‘What is history?’ has been a controversial question from antiquity down to the present, but it was never more vigorously discussed than in the Renaissance (‘Che cosa sia storia?’ asked Dionigi Atanagi in 1559; eight years later Giovanni Viperano, ‘Quid sit historia?’ and still a quarter-century after that Tommaso Campanella, ‘Quid historia sit?’). Then, as before and since, answers ranged widely – from simple happenings (res gestae) to God's ‘grand design’, from a lowly ‘art’ to an elaborate ‘science’, from a vague ‘sense’ to the ‘most certain philosophy’ (certissima philosophia, in the phrase of Andrea Alciato) and indeed to a position, according to Jean Bodin, ‘above all sciences’. ‘History’ could be objective or subjective, could refer to the past or merely to the memory thereof, to ancient testimony or modern reconstruction; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it rose grandly in the scale of western learning. Through the classical revival it became a liberal art and a literary genre; through the Reformation it became a surrogate for the tradition of ‘true religion’; through Counter-Reformation controversy it became a highly organised science. In various ways history became a dominant mode of expression and argument in the later sixteenth century, and its significance for the contacts with philosophy increased accordingly.