The wedding of Francesco de’Medici and Giovanna of Austria was accompanied by processions and art that celebrated Florence’s history and its cultural and artistic achievements. Vincenzio Borghini and Giorgio Vasari worked with Duke Cosimo on the program. New paintings on Florentine history in the Palazzo Vecchio led Girolamo Mei to write a treatisethat challenged Borghini’s assessment of the city’s history, using evidence that included the writings of Annius of Viterbo. They exchanged letters that raised issues about the use of ruins and other non-textual evidence. Borghini went on to write Discorsi on Florence’s history and traditions that also explored methods of studying the past; he wrote on medieval coinage, on families and family crests, the nature of nobility, and more. Borghini argued that traditions and social practices develop and change like languages. Many typically Florentine customs, he suggested, developed in parallel with the formation of the city’s government in the thirteenth century.

In the 1540s, Piefrancesco Giambullari and Giovan Battista Gelli published books in which they argued that the Florentine language was not a debased form of Latin, but derived from Aramaic and Etruscan. Their claims divided the Accademia Fiorentina for a number of years, and earned them the nickname “Aramei.”They relied especially on the writings of Annius of Viterbo, whose fraudulent works seemed to them to provide information about the region and its people that was absent from Roman sources. Their arguments about language history were unsatisfactory to many; efforts to refute them effectivelyinspired years of further research. Yet even those who opposed them were interested in finding ways to study peoples, languages, and customs. Ancient models of historical writing focused on politics and public actions, but in order to study groups of people, customs, or languages, newer approaches were needed.