The grand theme of Leonardo Bruni's fifteenth- century History of the Florentine People, often described as the first modern history because it seeks to embody humanist values, is history itself. What ought to be recorded and why? Who counts as important and for what reasons? Even more to the point is the peculiar twist that Bruni lends the ancient notion of historia as story. While Renaissance humanist historians, like their venerated ancient Roman forbears, such as Livy, credited history with a plot or series of plots for the sake of demonstrating its meaning, Bruni seems the first to insist on its aesthetics in a more modern, socially conscious, and above all ethical way: historia can be understood as leading into cultural and moral improvements.

For Bruni this meant tracing out the uneven evolution of local dreams of a type of popular political freedom, and delineating their progressive realization and fatuous destruction through 12 brisk books, commencing with their primeval- misty Eutruscan points of origin. It is significant that his title refers to the Florentine people and not just to Florence the city: an entire civilization, and not merely a city- state in the institutional sense, is viewed as groping its way over the centuries into familiar, if for his day rather novel notions of elected and just self- government. What remains striking for the modern reader along these lines is how early, at least from Bruni's point of view, and despite the succeeding dry periods of dithering defeats, an Italian population is to be understood as romanticizing various possibilities of quasi- democracy, and treating them as a virtuous enterprise.

This is not to suggest that Bruni himself was any more or less than a man of his time. Born into poverty in Arezzo in 1370, he came to Florence as a young law student. The fortune that he now amassed oiled cooling wheels of intellectual as well as political progress. Marrying into money likewise proved no hindrance. .