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

Starting from the political dimension that isrelated to every form of writing of history – meant as anoriented reconstruction of the past connected to the politicaland ideological context of reference – this paper proposessome general considerations about the political languageused in the writing of history. Special attention willbe given to particular themes, like the presence of semanticchanges, the continuing existence of schemes, concepts,words, periods, and the persistence of forms andmethods of definition that, in different chronological divisions,can contextualize different realities, in spite of theterminological analogies. The city historiography andchronicle studies between the 13th and the 15th centurieslend themselves to such an analysis, because they registerand picture the effective changing of the social, politicand economic structures of the urban realities whose historythey narrate, in a political context characterized byfluidity, hybridity, interchangeability of forms of government.This is a political context, then, that is very fruitfulfrom the point of view of political practice