HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

340 AUGUSTO VASINAnovitates. But in reality his vision of history, unlike that affirmed byVillani, is pessimistic and, faced with the ineluctability of the crisesof the former capital city, is resigned to the impossibility of recoveringits lay, civic, and popular values. The modernity and originalityof his prose are found in the author’s capacity to dialoguewith himself and his readers, to soothe his personal discomfort withhis memories and his experience of the present by communicatingit, in the conviction that his writing will be useful to his readers.His style—nervous, swift, vividly imaginative and colored, primitiveand learned at the same time—succeeds also in assuming dramaticmovement, almost like a romance, in the final chapters (chs. xviii–xxiiiand xxvi–xxvii) dedicated to Cola, who becomes the improvidentprotagonist of his Cronica. 59 This is a work, however, that is verydifferent from contemporary historiography, revealing among otherthings early humanistic predilections and suggestions, together withthe ability to transmit them to those outside the restricted circle ofeducated readers. 60As I have already mentioned, in the development of urban historiographybetween the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, theinvestigation and biographical definition of strong men and protagonistsof local and regional political life, who were capable of settlingthe paralyzing controversies of the urban and comital oligarchies,as well as the progressive leveling of civic and communal values topositions of conformity and opportunism regarding the strong powersthat were constituted from time to time, prefigure and sometimessignal the transition of chronicle-writing from the communal age tothat of the seigniorial and then princely ages. This transition, foundespecially in politically important centers such as Milan, Verona,Ferrara, and Rimini, sees the attention of the chroniclers transferredaway from institutions and communal society to concentrate on thelife of the court, sometimes conforming itself to the authority of the59Miglio (1995), 175–87.60The Cronica cannot be said to have remained for centuries in hiding: alreadyknown from the first half of the seventeenth century, and even partially publishedas the Vita di Cola di Rienzo and also by Muratori as Historiae Romanae fragmenta, ithad long enjoyed subsequently a fortune more of a philological than a historicalcharacter. Only in the course of the twentieth century, amongst a flourishing seriesof studies and of partial editions, has it finally received a complete critical editionof the text and a full historical re-evaluation. See Potthast (1962–98), 2:356; AnonimoRomano, Cronica, ed. Porta, xi–xvi.