Against Over-Interpretation: When a Single Source Becomes a System

One of the most persistent—and intellectually corrosive—risks in contemporary historiography is not factual error, but over-interpretation: the tendency to inflate a single source, or a narrowly circumscribed documentary cluster, into a comprehensive explanatory framework. What is lost in this process is not nuance, but proportion; not interpretation, but method.

A particularly emblematic case is that of Elena Bonora. Aspettando l’imperatore. Principi italiani tra il papa e Carlo V (Einaudi, 2012)—recently translated into English by a publisher that has developed the habit of repackaging older Italian historiography for the Anglophone market, sometimes canonical, sometimes less so (Waiting for the Emperor, Viella, 2022)—constructs an ambitious reconstruction of Italian political dynamics between 1534 and 1549 almost entirely on the correspondence of Cardinal Benedetto Accolti. The source is undoubtedly significant, but it remains one voice, embedded in personal agendas, factional anxieties, and rhetorical self-fashioning. To elevate such material into a quasi-total vision of Italian politics is to mistake perspective for structure, discourse for process, and contingency for system. And precisely because the source is so important, a more basic methodological question cannot be avoided: why was it not edited and contextualized as a source, for the benefit of the scholarly community and the advancement of the field, instead of being mobilized to sustain a small yet ambitious grand synthesis almost entirely dependent upon it? An edition—critical, annotated, and properly situated—would have allowed the correspondence to be interrogated, compared, and tested, rather than pressed into service as an all-purpose explanatory device.

The choice to pursue synthesis rather than source publication is not neutral. It shifts the burden of interpretation entirely onto the historian, foreclosing collective scrutiny and insulating the argument from the kind of philological and contextual control that only an edition can provide. In such cases, interpretation does not emerge from the source; it replaces it.The problem, however, is not confined to Bonora. It reflects a broader historiographical habit: the temptation to privilege coherence over complexity, to impose retrospective intelligibility where the sources instead testify to uncertainty, hesitation, and contradiction. Over-interpretation flourishes precisely where methodological caution is abandoned in favor of narrative elegance and interpretive audacity.

Anyone working in political, social, or religious history should be acutely aware that many types of sources are especially vulnerable to this distortion. They are not transparent windows onto political reality, but rhetorical artifacts, shaped by mediation, positioning, and institutional function. Treating them as repositories of implicit political theory, or worse, as evidence of fully formed ideological programs, is a fundamental category error. It turns historically situated texts into timeless explanatory keys.

These risks are not merely theoretical. They have tangible consequences for how we reconstruct early modern political cultures, confessional conflicts, and processes of state formation. They encourage speculative architectures built on insufficient foundations and reward interpretive bravura at the expense of empirical restraint.

I have addressed these issues en passant in my article Religious Policies and Civil Conflict: ‘Italian’ Perspectives on the French Wars of Religion, published in "Religions", 16 (8), 2025, where the danger of over-interpretation is explicitly identified as a methodological pitfall, particularly when modern analytical frameworks are retrojected onto sources that resist such coherence. There, the tone was restrained. Here, restraint is less warranted.

Methodological caution is not the enemy of interpretation; it is its minimum ethical requirement. When it is suspended, interpretation ceases to be analysis and becomes projection. At that point, historiography no longer interrogates the past, it colonizes it. Coherence is imposed where none exists; systems are extracted from fragments; voices are inflated into structures simply because the historian needs them to carry explanatory weight.

This is not innovation. It is methodological overreach dressed up as originality. And it should be called what it is. Sources do not generate systems. Historians do, by force, by selection, and by silence. The only real question is whether they are willing to admit it.

Daniele Santarelli