1. The classic statements on Machiavelli and Guicciardini as “philosophical historians” are by Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)
2. and John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), chs. 7–8.
3. David Allan, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
4. see also Allan, “Protestantism, Presbyterianism and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish History,” in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182–205.
5. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V: With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, From the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996 [reprint of the 1792 ed.]), I: x.