Il racconto della storia di un re europeo di età moderna e l'elaborazione aragonese di una storiografia celebrativa

The most important work of Bartholomew Facio (ca. 1405-1457) celebrates the Aragonian king Alphonso the Magnanimous, the new landlord of the South Italy since 1443. The work was the result of a wise mix of literary genres: namely, the humanistic approach of the history focussing on the actions of the men, the classical biography depending on Plutarch's Lives, which aimed to highlight the customs (ethos or mores) of its protagonists through their actions, and the panegyric tradition, eulogizing the virtues of their protagonists. Facio fixed the rules for the genre of the celebrative historiography of a king, which were used by many authors during the Modern Ages. Although it is hard to establish a direct influence of Facio's work, this new story telling works patently in some histories of European kings written in the Modern Ages. The present work focuses on the History of the king of Sweden, Charles Gustav written by Samuel Fleisner (Leipzig 1671), in order to show how the new categories introduced by Facio into the historic genre are working also in this later and peripheral work.