Historia

The word historia had for the Greeks a much broader meaning than it generally has today,” Giorgio Valla observed in his humanist encyclopedia of late Quattrocento. Over half a century later, in his dialogues with Della historia (1560), Francesco Patrizi portrayed himself in the grip of philosophical furor, obsessively asking everybody: what does historia mean? Patrizia’s quest was prompted by the enormously expanded use of the term in his times, what he calls “historia infinite way of being”: In this era, the term developed a medical connotation, referring to what will be later named historia medica or medicinalis. Later, historia came to be viewed as a noun that means history or story.