Chapter 3: Narrative as the Methodology of Humanism

This is not a prescription for all who take on a Humanist mantle to adopt narrative evaluation methods. But, as I will try to show, narrative representation emerged in tandem with iconoclasm and Humanist freedoms – much in the Italian Renaissance. And, of that, much in Florence of the 14th–16th Centuries. What we will do in this chapter is to immerse ourselves in the Renaissance expression of individual self-determination and narrative representation. This is by no means a diversion - though it certainly looks incongruous in a book on the politics and ethics of evaluation. It is our history. What follows may appear, at times, to diverge from our understanding of programs and of a commitment to Humanistic evaluation that you may or may not share. But, no. There will be barely a sentence that, for my intentions, does not address the dilemmas of how to go about evaluation that is sensitive to personal experience. It was at the end of my career as a programme evaluator that I immersed myself in Renaissance studies and came to fully understand the source and the political power of the method I had employed for 40 years. History is context; context is all.