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Abstract
This dissertation examines a set of largely forgotten fifteenth- and sixteenth-century histories and demonstrates how their authors constructed an intertextual dialogue about of the peninsula’s past and wrestled with issues of a national identity long before the existence of a national state. It thus sheds new light on the extensive and ongoing debate about the premodern origins of modern national identities. This dissertation also reorients some fundamental aspects of the Italian Renaissance by querying the dominant regional approach to the period and by challenging conventional wisdom about the supposed realism of Machiavelli’s political and historical thought.
Benedict Anderson and others have highlighted the ways that unified narratives begot unified national identities through modern media, but peninsular writers have been reflecting on the meaning of Italia and its history since antiquity, never through centralized discourses, but through regionally inflected, contested narratives. This dissertation shows that during the Renaissance Italian writers thought about the peninsula’s past more often and more critically than ever before. Spurred on initially by Italy’s economic and cultural preeminence in the fifteenth century and then, later, by the devastation wrought by four decades of invasions and political crises beginning in 1494, Italian writers laid the foundation for a dialogical model of national identity and history that still exists in Italy—and elsewhere—today.