Past/Present: Leonardo Bruni’s <i>History of Florence</i>

The importance of historical consciousness in thejRenaissance is a fact generally recognized by scholars of the period. From Petrarch on, it is possible to discern a growing awareness of the past "men became more and more conscious that all sorts of things—buildings, clothes, words, laws-changed over time."* As Panofsky puts it, men "were convinced that the period in which they lived was a 'new age' as sharply different from the medieval past as the medieval past had been from classical antiquity."^ This heightened sense of the past is itself one of the manifestations of a long civilizing process that still remains to be fully investigated. Some of the forces at work in shaping historical consciousness are to be identified in the progressive differentiation ofsocial functions, which in turn favours the gradual spreading of literacy among laity. ^ Already in the 13th and 14th centuries the new demands of the communal civilization had redirected cultural activities toward more marketable professions: alongside theologians, canonists, poets, physicians and scientists, we see more and more