the Rome-based Uberto Foglietta and the Swiss Milieu—obtained the highest scores, but they were followed by two Protestant theorists, Kochhafe and the Swiss Theodor Zwinger, whose text has 171 raw occurrences and a normalized frequency of 251.72 per 10,000 words from the artistry cluster. It appears that neither nationality nor confession represents a viable parameter for identifying patterns and trends in the corpus. Those paths of investigation are dead ends, it appears.

However, considering the personal stories and historical details behind the metadata—as far as these may be reconstructed—the lack of insights gained from cross-referencing the keyword-analysis results with the metadata is perhaps not so surprising. The sixteenth-century contributors to the Artis Historicae Penus represented a highly sophisticated segment of the Renaissance republic of letters, a segment that, generally speaking, took a deliberate personal stand on religion and was highly intellectually advanced. Some of them—such as the Protestant Celio Secondo Curione and the Catholics Sebastián Fox Morcillo and François Baudouin—were converts, as was the Protestant publisher Pietro Perna.Footnote ⁸³ Others, like Jean Bodin, remained nominal Catholics but essentially adhered to the Reformist program of the Erasmian school (and flirted with esoterism). Still others, like Simon Griner, belonged to minor creeds such as the First Helvetic Confession. In short, in terms of religious persuasion, the contributors to the Artis Historicae Penus did not fit into any predesigned boxes; instead, they appear to have created their own categories.Footnote ⁸⁴ They did not answer to mainstream religious, spiritual, or intellectual standards, and their views on history, presumably, cannot be so easily compartmentalized either.

The fact that the present investigation did not identify any clear patterns from cross-referencing keyword-analysis results with the metadata does not necessarily mean that there are no interesting discoveries to be made and no promising paths of future research to be based on the Wolff corpus. For one thing, the dataset could form the basis of future research on sixteenth-century European intellectual hotspots. Quite a few of the contributors to the Artis Historicae Penus—including Christophe Milieu, Celio Curione Secondo, Simon Griner, Theodor Zwinger, and the editor Pietro Perna—were based in Basel, Switzerland, a famous center of Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation, whose specific role in the development of Renaissance historiography would certainly be worth further investigation, mapping intellectual networks with digital tools such as social network analysis.Footnote ⁸⁵ It could also be interesting to use topic modeling to map similarities and differences between the artes poeticae penned by contributors to Wolff's anthology—Francesco Robertello's In Aristotelis Poeticam Explicationes (Explications of Aristotle's poetics, 1548), Sebastián Fox Morcillo's De Imitatione (On imitation, 1554), Giovanni Viperano's De Poetica Libri Tres (Three books on poetics, 1579), Antonio Riccoboni's Poetica (Poetics, 1585), and Francesco Patrizi's Della Poetica (On poetics, 1586)—and the same authors’ artes historicae.

On the hermeneutical side, looking into individual contributors’ use of genre and discursive form could also yield interesting insights. While the majority of the contributions in the anthology are classic treatises, a few of the authors—Giovanni Pontano, Francesco Patrizi, and Sebastián Fox Morcillo—wrote in dialogue form. Others (such as Francesco Robortello and Christopher Pezel) used the essay-like oratio, and Celio Secondo Curione preferred to write what he termed “sententiae.” Especially in the case of the texts written as dialogue, one would expect form to play a significant role in the overall message, but scrutinizing authors’ use of language and style more generally could also turn up interesting findings. If it is true, as the present investigation suggests, that Renaissance theorists of history generally saw artistry and cognition as complementary aspects of history writing, how did they write about this complementarity themselves? Are there any patterns to be discovered, any thought-provoking exceptions?

To conclude: though the present examination of the relative emphasis on cognitive and artistic conceptions of ars in Johann Wolff's Artis Historicae Penus has concluded, the dataset resulting from our computational analysis presents multiple open questions that are waiting to be explored, either through hermeneutical readings or with the assistance of digital tools. We cordially invite our colleagues to join the conversation.Footnote ⁸⁶

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