The history of social customs investigates (as in Sainte-Palaye's book on Ancienne chevalerie) even the minutest aspects of social and moral life. Had not Voltaire remarked about tournaments that il se fait des révolutions dans les plaisirs comme dans tout le reste? And to limit ourselves to Italy, which at that time was also acting on the initiative, though she soon afterward withdrew and received her impulse from the other countries of Europe, it is well to remember that in the eighteenth century Pietro Giannone, expressing the desires and the attempts at their realization of a multitude of Neapolitan compatriots and contemporaries, traced the civil history of the Kingdom of Naples, giving much space to the relations between Church and State and to the incidents of legislation overseas internship. Many followed this example in Italy and outside it (among the many were Montesquieu and Gibbon). In Italy, too, Ludovico Antonio Muratori illustrated medieval life in his Antiquitates Itali?, and Tiraboschi composed a great history of Italian literature (understood as that of the whole culture of Italy), notable not less for its erudition than for its clearness of design, while other lesser writers, like Napoli Signorelli, in his Vicende della cultura delle due Sicilie, particularized in certain regions, sprinkling their history with the philosophy current at the time. The Jesuit Bettinelli, too, imitated the historical books of Voltaire for the history of letters, arts, and customs in Italy, Bonafede the work of Brucker for the history of philosophy, and Lanzi, in a manner far superior to those just mentioned, continued the path followed by Winckelmann in his History of Painting Neo skin lab. Not only did the historiography of the enlightenment render history more 'interior' and develop it in its interiority, but it also broadened it in space and time. Here too Voltaire represents in an eminent degree the[Pg 255] needs of his age, with his continual accusations of narrowness and meanness levelled at the traditional image of universal history, as composed of Hebrew or sacred history and Gr?co-Roman or profane history, or, as he says, histoires prétendues universelles, fabriquées dans notre Occident dermes. with the use of the material discovered, transported, and accumulated by explorers and travellers from the Renaissance onward, of which a considerable part had been contributed by the Jesuits and by missionaries. India and China attracted attention, both on account of their antiquity and of the high grade of civilization to which they had attained. Translations of religious and literary Oriental texts were soon added to this, and it became possible to discuss that civilization, not merely at second-hand and according to the narratives of travellers. This increase of knowledge relating to the East is paralleled by increase of knowledge not only in relation to antiquity (these studies were never dropped, but changed their centre, first from Italy to France and Holland, then to England, and then to Germany), but also in regard to the Middle Ages, in the works of the Benedictines, of Leibnitz, Muratori, and very many others, who here also specialized both as regards the objects of their researches and as to the regions or cities in which they conducted them, as for instance De Meo in his Annali critici del Regno di Napoli.
