Linguaggio politico e scrittura storica nel basso medioevo. Alcune riflessioni metodologiche

Starting from the political dimension that is related to every form of writing of history – meant as an oriented reconstruction of the past connected to the political and ideological context of reference – this paper proposes some general considerations about the political language used in the writing of history. Special attention will be given to particular themes, like the presence of semantic changes, the continuing existence of schemes, concepts, words, periods, and the persistence of forms and methods of definition that, in different chronological divisions, can contextualize different realities, in spite of the terminological analogies. The city historiography and chronicle studies between the 13th and the 15th centuries lend themselves to such an analysis, because they register and picture the effective changing of the social, politic and economic structures of the urban realities whose history they narrate, in a political context characterized by fluidity, hybridity, interchangeability of forms of government. This is a political context, then, that is very fruitful from the point of view of political practice.