Croatian Humanists and the Writing of History in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Modern European historiography was nurtured in the school of Humanism, that attitude of mind, so characteristic of the Renaissance, which broke through the ecclesiastical “fixation” of medieval thought by a renewed appreciation of man and his role in this world. It accomplished this in part by reviving interest in the pagan culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanist men of letters looked to the literary and historical works of classical antiquity for their models of outlook and expression, and in these they found both a liberation from medieval modes and a new bondage. Humanism was also cosmopolitan: Humanist poets, scholars, and artists belonged to a Pan-European republic of arts and sciences with an official language of its own—a revived classical Latin. They traveled and mixed freely and lived in each others’ countries.