Rhetoric, history, and ideology: the civic panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni

Abstract

Dum patriam laudat, damnat dum Poggius hostem, Nec malus est civis, nec bonus historicus. Jacopo Sannazaro, Epigr . I. 20 I am afraid I shall have to bore the reader slightly by relating, in the first part of this essay, some dull but necessary information about the context, content and reception of two orations by Leonardo Bruni: the Laudatio Florentinae urbis and the Oratio in funere Ioannis Stroze . As is well known, these are the two most widely cited texts in modern discussions of Florentine civic humanism. Together with the De militia ( On Knighthood ), they are practically the only texts by Bruni read by historians of political thought. After that I hope things will get rather more interesting. I want to show in some detail the relationship between the rhetorical form and the historical (or rather unhistorical) character of these texts. My contention will be that both texts have been misunderstood because modern readers have not sufficiently appreciated the rhetorical conventions they assume and have not troubled to situate them in the context of Bruni's other works. This done, it will be clear, I believe, why the old dichotomy, “civic humanist or professional rhetorician?” that has bedeviled Bruni scholarship since the 1960s is fundamentally anachronistic. In closing, I shall question whether “civic humanism”, at least as it has been defined by Hans Baron and J.G.A. Pocock, is the best term to describe Bruni's humanism.

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