Humanism and Renaissance Historiography

Book excerpt: Edmund Fryde provides a general account of the attempt to revive and surpass the standards of classical historiography and charts its progress. The career of Politian, the librarian of Lorenzo the Magnificent, illustrates the advance in scholarship during the fifteenth century. Using new evidence from the Vatican Library the author demonstrates that Lorenzo's library can be largely reconstructed and that a wealth of manuscripts was already available in his time.