With no further design, without even a distinct idea, The Governour has of course no logical progress. Lawyer and something of a diplomat, Elyot was not a thinker. Reading widely without discrimination, and sometimes apparently at second hand, he compiled under headings. His later Bankette of Sapience (second edition? 1542) is a collection of sententiae arranged alphabetically under abstinence, adversity, affection, ambition, authoritie, amitie, apparaile, almsdeede, accusation, arrogance, etc. His Governour, though its headings have more logic, is hardly consecutive. In sources as in topics the book is a miscellany.
I. vii, viii, for instance, on a gentlemanly, not a professional knowledge of music, painting, and sculpture, suggest the Cortegiano; xii inquires “why gentilmen in this present time be not equal in doctryne to the auncient noblemen”; xiv proposes exempla for law students. After finding England deficient in the fine arts (140), he returns to law students with a recommendation of rhetoric, and thereupon itemizes it (149) under status, inventio, etc. By the end of the book he has passed from prudence to chess, archery, tennis, and bowls.
Elyot’s diction, though he wishes to “augment our Englysshe tongue,” is Latinized sparingly. Copie in the sense of the Latin copia, was fairly common in his time. He adds, e.g., allecte and allectyve, coarted, fatigate, fucate, illecebrous, infuded, propise, and provecte. His generally unpretentious habit is sometimes concretely racy.
Jean Bodin’s treatise on historical method (Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566),[86] giving high praise to Guicciardini, differs from him in conception. For Bodin, history is less a progress in time than a thesaurus of exempla.
Dividing it into human, natural, and divine, he would have us begin with a chronological reference table (ii), proceed to a more detailed survey, such as Funck’s or Melanchthon’s, advance to the histories of particular nations, Jews, Greeks, Romans, and then to such smaller communities as Rhodes, Venice, and Sicily, with constant attention to geography.
In iii, De locis historiarum recte instituendis, the topics are first the commonplaces of encomium: birth, endowments, achievements, morals, culture. From the family, which for Bodin is the starting point of history, we are to proceed to the organization of the state and the developments of the arts.
De historicorum delectu (iv) has many specific and acute estimates of both ancients and moderns. “Somehow those who are active in wars and affairs (44) shy at writing; and those who have given themselves somewhat more to literature are so possessed with its charms and sweetness as hardly to think in other terms.” Bodin himself is broad enough to praise both Plutarch and Tacitus.
De recto historiarum iudicio (v), beginning with geography, proceeds to regional traits. The approach is suggestive; but the development is little more than aggregation under those dubious headings Northern and Southern, Eastern and Western.
At this point (vi) Bodin begins the analysis of the state: the elemental family, the citizen, the magistrate, the king. “Macchiavelli, indeed, the first after some twelve hundred years since the barbarians to write on the state, has won general currency; but there is no doubt that he would have written several things more truly and better if he had added legal tradition (usus) to his knowledge of ancient philosophers and historians” (140). Monarchy is found to be the ideal form of government. The golden age of primitive peace and happiness is proved to be a senile fancy (vii). Let us rather, relying on the science of numbers, De temporis universi ratione (viii), compute the recurrence of historical “cycles.” Strange conclusion to so much hard reasoning!