Overview
The historians of the Renaissance were able to obtain a new and firmer grasp on the chronology of history and overall secularized the writing of history. The secularization of history was not an attempt to knock Christianity, but an attempt to look at history based on the documents that remained and to analyze them without any king of religious prejudice. The historians of the Renaissance, including a Leonardo Bruni, looked at history and the changes in it and tried to find the material causes of these changes or events, whereas in the Middle Ages problems, political strife or any other type of disturbance was labeled as caused by God. It was in this new form of analysis that Leonardo Bruni wrote his History of the Florentine People.
Guicciardini
The historical works of Fracesco Guicciardini are some of the most famous and most highly regarded historical texts in history. Francesco is most acclaimed because not only did he analyze things in the modern way a Renaissance man might have, but he also looked deeper into the causes and effects in history and gleaned lessons from them, lessons he believed were essential to learn.