The Undocumented Past: History Without Documents in Early Modern Europe

“Conjectural history” usually designates a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. They traced the development of human society and culture through reasoning based on philosophers’ views about human nature and travelers’ accounts of “primitive” peoples. Their work had a deep impact on their contemporaries and laid some of the foundations on which Darwin, Marx, and Freud built after their time. It also enraged the positivists of the nineteenth century, who proclaimed that “history is written with documents.” The humanists of the Renaissance rarely play a role in modern accounts of these developments. They receive credit for devising new ways of working with sources—indeed, with pioneering the descent into the archive that the positivists turned into a ritual and a theology. But they are rarely assigned a place, even as precursors, in the story of conjectural history. In fact, the central humanistic discipline, rhetoric, gave Lorenzo Valla the tools of conjectural argument with which he demolished the Donation of Constantine. These same tools were plied constructively by Valla himself and by other prominent humanists, from his contemporaries in the Roman curia, Biondo Flavio and Leon Battista Alberti, to the Jesuit historian of the New World, José de Acosta, a century later. All of them saw conjectural history—composed without full documents, and sometimes without any--as a core part of the larger rhetorical and philological traditions.