Francesco Guicciardini: the historian's craft is an essay in the art of reading history, designed to make the works of one of Italy's greatest historians more accessible to the modern reader. It is based on the assumption that historical writing is a literary genre and that histories are essentially narratives, an assumption natural to the Renaissance intellectuals of Guicciardini's time. Focusing on the texts themselves, particularly the Ricordi and the Storia d'Italia, the author examines the structure, language and themes in these writings, demonstrating Guicciardini's mastery of his craft and tracing the various stages of his intellectual development. As the first full-scale examination of Guicciardini and his works, this book makes a significant contribution to Renaissance literary and historical studies.