SOURCE: "The Historian's Language," in Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian's Craft, University of Toronto Press, 1977, pp. 174-83.

In the following essay, Phillips examines the writing style displayed in Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia (The History of Italy), concluding that the style is complicated, cool, and "mannered," but that it can also be passionate when called for by the subject matter; additionally, Phillips observes that Guicciardini's writing is a good example of the ambiguity found in humanism.

In the present century, when extended prose narrative is by far the dominant literary form, historians have largely abandoned their commitment to story-telling. In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, the art of prose narrative was still in its infancy, but historians were among its leading practitioners. The historian's craft is literary as well as analytic. Guicciardini's extraordinary intellectual achievement cannot be separated from the way in which his great book works upon the reader...