The Preface of the Anonimo Romano's Cronica: Writing History and Proving Truthfulness in Fourteenth-Century Rome

This article aims firstly to introduce a masterpiece of medieval Italian historiography to an English-speaking audience; secondly, to provide an English translation of the Anonimo’s preface, the most thoughtful and multifaceted document of late medieval Italy on the nature, aims, and method of writing history; thirdly, to analyse those parts of the preface in which the Anonimo expounds his ideas about history in the light of other statements about writing history made by late medieval Italian historians and chroniclers; and fourthly, to consider some examples of how the Anonimo proves to his readers the truthfulness of his accounts and how he quotes his sources. The Anonimo is commonly regarded as the most important literary source on Cola di Rienzo, but neither the preface of the Cronica (with related issues of the segnali), nor the sources he used for the non-Roman chapters of his work, have previously been studied.