Ars historica

It produced a small library of treatises underscoring the stylistic aspects of writing history as a work of art, but also introducing the contributions of philology and textual criticism in its precepts and evaluations.

In addition to the examples of the classical historians (Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus), the contemporary works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini enhanced the prestige of historical writing.

The vogue of the genre was international, stretching beyond the Italy of Robortello, Patrizi and their followers and the France of Bodin to the Basel humanists (Simon Grynaeus and Theodor Zwinger.

In Basel Pietro Perna distinguished himself as a promoter of a new cultural and religious model rooted in Erasmian critical standards in religion and medicine but also in historical scholarship.

Subsequently, Perna's work served the Jesuit Antonio Possevino for his critique of Bodin [1592] and as the target and textual source for his Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (1597).

The literary focus of Agostino Mascardi's Dell’arte historica reflects the intellectual demotion of the magistra vitae concepts with the advent of Cartesian and scientific rationalism.