Linguaggio politico e scrittura storica nel basso medioevo. Alcune riflessioni metodologiche

Abstract

Starting from the political dimension that is

related to every form of writing of history – meant as an

oriented reconstruction of the past connected to the political

and ideological context of reference – this paper proposes

some general considerations about the political language

used in the writing of history. Special attention will

be given to particular themes, like the presence of semantic

changes, the continuing existence of schemes, concepts,

words, periods, and the persistence of forms and

methods of definition that, in different chronological divisions,

can contextualize different realities, in spite of the

terminological analogies. The city historiography and

chronicle studies between the 13th and the 15th centuries

lend themselves to such an analysis, because they register

and picture the effective changing of the social, politic

and economic structures of the urban realities whose history

they narrate, in a political context characterized by

fluidity, hybridity, interchangeability of forms of government.

This is a political context, then, that is very fruitful

from the point of view of political practice.