The worldview of Renaissance military memoirists privileged tangible facts over both abstractions and experiences; privileged commemoration over understanding; and privileged the intrinsic merit of deeds and events over their causal impact. Consequently Renaissance military memoirs rejected the idea that either history or lifestory are organic and causal processes, in which facts are allocated a place according to either their impact or their representative value. Instead, for the majority of Renaissance military memoirists, both lifestory and history are exactly the same thing: an open and episodic collection of memorable tangible facts and episodes, which are normally honorable deeds, and which are memorable thanks to their intrinsic value rather than due to their illuminating, inspirational, instructive, or causal role.

This means that in memoirs, history and lifestory are identical, not just similar. Whatever is part of a ‘life’ is by definition also a part of history, and whatever cannot be a part of history cannot be a part of ‘life’. Narrating an honorable episode is at one and the same time both history and lifestory. This is best illustrated by comparing the Renaissance texts to twentieth-century military memoirs, a comparison that also clarifies what entices late-modern readers to subject memoirs to the history/lifestory dichotomy.

Twentieth-century memoirists tend to privilege abstractions and experiences over tangible facts, and causal impact over intrinsic merit. Consequently, for twentieth-century memoirists, the ultimate human reality is not the tangible reality of actions in the world.