SPECIAL SUBJECT
C: Writing History in Early Modern England
Arnold Hunt
Girton College
[email protected]
Overview
List of classes
Primary sources
General bibliography
Secondary reading (class by class)
Overview
History was one of the most prestigious branches of scholarship in the early modern
period. ‘There is no treasure so much enriches the mind of man as learning,’ wrote
Edmund Bolton, ‘there is no learning so proper for the direction of the life of man as
history’. And the early modern period also saw some major changes in history-writing
and historical consciousness, among them the decline of the medieval chronicle
tradition and the rise of a new school of ‘politic history’, influenced by Machiavelli
and Guicciardini, in which the history of the past was applied to the politics of the
present.
This went hand in hand with the rise of an antiquarian movement with a new
emphasis on original sources and a set of new techniques for interpreting them. As the
‘ancient British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth was gradually consigned to the
realm of myth and fable, so other models of national history emerged to replace it.
The Protestant Reformation became a crucial moment in the providentialist narrative
told by John Foxe and others, but also came to be seen as a profound rupture with the
past, creating what we now think of as the division between ‘medieval’ and ‘early
modern’. In these and many other ways, history as practised in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries continues to influence history as practised today.
This Special Subject will explore the writing of history in England from the midsixteenth to the late seventeenth century. The main focus will be on a group of
canonical works, including Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563-83), Holinshed’s
Chronicles (1577/87), Camden’s Britannia (1586), Stow’s Survey of London (1598)
and Ralegh’s History of the World (1614), ending with Clarendon’s History of the
Rebellion and other contemporary histories of the early Stuart period and the Civil
War.
But it will also take a wider view, following Daniel Woolf’s insight (in The Social
Circulation of the Past, 2003) that ‘the likes of Camden and Selden .. might not
represent the sum and total measure of historical culture in early modern England’. It
will investigate the reading as well as the writing of history, its refraction through
poetry and drama, and the relationship between historical scholarship and ‘social
memory’, all of which serve to illustrate the deep interconnections between elite and
popular perceptions of the past. Rather than taking a top-down approach, it will look
at the ways that social memory flowed back into historical scholarship through the
study of folklore and tradition (as in Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaism)
and the personal voice of biography and life-writing.
The course will consist of 16 two-hour classes in Michaelmas and Lent, followed by 4
revision classes in Easter term.
List of classes
Michaelmas Term
M1. Introduction
M2. Reading and writing history in the early modern period
M3. The chronicle tradition: Grafton, Stow, Holinshed
M4. Religious and providential history: Foxe and his opponents
M5. Politic history: the rediscovery of Tacitus
M6. World history: Ralegh
M7. National histories: Camden and his followers
M8. Legal antiquarianism: Selden, Cotton
Lent Term
L1. Ancient Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the mythical past
L2. The recovery of Anglo-Saxon England
L3. Histories of medieval England
L4. Histories of Henry VII and Henry VIII
L5. Histories of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth
L6. Histories of the early Stuart period and the Civil War
L7. History and biography
L8. History, memory and folklore
Michaelmas Term
M1. Introduction
This introductory session will cover some of the general themes of the course and
discuss the use of sources, particularly the use of Early English Books Online
(EEBO). We will look at Francis Bacon’s analysis of the different types of history in
his Advancement of Learning:
The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon, of the proficiencie and advancement of Learning
(1605), STC 1164. Second book, pp 7-17 (EEBO images 53-64).
Of the Advancement and Proficiencie of Learning (1640), STC 1167. Pages 79-105
(EEBO images 96-109)
The Advancement of Learning, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford, 1974), pp 67-80.
The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 2000), pp 62-73.
We will discuss these various editions, how they differ from each other, and why one
might want to choose one rather than another.
M2. Reading and writing history in the early modern period
Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds
(1945), pp 9-40. Available as an e-book (use Cambridge login):
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?c=acls;cc=acls;view=toc;idno=heb05975.0001.001
Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica: or a Rule of Judgement, for Reading or Writing our
Histories (c.1621), in J.E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century
(Oxford, 1907), pp 82-115. Available as an e-book (no login needed):
https://archive.org/details/criticalessaysof01spinuoft
Degory Wheare, De Ratione et Methodo (1635), translated as The Method and Order
of Reading both Civil and Ecclesiastical Histories (1685), sections 1-6 (pp 1-43, start
at image 25 on EEBO).
John Hall, ‘A Method of History’ (1645), printed in Joad Raymond, ‘John Hall’s A
Method of History: A Book Lost and Found’, English Literary Renaissance, 28: 2
(1998), pp 267-98 (Hall’s text pp 286-98): http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447578
Total pages: 119
M3. The chronicle tradition: Grafton, Stow, Holinshed
Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of England
(1569), dedication to William Cecil, preface ‘to the gentle Reader’, ‘Thomas N. to the
Reader’ (images 1-7 on EEBO). Nineteenth-century reprint available as an e-book (no
login needed): https://archive.org/details/graftonschronicl01grafuoft
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England (first pub. 1577). This is the last and
largest of the sixteenth-century chronicles, and its huge size (roughly 3.5 million
words) makes it almost unmanageable. The best way to access it is via the Holinshed
Project website, which includes the texts of the 1577 and 1587 editions, split up
chapter-by-chapter for ease of use:
http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/
A separate website provides some commentary on the edition, including some helpful
working papers. Paulina Kewes, ‘Narrative Historiography and the Rules of
Succession’ is particularly useful (and discusses other chronicles, not just Holinshed):
http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/papers.shtml
The modern facsimile edition edited by Cyndia Clegg, The Peaceable and Prosperous
Regiment of Blessed Queen Elizabeth (2005), is useful if you want to study the
censorship of Holinshed, as it includes facsimiles of both the censored and
uncensored versions, allowing you to compare them more easily. There is a copy in
the UL (S540.bb.200.1) and another copy in the Seeley Library (closed stacks,
DA350.H65 2005).
We will look at the last chapter from the 1586 edition: ‘The continuation of the
chronicles of England from the yeare of our Lord 1576 to this present yeare 1586,
&c.’ (http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1587_9135)
John Stow, Survey of London (first pub. 1598). This is another large and sprawling
work, best consulted in the modern edition by C.L. Kingsford (1908), which is also
available online (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/survey-of-londonstow/1603). We will look at the chapters ‘Of orders and customes of the Citizens’ (pp
79-91), ‘Sports and pastimes’ (pp 91-99), ‘Honour of Citizens and worthines of men’
(pp 104-117).
C.L. Kingsford, ed., Two London Chronicles from the Collection of John Stow, in
Camden Miscellany, vol. 12 (1910). Digitized text available online:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/camden-misc/vol12/no1
John Stow, The Annales of England (1605), STC 23337. Preface ‘To the gentle
reader’ (EEBO images 14-15).
John Stow, continued by Edmond Howes, Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of
England (1632), ‘An Historicall Preface to this Booke’ (EEBO images 3-10).
Total pages: c. 80
M4. Religious and providential history: Foxe and his opponents
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (first pub. 1563). The most authoritative edition of
Foxe is the online edition first published in 2011, The Acts and Monuments Online
(TAMO): http://www.johnfoxe.org
In addition to the text, this includes a commentary and a useful set of critical essays
which you can access by clicking on the link to ‘Critical Apparatus’ and then the link
to ‘Essays’. Patrick Collinson’s essay ‘John Foxe as Historian’ is particularly helpful.
Note: at the time of writing (Sept 2016) the Foxe website has gone offline, with no
indication of when it will be back up again. However, you can still access most of the
contents via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.johnfoxe.org
The huge size of the Actes and Monuments makes it challenging to navigate. We will
be looking at the following extracts: the 1570 prefaces ‘To the True and Faithful
Congregation of Christ’s Universal Church’ (also known as the ‘Protestation to the
Whole Church of England’) and ‘To the true Christian reader, what utilitie is to be
taken by reading of these Historyes’, and the opening to Book 5, in which Foxe sets
out his view of providential history. For convenience, we will also look at some of the
martyr narratives in the World’s Classics edition by John N. King, Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs: Select Narratives (2009). Copies of all these will be issued.
Alongside Foxe we will look at a couple of his Catholic opponents:
Robert Parsons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603-4), STC 19416.
Pages 292 (from ‘There remaineth then a third point’) to 299 (to ‘we take in hand to
intreate’), EEBO images 185-188.
Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, trans. David Lewis
(London: Burns & Oates, 1877), pp 104-65 (Book I chapters 15-19). Available as an
e-book (no login needed): https://archive.org/details/riseofschism00sanduoft
Total pages: c. 100.
M5. Politic history: the rediscovery of Tacitus
Tacitus, trans. Sir Henry Savile, The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba (1591),
STC 23642. Preface ‘A.B. to the Reader’ (EEBO images 3-4).
Sir Clement Edmondes, Observations upon the First Five Bookes of Caesars
Commentaries (1600), STC 7488. Pages 1-7, ‘Reading and discourse are requisite to
make a souldier’ (EEBO images 3-6).
Robert Johnson, Essaies (1601), STC 14695. ‘Essay 7, Of Hystories’ (EEBO images
18-24).
Robert Dallington, Aphorismes Civill and Militarie (1613), STC 6197. Extract: pages
1-18 (EEBO images 4-13)
Sir Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. Brian Vickers
(Cambridge, 1998), pp 225-36, ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’, ‘Of Seditions and
Troubles’.
Sir Robert Cotton, A Short View of the Long Life and Raigne of Henry the Third
(1627), STC 5864. In full: 49pp.
Total: 98 pages
M6. World history: Ralegh
Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (first pub. 1614), ed. C.A. Patrides (1971).
Digitized copies of the 1614 edition available on EEBO and at archive.org
(https://archive.org/details/historyofworld00rale).
M7. National histories: Camden and his followers
William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), STC 4509. Chapter 1,
‘Britaine’, pp 1-23 (EEBO images 9-20). Also available in an online edition
(http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/).
William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke (1605), STC 4521. Chapters on ‘The
Languages’ (pp 12-28) and ‘Christian Names’ (pp 28-39). (EEBO images 11-24).
Also available in a modern edition, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R.D. Dunn
(Toronto, 1984), and an 1870 edition available as an e-book (no login needed):
https://archive.org/details/remainsconcerni02camdgoog
William Camden and others, ‘Of the Diversity of Names of this Island’, in A
Collection of Curious Discourses (1773), pp 90-100. Available on ECCO and
archive.org (https://archive.org/details/acollectioncuri01conggoog).
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612), STC 7226. ‘From the Author of the
Illustrations’ (EEBO images 5-8) and ‘The first Song’, pp 1-22 (EEBO images 1021). Extracts from the book are available in a pilot online edition (http://humanitiesresearch.exeter.ac.uk/poly-olbion/).
William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1596), STC 15176. Preface ‘to his
Countriemen, the Gentlemen of the Countie of Kent’ (EEBO images 4-5).
Total pages: 88
M8. Legal antiquarianism: Selden, Cotton
John Selden, The Historie of Tithes (1618), STC 22172.3. Preface, pp i-xxii (EEBO
images 4-15), and ‘A Review of the VIII Chapter’, pp 481-5 (EEBO images 261-3).
Sir Robert Cotton, Cottoni Posthuma: Divers Choice Pieces of that Renowned
Antiquary (1651), pp 13-39, ‘That the kings of England have been pleased usually to
consult with their Peers in the Great Council’ (EEBO images 11-24).
John Selden, ‘To my singular good Friend, Mr Augustine Vincent’, in Augustine
Vincent, A Discoverie of Errours in the First Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility
(1622), STC 24756 (EEBO images 18-23).
John Selden, Tracts (1683), Janus Anglorum, chapter 19, ‘Of Law-Makers’, pp 93-4
(EEBO images 64-5).
Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae [In Praise of the Laws of England;
parallel Latin-English text with Selden’s notes in English] (1616), STC 11197.
Chapter 17, ‘The customs of England are of most ancient antiquitie’, pp 38-40 (EEBO
images 46-8), with Selden’s notes on this chapter, pp 7-22 (EEBO images 147-55).
Total pages: 80
Lent Term
L1. Ancient Britain
William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), STC 4509. ‘The Name of
Britain’, ‘The Manner and Customs of the Britons’, ‘Romans in Britain’ (final page
only), ‘Britons of Armorica’, ‘Britons of Wales and Cornwall’, ‘Picts’ and ‘Scots’
(EEBO images 20-26, 52-53 and 64-74).
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England (1587). STC 13569, on Boudicca’s
rebellion, vol. 2 pp 42-46 (EEBO images 307-311).
John Selden, Tracts (1683), Janus Anglorum, on the ancient Britons, pp 1-16 (EEBO
images 18-32).
Edmund Bolton, Nero Caesar (1624), STC 3222, on Boudicca’s rebellion, pp 97-193
(EEBO images 63-111).
Total pages: 91
L2. Anglo-Saxon Britain
A Machiavellian Treatise by Stephen Gardiner, ed. P.S. Donaldson (Cambridge,
1975), pp 101-51: ‘A Discourse on the Coming of the English and Normans to
Britain’.
John Milton, History of Britain, Book III, including the ‘Digression’ on the Long
Parliament.
L3. Medieval England
John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (first pub. 1599), ed. John J.
Manning (1991), pp 130-67 (on the deposition of Richard II).
Samuel Daniel, The First Fowre Books of the Civil Wars between the Two Houses of
Lancaster and Yorke (1599), pp 39-48.
Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars (1609), preface and pp 56-69.
L4. Histories of Henry VII and Henry VIII
Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. Brian Vickers
(Cambridge, 1998); The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, ed.
Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 2011).
Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth
(1649). [About 50 pp will be set]
The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil A.D. 1485-1537, ed. and trans. Denys Hay
(London: Royal Historical Society, Camden Series 74, 1950), introduction and Book
XXVII (pp 221-337). Also available in an online edition
(http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/polverg/).
L5. Histories of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth
John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth (first pub. 1630), ed.
Barrett L. Beer (1993).
John Hayward, Annals of the First Four Years of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed.
John Bruce (Camden Society, 1840).
William Camden, Annales, or the History of the Most Renowned and Victorious
Princesse Elizabeth (1635), ed. W.T. MacCaffrey (Chicago, 1970). Also available in
an online edition (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/camden/). [About 50pp will be
set, including the introduction and the chapter on 1587]
L6. Histories of the early Stuart period and the Civil War
Sir Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (1651), pp 176-226.
Peter Heylyn, Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles (1656),
preface, pp 28-33, 104-11, 144-7.
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion: A New Selection, ed.
Paul Seaward (Oxford, 2009), pp 1-28 (on the 1630s), 332-6 (on the execution of
Charles I).
Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford,
2009), pp 107-11, 130-55.
L7. History and biography
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (1579),
prefatory material (images 1-8 on EEBO).
George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. R.S. Sylvester (Early
English Texts Society, 1959).
John Clapham, biography of Lord Burghley, in Clapham, Elizabeth of England:
Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Evelyn
Plummer Read and Conyers Read (1951), pp 70-85.
‘Of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham:
Some Observations by Way of Parallel’, in Henry Wotton, Reliquiae Wottonianae
(1651), pp 1-70.
L8. History, memory and folklore
John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, in Aubrey, Three Prose Works,
ed. John Buchanan-Brown (1972), pp 129-82 (introduction and chs. 1-5).
Aubrey, ‘An Introduction to the Survey of Wiltshire’, from Miscellanies on Several
Curious Subjects (1714).
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (Creighton Trust
Lecture, 1983).
Andy Wood, ‘History, Time and Social Memory’, in Keith Wrightson, ed., A Social
History of England (Cambridge, 2017), pp 373-91.
General bibliography:
Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1970).
Patrick Collinson, ‘History’, in Michael Hattaway, ed., A New Companion to English
Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 1 (2010), pp 55-73.
Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the
University of Oxford, Vol. IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), pp 327-57
on history.
A.B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in
Renaissance England (Durham, NC, 1979).
Levi Fox, ed., English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Oxford, 1956).
F.S. Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought
1580-1640 (1962).
Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, 2007)
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England
(Chicago, 1992)
T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950)
Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino:
Huntington Library, 2006)
Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English
Historiography (1987)
F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967)
May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford, 1995)
Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, eds., The Historical Imagination in Early
Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1997)
Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 2007).
William Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical
Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (London, Institute of Classical Studies, 2005).
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (1983).
Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England
(Oxford, 2010)
D.R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 15001710 (Oxford, 2003)
D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and the
‘Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990)
Secondary reading (class by class):
M2. Reading and writing history in the early modern period
Leonard F. Dean, ‘Bodin’s Methodus in England before 1625’, Studies in Philology,
39 (1942), pp 160-66.
Richard L. DeMolen, ‘The Library of William Camden’, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, 128 (1984), pp 326-409.
Norman Farmer, ‘Fulke Greville and Sir John Coke: An Exchange of Letters on a
History Lectureship and Certain Latin Verses on Sir Philip Sidney’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 33 (1970), pp 217-36 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3816636).
Ingo Herklotz, ‘Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’: A
Critical Review’, in Peter N. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism:
Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto, 2007), pp 127-53.
Ivo Kamps, ‘The Writing of History in Shakespeare’s England’, in Richard Dutton
and Jean E. Howard, eds., A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol 2: The
Histories (2003), pp 4-25.
Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering and
Sociability 1660-1703 (Oxford, 2015), ch. 4, ‘Reading History in the Restoration’ (pp
108-34).
Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), pp 285-315 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/750215)
Joseph H. Preston, ‘Was there a Historical Revolution?’ Journal of the History of
Ideas, 38:2 (1977), pp 353-64.
J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Precept, example, and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica’,
in Kelley and Sacks, eds., The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain
(1997), pp 11-36.
D.R. Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the
Past, 1500-1700’, in Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England, pp
31-67.
D.R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), chapter 2:
‘The contexts and purposes of history reading’ (pp 79-131).
M3. The chronicle tradition: Hall, Grafton, Stow, Holinshed
Ian Archer, 'The nostalgia of John Stow' in D. Smith, R. Strier and D. Bevington, eds.,
The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649 (Cambridge,
1995), pp 17-34.
Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997),
ch. 7, ‘The review and reform of Holinshed’s Chronicles’.
Janet Ing Freeman, ‘‘Lyes’ and ‘Hyghe Treason’ in 1570: John Stow annotates
Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles’, The Library, 7th series, 6 (2005), pp 25173.
Ian Gadd & Alexandra Gillespie, eds., John Stow and the Making of the English Past
(London: British Library, 2004).
Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer and Felicity Heal, eds., The Oxford Handbook of
Holinshed’s Chronicles (2012).
F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967), ch. 5, ‘The Great Chronicle Tradition’
(pp 167-201).
Scott Lucas, ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Mirror for Magistrates: History and the Tragic
Pattern’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor
Literature 1485-1603 (Oxford, 2009), pp 356-71.
J.F. Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the
City from Stow to Strype 1598-1720 (Cambridge, 2001), chs 1-3 (Collinson, Merritt,
Archer), pp 27-113.
G.J.R. Parry, ‘John Stow’s unpublished ‘Historie of this Iland’: amity and enmity
amongst sixteenth-century scholars’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987), pp 63347.
Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago, 1994).
D. R. Woolf, 'Genre into Artefact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the
Sixteenth Century', Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1998), pp. 321-54.
M4. Religious and providential history: Foxe and his opponents
Patrick Collinson, 'Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant
historiography', in Kelley and Sacks, eds., The historical imagination in early modern
Britain (1997), pp 37-68.
Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: the Veracity of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in
A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, eds., Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the
Netherlands (1985), reprinted in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (1994).
Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern
England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011).
Christopher Highley, ‘‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis
Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation’, in Kewes, ed., The Uses of
History in Early Modern England, pp 147-68.
Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds., John Foxe and his World (Aldershot,
2002).
John N. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge,
2006).
David Loades, ed., John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997).
G.J.R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of
Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1987).
M5. Politic history: the rediscovery of Tacitus
Alan T. Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism and the ‘Utility’ of Tacitus’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 45 (1983), pp 127-55 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817324).
Richard Dutton ‘Buggeswords: Samuel Harsnett and the Licensing, Suppression and
Afterlife of Dr. John Hayward's The first part of the life and reign of King Henry IV’,
Criticism, 35 (1993), pp 305-39 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/23116649).
Bart van Es, ‘Historiography and Biography’, in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie,
eds., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 2: 15581660 (Oxford, 2015), pp 433-60.
Paulina Kewes, ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late
Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74:4 (2011), pp 515-51
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2011.74.4.515).
F.J. Levy, ‘Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History in England’,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 50:1 (1987), pp 1-34
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817346).
J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean
England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), pp 199-225
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709732).
Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.15901630’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart
England (1994), pp 21-43.
David Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political
Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), pp 313-42
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/518347).
D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (1990), ch. 4, ‘Politic
Biographers and the Stuart Court’ and ch. 5, ‘The Historian as Counsellor’ (pp 10569).
M6. World history: Sir Walter Ralegh
Anna Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and his Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking
to the People (Basingstoke, 1997), ch. 2, ‘The History of the World’ (pp 22-59).
Joseph M. Levine, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and the Ancient Wisdom’, in B.Y. Kunze and
D.D. Brautigam, eds., Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British
History (Rochester, 1992), pp 89-108; reprinted in Levine, Re-enacting the Past:
Essays on the Evolution of Modern English Historiography (Aldershot, 2004).
Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s ‘History of the World’ and the Historical Culture
of the Late Renaissance (Chicago, 2012).
M7a. National histories: England, Scotland, Ireland
Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Constructions of the Historical
Kingdom of Ireland’, in Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest, eds., Constructing
the Past; Writing Irish History, 1600-1800 (2010), pp 9-26.
Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason, eds., George Buchanan: Political Thought in
Early Modern Britain and Europe (2012).
Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor representations of Irish origins’, Irish
Historical Studies, 28 (1993), pp 390-408.
Andrew Hadfield, ‘Sceptical History and the Myth of the Historical Revolution’,
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 29 (2005), pp 25-44.
Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the
Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999).
Richard McCabe, ‘Making History: Holinshed’s Irish Chronicles, 1577 and 1587’, in
David J. Baker and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance
Literature (Cambridge, 2002), pp 51-67.
Roger Mason, ‘Scotland’, and Colm Lennon, ‘Ireland’, in Kewes, Archer and Heal,
eds., Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2012).
Roger Mason, ‘How Andrew Melville Read His George Buchanan’, in Roger A.
Mason and Steven J. Reid, eds., Andrew Melville (1545-1622): Writings, Reception
and Reputation (2014), pp 11-45.
David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, in Kevin Sharpe and
Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of
Seventeenth-Century England (1987), pp 78-116.
Malcolm Smuts, ‘Banquo’s Progeny: Hereditary Monarchy, the Stuart Lineage, and
Macbeth’, in J M Dutcher and A L Prescott (eds), Renaissance Historicisms: Essays
in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney (Newark, 2008).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution (1966),
reprinted in revised form in Trevor Roper, The Invention of Scotland: Myth and
History (2008).
M7b. Local history and gentry antiquarianism
Jan Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local
History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006).
Richard Cust, ‘Heraldry and the Gentry Community in Shakespeare’s England’, in
Nigel Ramsay, ed., Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (Dodington:
Shaun Tyas, 2014), pp 190-203.
Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson, eds., William Dugdale, Historian, 16051686: His Life, His Writings and His County (2009).
Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford, 2002), ch. 2, ‘Chorography and the
Presence of the Past’ (pp 49-77).
Oliver D. Harris, ‘William Camden, Philemon Holland and the 1610 translation of the
Britannia’, Antiquaries Journal, 95 (2015), pp 279-303.
Arnold Hunt and Dora Thornton, ‘A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed: Thomas Lyte,
The Lyte Genealogy and the Lyte Jewel’, Antiquaries Journal, 96 (2016),
forthcoming.
Stuart Piggott, ‘William Camden and the Britannia’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, 37 (1951), pp 199-217.
R.C. Richardson, ‘William Camden and the Re-Discovery of England’, Transactions
of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 78 (2004), pp 108-23
(https://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/05Vol78-Richardson.pdf).
Philip Schwyzer, ‘John Leland and His Heirs: The Topography of England’, in Mike
Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature 14851603 (Oxford, 2009), 238-53.
Philip Styles, Sir Simon Archer, 1581-1662 (Dugdale Society, Occasional Papers,
1946).
Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), ch. 4, ‘The Genealogical
Imagination’ (pp 99-137).
M8. Legal antiquarianism: Selden, Cotton
David Sandler Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years: Politics and Society in
Early Seventeenth-Century England (1988).
Christopher Brooks and Kevin Sharpe, ‘Debate: History, English Law and the
Renaissance’, Past & Present, 72 (1976), pp 133-42.
Paul Christianson, Discourse on History, Law and Governance in the Public Career
of John Selden 1610-1635 (Toronto, 1996).
Paul Christianson, ‘Young John Selden and the Ancient Constitution, c.1610-1618’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128 (1984), pp 271-315.
J. Sears McGee, An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford,
2015).
J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English
Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (enlarged edition, Cambridge, 1987).
Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton (1586-1631): History and Politics in Early Modern
England (Oxford, 1979).
Kevin Sharpe, ‘Re-writing Sir Robert Cotton: Politics and History in Early Stuart
England’, in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of SeventeenthCentury Politics (Cambridge, 2000).
Johann P. Sommerville, ‘History and Theory: The Norman Conquest in Early Stuart
Political Thought’, Political Studies, 34 (1986), pp 249-61.
Corinne C. Weston, ‘England: Ancient Constitution and Common Law’, in J.H. Burns
with Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700
(Cambridge, 1991), pp 374-411.
D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (1990), ch. 7, ‘Selden: From
Antiquarianism to History’ (pp 200-42).
Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the historians’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake,
eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), pp 67-89.
Blair Worden, ‘Historians and Poets’, in Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early
Modern England (2006), pp 69-90.
C.J. Wright, ed., Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier
and his Legacy (1997).
L1. Ancient Britain
Anke Bernau, ‘Myths of origin and the struggle over nationhood in medieval and
early modern England’, in McMullan and Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in
Early Modern England (2007), pp 106-18.
Richard Dutton, ‘King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia and ‘The Matter of
Britain’’, Literature and History, 12 (1986), pp 139-51.
Richard Dutton, ‘Shakespeare and British History’, in Kewes, Archer & Heal, eds.,
Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2012), pp 527-42.
Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in
the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), ch. 4, ‘Milton on the
Ancient Britons’ (pp 91-117).
Graham Parry, ‘Ancient Britons and Early Stuarts’, in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn
Burgess and Rowland Wymer, eds.,, Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance
Literature, History and Politics (2000), pp 155-78.
Carolyn Williams, Boudica and her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior
Queen (2009).
L2. Anglo-Saxon Britain
Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence
Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (2012).
Robin Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times’,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 21 (1935), pp 47-74.
Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson, eds., The Recovery of the Past in Early
Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of
Matthew Parker (Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1998).
Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28
(1999), pp 225-356.
R.I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books (1993).
B.S. Robinson, ‘‘Darke speech’: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), pp 1061-83
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543358).
Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England
(Chicago, 2008).
Retha Warnicke, William Lambarde, Elizabethan Antiquary 1536-1601 (1973).
On the Machiavellian Treatise:
Sydney Anglo, ‘Crypto-Machiavellianism in Early Tudor England: The Problem of
the Ragionamento dell’Advenimento delli Inglesi et Normanni in Britannia’,
Renaissance and Reformation, new series, 2: 2 (1978), pp 182-93
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/43444227).
Dermot Fenlon, review of ‘A Machiavellian Treatise’, Historical Journal, 19: 4
(1976), pp 1019-23 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2638249).
On Milton’s History of Britain:
Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Conquest and Slavery in Milton’s History of Britain’, in Nicholas
McDowell and Nigel Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2011).
Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in
the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991).
Austin Woolrych, ‘Dating Milton’s History of Britain’, Historical Journal, 36: 4
(1993), pp 929-43.
L3. Medieval England
Karen Britland, ‘‘Kings are but Men’: Elizabeth Cary’s Histories of Edward II’,
Études Épistémè, 17 (2010), 31–53 (https://episteme.revues.org/660).
Michael Hattaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays
(Cambridge, 2002).
Ruth Morse, R 2013. ‘Shakespeare and the Remains of Britain’, in R Morse, H
Cooper and P Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge,
2013), pp 119-37.
Cathy Shrank, ‘John Bale and reconfiguring the ‘medieval’ in Reformation England’,
in McMullan and Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England
(2007), pp 179-92.
Jennifer Summit, ‘Leland’s Itinerary and the remains of the medieval past’, in
McMullan and Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England
(2007), pp 159-76.
Gillian Wright, ‘Samuel Daniel’s Use of Sources in The Civil Wars’, Studies in
Philology, 101 (2004), pp 59-87.
L4. Henry VII and Henry VIII
Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations 1530-83 (Aldershot,
1999), ch. 1, ‘John Bale, Edward Halle and the Henrician Reformation’ (pp 40-79).
Thomas Betteridge and Thomas Freeman, eds., Henry VIII and History (Farnham,
2012), esp. chapters by Lucas, Freeman, Houliston and Jackson (pp 51-64, 87-149).
C.S.L. Davies, ‘Tudor: What’s in a Name?’ History, 97 (2012), pp 24-42.
Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford,
1952).
Stuart Clark, ‘Bacon’s Henry VII: A Case-Study in the Science of Man’, History and
Theory, 13: 2 (1974), pp 97-118 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504854).
L5. Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth
Patrick Collinson, ‘One of Us? William Camden and the Making of History’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), pp 139-63
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679292).
Patrick Collinson, ‘William Camden and the Anti-Myth of Elizabeth: Setting the
Mould?’ in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., The Myth of Elizabeth (2003),
pp 79-97.
Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Doran and Freeman, eds., The Myth of Elizabeth, pp 2755.
Paulina Kewes, ‘Two Queens, One Inventory: The Lives of Mary and Elizabeth
Tudor’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and
Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s First Historian: William Camden and the
Beginnings of English ‘Civil’ History’, Renaissance Essays (1985), pp 121-48.
L6. The early Stuart period and the Civil War
Martin Dzelzainis, ‘‘Undouted Realities’: Clarendon on Sacrilege’, Historical
Journal, 33 (1990), pp 515-40.
C.H. Firth, ‘Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion’, English Historical Review, 19
(1904), pp 26-55, 246-63, 464-83.
Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law and
National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Lorna Clymer, ed., Ritual,
Routine and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures 1650-1832
(Toronto, 2005), pp 103-31.
Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague,
1974).
Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The
Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007).
David Norbrook, ‘The English Revolution and English Historiography’, in N.H.
Keeble, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution
(Cambridge, 2001), pp 233-50.
Paul Seaward, ‘Clarendon, Tacitism, and the Civil Wars of Europe’, in Kewes, ed.,
The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2006), pp 285-306.
John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in
Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008), ch. 1, ‘The Debt of Memory:
Edmund Calamy and the Dissenters in Restoration England’ (pp 13-40).
Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern
England (2000).
Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of
Posterity (2001),
B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640-1660 (1991).
L7. History and biography
Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in
Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, 1984).
Timothy Hampton, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in
Renaissance Literature (Cornell, 1990).
Jessica Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of
Biography (Oxford, 2001), ch. 2, ‘Reading Plutarch, Writing Lives’ (pp 32-65).
Thomas Mayer and D.R. Woolf, eds., The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern
Europe (1995).
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality,
Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012).
Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010).
Richard S. Sylvester, ‘Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey: The Artistry of a Tudor
Biographer’, Studies in Philology, 57 (1960), pp 44-71
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/4173301).
L8. History, memory and folklore
Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense
of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973), pp 231-55
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/751164).
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford, 2000).
Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written
Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 9 (1999), pp
233-56 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679402).
Robert Tittler, Townspeople and Nation: English Urban Experiences 1540-1640
(Stanford, 2001), ch. 5, ‘Henry Manship: Constructing the Civic Memory in Great
Yarmouth’ (pp 121-39).
Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and
Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011).
Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in
Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013).
Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), chs 8-10, ‘The Past
Remembered’ (pp 259-391).
Daniel Woolf, ‘Little Crosby and the horizons of early modern historical culture’, in
Kelley and Sacks, eds., The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain (1997),
pp 93-132.