What is an exemplary story ?

Abstract

To believe that we are now finished with the conception of history as magistra vitae, mistress and oracle of our lives, is perhaps to place too much faith in the imperious succession of regimes of historicity. A detour into the narrative theories of exemplification, from Karlheinz Stierle to Timothy Hampton, allows us to take a fresh look at the question of the power of the exemplary in humanist historiography of the Quattrocento. Readers of Sallustus, the tyrannicides of ^15th-century Italy intended to overthrow the world by the sheer force of ancient examples, which they saw as prefiguring the conjurations to come. We attempt to grasp this through a Machiavellian analysis of the murderous sequence leading from the assassination of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, in 1476, to the Pazzi conspiracy in Florence two years later. In this way, we can better understand what the attack was all about. By separating us from our ability to tell a story, it leaves us helplessly in the hands of a narrative machine, whose frenzies no-one can control.

Contents

• Magistra vitae, history as master and oracle of our lives: narrative revolution and the old regime of historicity
• The overflow of history, inexemplary lives that cannot be imitated
• An example is only convincing if it "shows the inevitable consequences of a given decision in a given situation" (Karlheinz Stierle)
• The long modern crisis of exemplarity
• How humanist literature wrote the history of its time in advance (Timothy Hampton, Writing from History. The Rhetoric from exemplarity in Renaissance literature, 1990)
• Vestigia immitando : in 1476, Girolamo Olgiati, tyrannicide and avid reader
• "Everyone has read the Conjuration of Catilina by Sallustius" (Machiavelli)
• The politicization of Sallustus' reception in the 15th^century
• An act of reading (Timothy Hampton): a reader's novel
• A humanist plot: read a book and turn the world upside down (Stephen Greenblatt, Quattrocento, 2013)
• Close to the prince: Bernardino Corio, historian, humanist and butler
• Bad omens, prognostications and princely medicine (Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars. Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan, 2013)
• The conspiracy of Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani, Carlo Visconti and Girolamo Olgiati: family remembrance, civic memory, political regeneration
• Looking for the wrong subject: Cola Montano;
• Lucia Marliani, Bona di Savoia and the novellistica
• Mutazione di stato : the curialization of Milanese political society in the time of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Gregory Lubkin)
• Christmas celebrations in Milan: spatio-temporal logics of tyrannicide
• From the "murder of the lord" (Robert Jacob) to the Village of the " cannibals " (Alain Corbin): the long Middle Ages of sacrificial regicide
• Santo Stefano, December 26, 1476: io sono morto
• The Secret Council and the secrecy of theState
• From the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the Pazzi conspiracy (1476-1478)
• Diplomatic correspondence, printing and information warfare: the conservazione di stato (Riccardo Fubini)
• In Milan and Florence, two divergent strategies to forge a reassuring interpretation of the event on the spot
• "A prince who wishes to guard against conspiracies must therefore fear more those to whom he has done too much good than those to whom he has done too many insults" (Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius)
• What are we waiting for? By separating us from our ability to tell a story, it leaves us helplessly in the hands of a narrative machine whose runaway events no one can control (Uri Eizensweig, Fictions de l'anarchisme, 2001)