Book Alert / History of the Florentine People

History of the Florentine People, Volume 3, Books IX-XII, Memoirs, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard UP '07, 477 pages, ISBN #0-674-01682-3. Cumulative index, index to archival sources, bibliography, notes to the translation, notes to the text.

Leonardo Bruni isn't the first historian to race the clock. Poor William Manchester ran out of gas midway through the third volume of his trilogy on Winston Churchill a decade ago and had to hand it off to some raw recruit to finish the job. For his part, Bruni didn't anticipate when he began his history of the Florentine people in 1415 that it would take nearly 30 years ago complete.

As the editor tells us, Bruni expected his 12-book history to concentrate on contempory events, ending perhaps with the capture of Pisa in 1406. But he didn't anticipate being named chancellor of Florence in 1427, a post he held for 17 years. Organization and reorganization of a staggering amount of material took time, and at one point, Bruni found himself short of reliable sources.

But when all was said and done, the editors write, "Bruni became the first historian in the Western tradition to compose a history based extensively on sources in government archives" and, in so doing, to become the bestselling author of the 15th century. Bruni's own Memoirs complete this third and final volume of his history. Latin scholars will appreciate the book's format, with a page of the original Latin facing its English translation. Separate sets of notes relate to the text and the translation.