This chapter examines what Machiavelli means by 'history' and his understanding of the past as exemplary and imitable. It shows how his examination of historical texts was part of a distinctive medieval tradition of textual study. Machiavelli's historical analysis of ancient texts and the laws of human behaviour which he believes can be elicited from past writings about human action was part of a long tradition of reading texts that was elaborately developed during the Middle Ages. It was a method of reading that was not new to the Renaissance. Machiavelli links a psychological theory of human nature with a theory about how language in its written form can represent past perceptions of appearances. In short, it is a kind of Aristotelianism that was developed most influentially by theologians, philosophers and rhetoricians who were grouped together especially from the fourteenth century onwards and known as the via moderna.