Disciplinary History and Historical Culture. A Critique of the Histor: the Case of Early Modern England

There are times when work on
the history of history must appear distinctly
narcissistic, especially when it deals with
ages which did not regard history very
highly.

G. R. Elton, Professor of History, Cambridge

Just the facts, Ma'am

Joe Friday, fictional TV detective, Los Angeles

1. I. Prologue
   
   One morning in 1611, a Lancashire cowherd found a number of old silver coins and, not knowing what they were took them home to his master, a man named William Blundell. The landlord of the manor of Little Crosby, near Liverpool, Blundell was a catholic gentleman whose family had long suffered from protestant persecution. Blundell was both a pious son of Rome and an enthusiastic, self-taught antiquary, and the coins had been found in a section of land he had recently turned into a clandestine cemetery for local catholics. He found many more coins himself, and then, believing them to be a divine reward for his family's steadfastness in the face of puritan hostility, he divided his find into two. One half he consecrated to God, having a pyx and a chalice made of it; the other half he set about analyzing using a fertile imagination and such books as he had access to. His labors resulted in an engraved plate depicting some of the coins, printed copies of which were circulated locally, and in a short account of the coins (which were, it is now known, part of a Viking trove left by a receding army in the tenth century), and of the kings represented thereon, paying special attention to those Anglo-Saxon monarchs, such as Alfred, whom he saw — in stark contrast to all recent monarchs save Mary Tudor — as great respectors of the Church and loyal servants of Rome [1]. What are we to make of this story, which appears nowhere in the standard accounts of early modern historical thought? A conventional historiographical analysis would see this as simply one more episode, and a very minor one at that, in the development of antiquarian interests in the early seventeenth century — hardly worth more than a footnote in an account of early Stuart historical thought. But Blundell's account of his servants discovery, and of his subsequent historical detective work, opens a window on to a number of different cultural transactions. It raises questions such as the significance of objects from the past for their elite collectors and for the humble folk who found them, and the mental world of the rural catholic squire attempting to make some sense of his find. What did Blundell, and the numerous other antiquarian-minded gentlemen around the English countryside, imagine such objects as coins, urns, giant bones and the like to be? For that matter, what did the Thomas Ryses of the time, unfamiliar with much of national history, make of such trinkets that they turned up while ploughing, digging or building? Can the discussions between servants and masters, vulgar and learned, about the residue of the past, tell us something about the historical imagination of early modern England?
2. I suggest that they can, but only if we abandon some time-honoured convictions about the way in which the history of history should be approached. My purpose in this essay is both critical (and, I fear, polemical) as well as constructive. I wish to take issue with what I will here call 'traditional' or sometimes 'positivist' historiography — positivist in the looser sense of assuming gradual, incremental progress in the state of historical knowledge and the methods by which such knowledge is obtained — by analyzing some central axioms through which that disciplinary mirror has focused itself for nearly a century. In the ensuing section, I will examine more closely several constituting assumptions of historiography that have had a helpful, but also distorting, effect on the history of the discipline in early modern times: let us call these, if the Baconian affectation can be permitted, idols of the historiographic mind. In the third section, I will explore the lessons that may be learned by us as early modern historiographers from other, more critically sophisticated, periods of historiographical research, and from other disciplines, most notably literary criticism and cultural anthropology, and will also offer a few concrete suggestions as to what can be done to move us beyond traditional historiography toward a sort of histoire totale de l'historiographie, the reconstruction of a past era's 'historical culture'. By this last term, I intend the complete matrix of relations between past, present and future that includes but is no longer limited to the formal historical writing of that era, a matrix that includes elite and popular, narrative and non-narrative modes of representing the past, that is manifested not merely in texts but in types of behaviour (for instance, the use of time, or the celebration of anniversaries and birthdays) and that, even more importantly, is subject to social and commercial forces that, as much as the traditionally-studied intellectual influences, conditioned the way in which the early modern mind thought, read, and wrote about the past [2].
   
3. II. The Road to Modernity
   
   There can be little doubt that the early modern period was of great importance in the development of modern historiography. Not, certainly, if one reads virtually any of the enormous secondary literature on the subject. Since the time of the Swiss historiographer Eduard Fueter, historians interested in reliving the infancy and adolescence of their discipline have singled out the period from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century as a time of immense change and progress in the advancement of history toward a modern 'science' [3]. One simply has to go to the great surveys of historiography produced in the first half of the twentieth century to see this notion in action: Fueter himself spent exactly half of his survey of modern historiography on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century; James Westfall Thompson, his most sophisticated American successor, ten chapters or some 250 pages; and that enthusiastic New Historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, devoted three substantial chapters to the period from 1400 to 1700, before his survey deteriorated into a laundry list of great names. Most recently, Ernst Breisach's useful textbook also includes four chapters on the three centuries after 1400, more than for any period after antiquity and before the twentieth century [4]. If Breisach and other recent scholars, less convinced than Fueter, Thompson and Barnes of the 'scientific' nature of their discipline, have been a bit less patronizing in their praise, or condescending in their criticism, of the respective virtues and sins of our early modern predecessors, they have nevertheless still conveyed two related messages. The first is that history has grown up by little and little, in parallel with society, from its ancient beginnings to a modern professional discipline with systematic and well-grounded rules of 'evidence', 'method', 'analysis' and 'truth', and related canons of professional practice. The second is that it is our job as historians and teachers to uphold these canons in our own work, to nurture them in our students, and to enforce obedience to them, insofar as we can, outside the academy [5]. The romance of history often proceeds, even where only a few episodes in the story are explicitly related, within a kind of autobiographical disciplinary meta-narrative that in turn implies the existence of an «Ideal Eternal Historiography», beginning with Herodotus and reaching maturity not, as one might expect, in our own times, but with Leopold von Ranke.
4. It is Ranke whose portrait continues to adorn the frontispiece in reprints of Barnes survey, and whose name is still, somewhat perversely in view of recent scholarship on his life and work [6], often used as a metaphor for history's coming of age in the nineteenth century. Ranke has become, especially in Anglo-American circles, a kind of Moses proclaiming the promised land of modern historical enquiry. His twentieth-century heirs have often fought over the inheritance and repeatedly divided and subdivided it into increasingly isolated scholarly appanages; but they agree, for the most part, in their choice of a disciplinary lawgiver. A near religious faith in this myth of disciplinary origins, lent missionary force by History's view of itself as the master-discipline within the humanities and social sciences, has long predominated in the United States and, in a somewhat less dogmatic form, in Britain. It is by no means limited to those countries, nor to actual admirers of Ranke and nineteenth-century German historicism. Germans, Frenchmen (beginning with the notorious little red book of French historical method, Langlois and Seignobos) and Italians (despite strong countervailing voices such as Croce and Gramsci) have contributed to the figuring of history as a rags to riches success story; the late Arnaldo Momigliano, perhaps the most influential classical historiographer in recent memory, made no apologies for doing so. But English historiographers — that is, scholars writing about the history of history in England — have been especially susceptible. From Herbert Butterfield's Man on his Past and David Douglas's English Scholars, through F. Smith Fussner's The Historical Revolution and Fritz Levy's Tudor Historical Thought, right up to recent works by scholars such as Joseph M. Levine and Arthur Ferguson [7], historiographers have without exception bought into a particular account of the development of English historiography, and by extension, of the main currents in the history of what we now call the 'discipline' in other countries [8].
5. Although not all occur in every account of early modern historical writing, and though many authors take steps to minimize their effects, four assumptions govern virtually all treatments of the subject, whether they lie right on the surface, or hidden from view but still implicit in the structure of books, their own plot, and their choice of language. These assumptions derive from a highly developed western tradition of empirical criticism that fuses Anglo-American common-sense scepticism (deriving ultimately from Hume, Locke and Bacon, but perhaps traceable as far back as William of Ockham) and nineteenth- century German critical enquiry. 1) The idol of attainable historical truth: the importance of a notion of absolute, or at least proximate-to-absolute, historical truth, and the merit of historians who successfully seek it in the phenomenological detritus of time. Entailed in this assumption is a corollary, the devaluing of other elements in and forces acting upon the construction of the past that, however important or even defensible they may have been at the time, undermined our predecessors attempts to measure up to our standards of truthfulness. Such «negativities», to invert a Foucauldian term, may include, at varying times and in differing combinations, ideology, myth (particularly myths of national origin — Brutus and the Trojans, Samotheans, Albion), legend (Arthurian and Galfridian fabrications of the unrecorded past), national insularity (for instance in John Pocock's and Donald Kelley's suggestions about the English common-law mind) [9]. 2) The idol of technical methodology: the inherent superiority of any historical work that is based on original research, especially research in archival manuscript sources, over works based on printed materials or, worse still, simply «cobbled together» or «cut and pasted» from previously published histories. 3) The idol of realistic representation: or, the pretty and ugly sides of rhetoric. The key to Renaissance theories of communication, rhetoric is often praised for providing an organizing principle for the raw material of past — Hayden White's «historical field» — and allowing early modern writers, beginning with Leonard Bruni and his Florentine successors, to escape from the «tyranny of the res gestae», in Ferguson's equally apt phrase for the mere listing of events and dates.
6. It is also nearly as often damned for concealing panegyric, promoting florid language, giving rise to imprecision, and emphasizing straight story-telling rather than hard-nosed analysis and what some early seventeenth-century authors dubbed a «plain style» [10]. 4) The idol of the authorial subject, whereby modern historiography of the early modern period, blissfully uninfluenced, it would seem, by critical developments of the last thirty years, continues to assert the supremacy, centrality and autonomy of the individual historical writer and the need to base any account of the history of history in author-focused studies of past historical texts and their makers [11]. This assumption, too, manifests itself in a number of different ways: in the preference for single-authored works — Bacon, unoriginal as he may be, Thomas More, with his chronologically incomplete but psychologically coherent portrait of King Richard III, and even Shakespeare — over the collaborative; in the literary canonization of those histories with a distinctive personal style, from Foxe to Gibbon, and the consequential marginalization of others that seem merely to echo, in a grave humanist basso, the dull impersonality of the chronicles; and in the valuation of authors who proceed free of external encouragement or inducement over those whose financial or social standing permitted them to write relatively free of such malign influences, that must necessarily produce service to a different mistress than truth. Let us now examine these four assumptions more closely. The first, concerning early modern notions of truth and their approximation to modern ideas, is relatively easy to detect and also to explain. Virtually no work on English historiography does not in some way assume that a history, narrative or non-narrative, that is deliberately truthful, or seeks to find out the truth, is inherently superior to one that does not [12]. By these lights, William Camden's or John Selden's striving after the truth of a particular event or series of events — the causes of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, or the precise development of medieval tithing customs — are not merely interesting seventeenth-century achievements; they are taken as programmatic for the development of modern historical writing. Professor Pocock, among the least whiggish and present-minded students of historical thought, looked elsewhere than formal historiography for the origins of the modern understanding of feudalism, and pointed to the existence of competing languages, derived from different legal systems, each of which constrained seventeenth-century English historical thought.
7. But there is still, in his classic account of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, first published in 1957, a 'right' answer, advanced toward by Spelman and his successors, which can be contrasted and compared with the intellectual wrongness of the «common-law mind», there represented principally by the common lawyer, judge, and parliamentary politician, Sir Edward Coke. Half a decade after Pocock's book, the concern for truth is much more explicit — and unrepentantly positivist — in F. Smith Fussner's The Historical Revolution. Writing in the early 1960s, at a time of great enthusiasm for links between disciplines, and especially between history and the 'hard' sciences, Fussner saw the writings of select early Stuart historians as revolutionary, because they promoted a modern 'coherence' theory of truth. He was especially critical of those among their number who appeared to allow partisanship (except, interestingly, in the case of Selden's supposed erastianism, which seemed attractively modern and progressive) ideology to interfere [13]. But ideology can surely not be left out of any account of historiography, nor need it be considered as a retarding and malevolent influence: what makes seventeenth-century historians resemble their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors more closely than they resemble all but a few of their Tudor predecessors, is precisely their willingness to allow a particular vision of the present to structure their emplotment of the past [14]. Even if ideology is grudgingly granted a legitimate role in the formation of historical consciousness, what good can one find in myth? Surely, we want to think, our illustrious predecessors did not really believe that a ragtag gang of Trojan losers helped found and populate the island of Albion (to paraphrase Etienne Pasquier's comments on the cognate French myth of Francion), or that the land was ruled by giants, or that fairies and magicians aided warrior kings in keeping out the Saxon host and transported Stonehenge from Ireland to southwestern Britain [15].
8. Was William Camden, the most influential of late Tudor antiquaries, simply copping out, avoiding a scrap, when he refused in his Britannia (1586) to engage in the debate on King Arthur, or was he genuinely uncertain? We instinctively want to side with those, like Polydore Vergil, who challenged the evidentiary basis of such myths and legends, even when their grounds for doing so were logically weak. As Fritz Levy perceptively observed thirty years ago in Tudor Historical Thought, Vergil's critics, particularly Leland, had both logic and method on their side in coming to Arthur's defence — the mere absence of a mention of something in the early British sources does not mean that it did not exist or did not happen, especially if other available sources like Welsh folklore, linguistic survivals, and local toponyms could be adduced to testify otherwise [16]. If the medieval mythographers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and their ilk can be excused as playful romancers [17], surely one cannot defend the treachery of a wilful early modern forger. English historiographers have not had to deal as directly with the issue of textual forgery as their continental colleagues — we have no such flagrant example as Annius of Viterbo — but still it pops up, for instance in the lingering suspicion that the work of the «martyrologist» (as he is most often dubbed) John Foxe is largely unreliable as a source for Reformation history because he may have rather creatively interpolated absences in the consistory court records and oral testimonies that he collected [18]. The historians of the English civil war, nearly a century later, and with perhaps greater culpability, reprinted holus bolus documents that served their ideological arguments and that they must have realized were bogus, while criminally using their greater critical acumen to denounce their opponents own choice of documents that were similarly suspect. We would do well to take note of Anthony Grafton's recent essay on Renaissance forgery, which demonstrates once and for all that the most notorious forgers were successful precisely because they had the critical and scholarly tools, including a sense of anachronism, to compose documents or texts with the air of verisimilitude [19]. The forger is merely the mirror image of the scholar, Hyde to his Jekyll. Still under this initial rubric, early modern historians are supposed to have been in the process of beating the bounds between truth and fiction.
9. May McKisack, in the concluding section of one of the most well-researched but also most trenchantly empiricist of all accounts of early modern English historiography, starkly contrasted the success of an extended, crowd-pleasing fiction like William Warner's verse history, Albion's England (1586 and four further editions) with the unexciting but truth-seeking researches of her antiquaries, from whom Warner professed to borrow but essentially ignored [20]. There is endless fascination for literary scholars and historiographers alike in works that seem either to confirm or to challenge the boundaries of truth and fiction, of which Michael Drayton's poetic chorography, Poly-Olbion is perhaps the best-known example. Here, the muse recounts all the great founding legends of the British past, and provides for their demolition in the form of «illustrations» by John Selden, representing the side of truth, or at least of non-fiction [21]. At least the forgers and weavers of poetry are deemed in need of some attention, however chiding: our scholarly ancestors, especially those with antiquarian leanings, must be shown to be dragging themselves, however unwillingly, out of the primeval muck of romance and half-truth. Ironically, we have chosen to ignore something prominent in many of the antiquaries works, namely, more popular versions of the past, many surviving today in place names, and recorded as oral traditions by scholars such as Camden and Leland. These traditions have received virtually no attention hitherto, though a majority of Tudor and early Stuart antiquaries thought them worth recording and saw them as a legitimate supplement to written evidence. William Blundell was certainly among them: his acceptance of the oral tradition that placed a by then long-vanished Anglo-Saxon church on his property was as important to him in interpreting the old coins found thereon as was his reading of books like Camden's Britannia. As late as the 1690s, Abraham de la Pryme, a Yorkshire vicar, boasted of his use of such sources at the beginning of his unpublished history of the town of Hatfield Chase, «I have searched & examind not onely all printed books & chronicles, in which I might expect to find any thing relateing there to, but have also examind all the most antient men liveing in the whole country round about» [22].
10. One looks in vain to the existing literature for the role in the development of modern historiography of local giants, Danish invaders and colourful figures like Mr Rut, who gave Rutland its name by riding around the shire in a single day (a popular fiction that may have outlived the geographical reality of its county, which was legislated out of existence in 1974). The second assumption or idol, referring principally to the value of technical erudition (especially archival research) and of the methodological principles to be followed in undertaking it, flows out of the first. If we take truth in the representation of the past as the proper goal of all historians, then those who proceeded ad fontem should merit more attention than those who did not. Among so-called 'politic' historians of England writing in the early seventeenth century, the erstwhile poet and masque-writer Samuel Daniel may be judged a sharper student of the past than the civil lawyer, Sir John Hayward, not only because Daniel wrote better prose (a tricky point to which we will have to return further on), but also because he recognized that original letters could provide an important clue to the workings of the medieval political mind, and thereby explanation of the causes of events. As a retailer of Tudor events, Camden is superior to Francis Godwin or even to Francis Bacon (at least as a practicing historian as opposed to a theorist), because whereas Godwin and Bacon used documents only rarely, and mainly as provided for them selectively and at second-hand, Camden made the full run of available state papers and Cottonian manuscripts the bedrock of his account of Elizabeth's reign. Lord Herbert of Cherbury merits similar praise from his biographers for his use of Tudor documents to revive the flagging reputation of Henry VIII in the 1630s and 40s. Yet both of these apparent champions of modern historical procedure were far from letting the facts speak for themselves in anything like a Rankean, let alone a twentieth-century manner. Each was manifestly influenced by the royal audiences for which he wrote (quite aside from both sharing a more general hierarchical and conservative world picture), and each used his documents in ways that now seem problematic.
11. Camden can be faulted for too great a reliance on the unprocessed, unedited written record, and for too great a willingness to repeat the contents of a document without examining the reliability or perspective of its authors; for the opposite reason, Herbert can be attacked for relying almost entirely upon the labors of the paid assistants (retained, one should add, by the crown) who sifted and transcribed materials for him. The intellectual roots of this second assumption lie in a progressivist tendency to see historical scholarship as proceeding, over a few obstacles and past a number of easy bends, along a well-signposted road leading to a generic Public Record Office. This progressivism is more subtle than a crude statement that the sixteenth-century historians were better than their medieval predecessors, or that the Enlightenment, from Descartes to Hegel, represented a long and fruitless detour in the development of method (though not, of course, in the progress of historicist consciousness, a different terminus altogether), or that it took the historians of Niebuhr's and Ranke's generations to put the scholarly cart back on track [23]. The case is rarely put so baldly. Nonetheless, a residual positivism that is no longer universally accepted within the historical community continues to serve as a benchmark for the evaluation of the tools and methods used by past eras to reconstruct their own histories. Medievalists have been quick to point out that certain medieval chroniclers, Bede and William of Malmesbury for instance, made much greater systematic use of available documents than did others; Renaissance scholars laud Guicciardini and Sarpi for the same merits; in more modern times Stubbs and Round are deemed superior to Froude and Freeman because they made greater use of documents, thereby melding the researches of early nineteenth-century antiquaries like Sir Francis Palgrave with literary history-writing in the tradition of Macaulay and Gibbon [24]. But the early modern period seems particularly well-suited to a teleological vision of the development of historical methods, and such a vision has distorted many treatments of Tudor and Stuart historians. Fussner, the most extreme, deplored the number of «lesser works [...] completely derivative in content and purpose» that emerged from the presses in the early seventeenth century.
12. He abruptly dismissed as «hack work typical of the age» what was in fact a rather innovative attempt by the obscure Lincolnshire squire Edward Ayscu, writing amid the enthusiasm for the Anglo-Scottish union of the 1600s, to explore the history of diplomatic relations between the two kingdoms [25]. Arthur B. Ferguson, interested principally in the broader contours of Tudor historical thought, rather than in technical methods as such, and more cognizant than Fussner of the importance of controversy in stimulating thought about the past, is more cautious. Yet he, too, manages to celebrate the superior scholarship and erudition of select figures [26]. May McKisack, trained in the thoroughly empirical mode of an Oxford medievalist, made archival research the very thrust of her exhaustive examination of the Tudor antiquaries, just as Sir Thomas Kendrick and Stuart Piggott, writing about more remote British antiquities, privileged archaeological evidence. David Douglas's beautifully-crafted book about the Augustan scholars similarly awarded bouquets, and the odd brick or two, to Hearne, Wanley, Hickes, Wharton and Dugdale, et alia for variously making careful or erratic use of the sources [27]. Most recently, Joseph Levine's collection of essays, Humanism and History announces on the very first page that its author seeks an answer to the question «how and why English historiography found its modern method» [28]. Both here in and in his more recent Battle of the Books, Levine pays careful attention to non-methodical factors in the development of historiography, especially to the interrelations of friendship and enmity, politics and patronage, that exist among scholars hitherto assumed to resemble the classical busts that decorated their libraries — beautifully formed heads without bodies. Nevertheless, a predisposition toward the antiquarian and scientific, and against the mere story-teller, inevitably emerges from his essays, which amount to several chapters in the larger story of the progress of English historiography. Consider the explicitly teleological language of the following prefatory passage in Levine's collection of essays, with regard to the place of Gibbon: «[...] I have attempted to draw a balanced picture and to estimate not only how far modern historiography had advanced by the time of the Decline and Fall but how far it still had to go. For there was undoubtedly still a distance to travel [...].
13. We read Gibbon and continue to enjoy him, but his method and his viewpoint are not ours. Modern historiography had advanced by his day to the point where it could clearly differentiate the past from the present, not only roughly but in exact detail, and it had established a difference, both practical and theoretical, between fact and fiction. To measure its achievement, one has only to compare Gibbon's view of the past with Caxton's. Yet Gibbon still stands apart from us by an awkward gulf. For one thing, he has not yet seen how to apply the method of the philologists and antiquaries systematically and equally to his whole subject (he was content, we know, to do his researches in his own library). For another, he remains confident that the values of his own time and place are still the only standards for all history [...]» [29]. Now, as with the notion of truth, I am very far from saying that any of this is wrong or that it is not useful. In the history of history as a mode of knowledge, Geschichteswissenschaft, it is a 'fact' that modern scholars have, until recently at any rate, learned to rely principally on what the documents tell them, that they tell their students to do likewise, and that they excoriate in print any colleague, living or dead, whom they deem to have let the side down [30]. So telling the history of history as a Triumphal Progress, or even a painful and prolonged march, toward proper appreciation of and exploitation of documentary sources, or to the application of philological techniques to the comparison of past and present, is by no means to tell a wrong story. My point is that it is not the only story that can be told. The third idol has to do with the place of style, literary ability and the capacity to tell a good tale. In the humanist culture of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this almost always boils down to an assessment of the alternately modernizing and retarding influence of rhetoric. Following the lead of Italian Renaissance scholars [31], English historiographers have shown a curious ambivalence to the place of style, and especially of classical rhetorical techniques and models, in the construction of and embellishment of the past. On the one hand, with Struever and Wilcox, we are inclined to see the rediscovery of ancient rhetoric, and its employment on the indigenous past, as a good thing.
14. After all, the composition of chronicles, that most medieval of all genres of writing, could not continue forever — could it? There is, at first glance, something anarchic, disorganized, and ungainly about many medieval and Tudor chronicles [32]. Even the most sophisticated of chroniclers, because ignorant of such classical verities as the autonomy of individual actors in matters sublunary, and of the role of historical contingency as embodied in Tyche, seem unable to organize their works according to any principle other than the annal, or to envisage any metahistorical pattern beyond the transcendental reality of a providential schedule for redemption. Renaissance rhetoric would seem to provide a solution. It provided humanist historians from Bruni on with the organizational principles to reconstitute a picture of the past according to categories of persuasive oratory, and allowed them to tell a «connected story» [33]. Rhetoric also generated the topoi for the creation of histories that were not only organized but also individualized in a specific authorial voice. This is dealt with in Louis Green's and Donald Wilcox's treatments of early Renaissance historiography, but the point is pressed hardest by Nancy Struever, in defending the position of rhetoric as the linguistic principle prefiguring the telling of any ordered story that aspires beyond a chronicle. «Humanist rhetoric gave a more comprehensive view of reality to historical consciousness[...]. The humanist availed himself of rhetorical analysis to determine his priorities in historical narration; at the same time purely formal motives of rhetoric appear as historical moments in his pursuit of the meaning of classical antiquity» [34]. But one's attitude toward rhetoric depends, it would seem, on the period one is describing. Rhetoric is good, almost trendy, when it allows Thomas More to go beyond his chronicle sources and create an exaggerated but internally consistent portrait of Richard III, or permits Machiavelli to declaim on the virtues of Lorenzo il Magnifico or Castruccio Castracani. It is good when it permits the Italian Polydore Vergil to abandon the annals of Fabyan and other chroniclers and to organize his history according to a unifying principle, that of the reign [35].
15. On the other hand, rhetoric is manifestly bad when it gets in the way of the facts, which of course should be allowed to speak for themselves — what, in their own way, many medieval and Tudor chroniclers were allowing them to do by avoiding the imposition of a single narrative structure with a clear authorial voice [36]. It is similarly malign when it is used to glorify or decry the deeds of the great in a panegyrical or polemical fashion, tarting up truth best left semi-naked as on the familiar frontispiece to Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World [37]. And its influence is beyond the pale when a mere set of stylistic conventions takes command of the agenda, compelling the historian to talk about only a narrow range of subjects because the protocols of genre so dictate. The result: from being the light leading out of the tunnel of medieval historicizing, Renaissance rhetoric has become by the seventeenth century an old clunker that is running out of gas, losing its muffler, and obstructing the throughway toward the nineteenth century. Another way to look at it would be to see rhetoric, and classical humanism in general, as the historiographer's equivalent of Capital: it took us out of the feudal chronicle era, in the direction of modernity, before it outlived its usefulness and became perverted in the hands of courtly writers and sycophants during the era of confessional strife and absolutist states [38]. It is significant, if again ironic, given the contributions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in technical scholarly terms, that the historiographers of that more recent era have far fewer hang-ups about the place of rhetoric in historical writing. If they praise Gibbon, the great synthesizer of erudition and style in Momigliano's estimation, for his mastery of the sources, albeit at second hand, and his dazzling late Enlightement style, they also acknowledge that all the great historians of the nineteenth century are great not merely because of their toil in the dusty libraries, but because of the enduring literary worth of what they wrote. Michelet, Burckhardt, Tocqueville, Marx, and even Ranke, are worth reading because they tell good stories, even, in Burckhardt's case, in a radically anti-narrativist fashion. That is what makes them immortal. We stopped long ago reading them as authorities on their periods. Where they live on it is as supertechnicians, philosophers, or masters of style.
16. Most recent works on nineteenth-century historiography, from John Clive's straightforward biography of T. B. Macaulay through Stephen Bann's semiotic investigation of the languages of historical representation, to say nothing of Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, and Hans Kellner [39], take literary merit as a starting-point, even when they concede that archival research was not (in Macaulay's case, most obviously) the main point at issue. Nor does one need to enter the realm of advanced critical theory to see this: operating within a simpler, Skinnerian framework of political languages, J. W. Burrow concentrates on the «rhetorical suggestiveness» of the English historians in his A Liberal Descent, and Dwight Culler provides a similarly thoughtful literary analysis in The Victorian Mirror of History, highlighting the endurance of analogical interpretations of the past; Rosemary Jann has pointed out just how the very historians who claimed to represent the real and eschew the invented nevertheless «exploited the tactics of both romance and realism» [40]. But one can look just about everywhere in vain to find this kind of treatment of the early modern period, at least among historiographers. With the exception of More and Bacon, I cannot find such an analysis being made of any English historian before the time of Clarendon and Hobbes, and of few before Hume and Gibbon [41]. Fourth, and finally in this catalogue of idols, virtually every historiographic treatment in the Anglo-American tradition (and here, unlike the case for the preceding point, early modernists are not alone) takes it as given that the historical mentality of earlier centuries can be adequately retrieved by examining the texts and, where relevant, the public careers, of dead historians. It is almost universally true that historiographers, being themselves the authors of history books, choose to study past history-writing principally through the books of past authors; this in part explains the preference for histories with a strong «authorial identity» that I suggested above in my discussion of rhetoric.
17. This assumption of the centrality of the historical author to any enquiry into earlier attitudes to the past carries with it five collateral articles of faith: a) that history is ideally contained, and speaks most authoritatively, when presented in a single connected text, and especially when in print; b) that the notes, jottings, conversations, musings, and letters that precede the text are simply illustrative of and ancillary to the process of creating histories, rather than themselves crucial evidence of ways of thinking about the past — this from the same mindset that praises earlier historians precisely for going beyond published texts to use documents and artifacts!; c) that the study of past historians, text by text, can provide us with a complete picture of the historical thought of past ages; d) that for every period in the history of historiography, there exists a canon of great historical texts, analogous to, if less well known than, great literary texts and e), relating back to the earlier point about the desirability of historical truth, that those historians who wrote with a greater degree of autonomy from outside influences, especially economic and political, have greater intrinsic merit than those who do not [42]. Having now raised the unwelcome but unexorcisable spectre of the much-controverted canon, one might ask of what, or more accurately of whom, would a canon of great historians consist? For the western tradition as a whole the answer is pretty straightforward. One has simply to look at any reader or anthology on the subject, and one regularly finds the same names from Thucydides to Toynbee [43]. This is, admittedly, a bit more ambiguous if we confine our pool to the historical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there would certainly be room for More's Richard III, unfinished gem that it is, Camden, Bacon, Daniel, Clarendon and Gilbert Burnet. On the other hand, if one were looking principally for antiquaries and the pioneers of method, Camden alone would remain, and be joined by Leland, Selden, Spelman, Dugdale and several supporting cast members from McKisack's and Douglas's volumes, the Francis Tates, Arthur Agards and Roger Dodsworths of the age [44]. In some ways, the reluctance of historiographers to part with an authorial/textual approach, may itself soon seem like crotchety obscurantism. We are living and teaching at a profoundly antiessentialist, anticanonical juncture that has questioned the importance or even the existence of the author, and that daily throws textual babies out with their interpretive bathwater. While individual studies of certain authors should and very likely will remain the subject of much future historiographical scholarship — there are still a number of 'greats' who require periodic re-examination in the light of our own changing assumptions — they should not be permitted to monopolize the discussion. If they do, then historiographers will remain liable to the late Sir Geoffrey Elton's charge that we should be doing plain-old history rather than bestowing upon the subject a stature in the early modern period that it did not enjoy at the time [45].
    
18. III. The Road(s) Ahead
    
    As the millennium concludes that began with chronicles and ended with history Web-sites, the history of history now stands at a crossroads, much as does the broader discipline of which it is the official record-keeper. We can choose simply to write more articles and books about Camden, Bacon, & Cie., no doubt filling in gaps as we go. Alternatively, we can take advantage of the intellectual ferment within and outside historical studies that seems so far to have had little impact on historiography. I suggested above that students of post-Enlightenment historiography have shown much greater willingness than early modernists to learn from their literary and philosophical colleagues. There is as yet nothing to compare for the early modern period to Hayden White's and Hans Kellner's analyses of nineteenth-century historical thought, and with it their challenge of conventional boundaries, between history and philosophy, and history and fiction. This is not to argue that stealing categories developed for another period, will suffice or is necessarily appropriate (this essay has, of course, been devoted precisely to the proposition that in most instances it is not) — only that the opportunity has arisen to be a bit more imaginative in our studies. Is there any good reason, for a start, not to begin a serious consideration of the literary, as opposed to «historical» contributions of the historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to do so with the same broad choice of critical tools used by those who have written about Macaulay, Gibbon and Seeley? Further lessons can be derived even further afield. Cultural anthropology and ethnography have taught social historians and literary scholars to avoid ethnocentrism. Is it proper for us to continue to assume that early modern historians, or readers of history, thought and wrote like us, or that when they did not they have failed, fallen prey to some «medieval» hangover? Should we assume that Camden and Selden, to say nothing of more overtly polemical historians such as Robert Brady, Clement Walker, or Jeremy Collier, possessed or wished to possess our own standards of proof, objectivity, and loyalty to the unadorned fact? Did they even have the same understanding of what it was to tell a 'true' history?
19. Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, a locus classicus of English Renaissance historical thought, is often quoted to show just what the most 'modern' of early modern scholars was fighting against, namely a narrowly pyrrhonist and reactionary notion (again, taking history as the inherently progressive and scientific side in this greatly exaggerated feud of the discourses) that since knowledge of the specificity of the past was clearly impossible, we all ought to study the general moral principals better taught by poetry. After fifteen years of studying sixteenth and seventeenth-century historians, I am no longer convinced that any Elizabethan or early Stuart historian would have had a serious problem with Sidney, nor that they wished to erect any Berlin wall between poetry and history. Viewed in this way, the confluence of Drayton and Selden between the covers of the Poly-Olbion looks less like an awkward mix of two radically different approaches to the past, and more like a playful pluralist exploration of two complementary modes of historical imagination. Drayton, no more than Sir Walter Scott two centuries later, did not operate in a world of romance or science fiction, utterly slipped of the surly bonds of historical fact, and Selden's and Spelman's different reconstructions of past legal systems from a variety of deficient sources shows a degree of historical imagination and conjecture that would not be to the liking of very many examiners of doctoral dissertations in Oxbridge today. There is more to be learned from anthropology, specifically the vital importance of other vehicles of historical consciousness: art, drama, ritual, dress, gesture, humour and physical environment. If we ve just about exhausted the motherlode of the major narrative historians and antiquaries, then, rather than continuing to pan for odd nuggets of historical gold in the dross of increasingly obscure texts, perhaps the time has come for a more holistic approach. Should we continue to laud those who denounce as unproven the myths of Brutus and Arthur, or those who buried themselves in the records of the Tower, when many no longer accept the minimal historical accuracy of any document? [46] Would it not be better to pay some attention to oral tradition and folk tale, to the private notes of those, like William Blundell and Abraham de la Pryme, who were readers first and writers second, and to the social bonding that myth and legend continued to provide? What is often called the «1066 and all that» picture of English history, or more respectfully (if sexist), «what every schoolchild knows», had to come from somewhere. So, similarly, did the modern local publican's conviction that his house was raided by Cromwell's soldiers.
20. No amount of discourse about Camden and Clarendon, or even Coke and Hooker, will help us answer this question, and it will not help us to understand what was going on in William Blundell's mind (and the mind of his cowherd) on that grey morning in 1611. To quote the title of a recent book by David Lowenthal, «the past is a foreign country» [47]. I would maintain that the past's attitude to its own past is equally foreign and that by concentrating on historical authors we have not explored that foreignness, but have at best received its heads of state and ambassadors, who seem to speak our lingo, into our own dominions. Like anthropology, varieties of critical theory can teach us much about how to go about our task, and we need not allow them wholly to seize the agenda. It should be possible to borrow some of the more salutary suggestions of Derrida about the contradictions inherent in any text, or the Reader-response schools decentering of the authorial voice, without throwing up the white flag and surrendering entirely our basic instincts as historians. On the contrary, borrowing eclectically but carefully from other disciplines should give us a much sounder grasp of what the ordinary articulate — and even, perhaps, the inarticulate — English man or woman meant when he or she referred to the past. The attention paid by current scholarship on early modern political thought to linguistic contexts, complemented in somewhat different garb by German-style Begriffsgeschichte, may oblige a closer examination of a number of polyvalent terms, or keywords as Raymond Williams usefully put it, that are often treated as if they had meant the same thing. We know that a variety of different meanings attached to the word historia and its various vernacular equivalents, which in the seventeenth century comprised not just our non-fictional notion but also a variety of plebeian romances and neo-chivalric ballads. It was beginning to comprise, for instance in Bacon and Hobbes, a Herodotean enquiry into the natural world. Still later, it would creep furtively across the insecure frontier separating fact from history, where it would be applied to the novel. Other words admit a similar pluralism of meaning. 'Ancient', for instance, had a wide range of senses and could refer to any time from the dawn of man through the bounds of legal memory to the previous year.
21. The phrase «the kings of England did anciently» do such and so might refer to the time of Magna Carta, but it could also, depending on the context of the conversation and the assumptions of the audience, refer to relatively recent times. The most 'ancient' member of a group might, in fact, be quite young. To be 'ancient' did not in fact require that something or someone be very old at all: it was an entirely relative adjective. In London and most provincial boroughs, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the former officers of a craft were commonly known as «the most auncient persones»; in Coventry this denoted those who had lived long enough to practice a craft as freemen for twenty years. The Elizabethan popular writer Thomas Deloney describes the widow (who was not old), of Jack of Newberry's master as «a very comely ancient woman» [48]. Similarly, the term «old» was itself often no more than a mere tag, to distinguish one object, person or place from another. Old John Smith might be thirty- five, his neighbour young John Smith twenty-two. Negotiations between two Suffolk families of the mid-sixteenth century mention the piece of land at issue as «the olde shepes bridge», a referent clearly understood by both parties; a barren parcel of waste known simply as «the olde» was the issue of a Worcester tithe dispute in 1561 [49]. «Old» could simply be used as a mark of distinction from new: thus in 1644 William Dowsing the iconoclast distinguished between «new» (freshly appointed for the year) and «old» churchwardens (those whose terms had just expired), in noting local resistance to his visitation at Ufford in Suffolk [50]. If it is possible to question the meaning of historiographical terms, it is also not to late to escape the confines of the historical text altogether. In order adequately to understand what is at stake in any utterance about the past, it is no longer sufficient to find out what sources the historian had read, then work out his world picture or ideology, and explicate the story he tells. It is necessary to treat any such parole as an act of communication between author and reader, a conversation that is itself only one corner of a matrix that also includes social and political forces (censorship, patronage, kinship, ideology), and economic forces (the demands of printers and the public, the place of consumer culture) — not to mention sheer idiosyncrasy. As will be argued, in the next, concluding section, we could easily begin our reconfiguration of historical culture by simply shifting our gaze sideways, from the author to the reader and hearer, from the producers of history to its consumers, who by the very act of reading were playing an increasingly important part in the production and distribution of texts and artifacts from or about their past.
    
22. IV. Conclusion: From Historiography to Historical Culture
    
    What is to be done? An approach is needed to the problems raised here that will knock historiography off its olympian summit and bring it to the slopes and valleys of intellectual, cultural, and social history. To do this means subduing our instinct to treat past historical thought as the primate stage of modern historiography. It also means that we must abandon the fixation on coherent textuality inherent in the very word 'historiography' and instead ask what it meant to think, speak, and sense historically in an era such as early modern England. We can begin by biting off a bit more than the small chunks of time that we have examined in the past. It is a valid criticism to say that with one or two exceptions, virtually every work on Tudor and Stuart historiography has suffered from period insularity, so vast is the number of historical texts in print, especially after 1640, when hundreds become thousands. Nor has every sub-period received comparable scrutiny. Saving the major works by Levine and Douglas, and, with somewhat different concerns, Pocock, the Restoration and Augustan eras have had nothing like the attention lavished on the Tudor and early Stuart period. The entire time span from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century urgently needs to be put in the same camera frame, moving us away from an 'historiographie événementielle' that focuses on the individual historical text as a blip or event within a brief time span, toward the analysis of a much wider frame of cultural conjonctures. I hinted earlier at the existence of a paradox among students of historiography. On the one hand we have long lauded the technical virtuosity, often achieved in extraordinarily difficult or uncomfortable circumstances, of Tudor and Stuart historical writers — especially the philological and archaeological scholars from the time of Leland through the age of Camden and Selden up to the Augustan masters whose works bear witness to the importance of what Levine has called the «antiquarian enterprise». On the other hand, we have ourselves been, by and large, singularly unadventuresome in our use of sources.
23. It is not that archival materials have not been used, especially where the antiquaries are concerned — the best books in this area make copious use of such sources, principally from central repositories such as the Public Record Office, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the British Library. It is instead that the range of such sources, archival and printed has been severely restricted, both as to type and location, and that the questions brought to them have been, in consequence, also quite limited [51]. Attitudes to, rather than merely textual usages of, key words such as 'old' and 'ancient' can be derived from behaviour: the differing approaches taken by country landowners to the refurbishment of their estates, combined with the frequent and well-documented practice of 'recycling' building materials for new edifices, provides a corrective to the view that early modern people had a knee-jerk reaction in favour of anything that was old, and against anything that smacked of new-fangledness. But family papers and correspondence are not alone. Institutional records, especially from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, provide other types of information: on attitudes to the elderly, on the construction of personal and community time, or on the treatment of oral evidence where events from the past are being related — and surely the past that was important to the village tenant and urban artisan is just as meritorious of our attention as the published perceptions of the fellow-intellectuals who have commanded our attention so far [52]. The voluminous personal jottings in the diary and commonplace books of a cranky grand dame such as Earl Cowper's mother Sarah, as much as her unprinted history of the world, contain extraordinary potential for answering the question of whether females and males had different ways of making sense of the past [53]. Nor is it essential to give up the study of history books. On the contrary, in dealing largely with the contained, the text, and its author, we have ignored the container, the book itself.
24. Recent work in l'histoire du livre (and on the closely related topic of the history of reading) by French and American scholars such as Furet and Chartier, Darnton, Davis and Eisenstein, has opened up a whole new range of possibilities for discovering how Tudor and Stuart England made sense of its past: not just what was written, but the economic and social forces behind the production of histories, the place of printers and publishers, the significance of the development of provincial book trade and of local parish and school libraries. How much did certain titles cost and did the prices vary by time and place? Were histories, in various formats, more or less expensive than other books? How many histories was a person likely to own in his or her lifetime? On this last point, I offer two contradictory examples. The Kent record office contains among its exceptional holdings (which include papers of the antiquary Sir Edward Dering and the chronologer John Marsham) the probate inventory of the worldly goods of one Edward Platt. A clergyman in the parish of Graveney, Platt died on the very eve of the Restoration in late 1659 or early 1660. His very small personal library contained only forty-nine books. Of these, the sole historical items were a copy of Suetonius and a very old work, the mid-sixteenth century Epitome of Chronicles begun by Thomas Lanquet and edited by Bishop Cooper. Lanquet's book had not been reprinted since 1565, and a century later was not easy to come by without some effort. We can therefore infer that Platt, who was evidently no great lover of history, had either received his copy as a gift, or perhaps inherited it as a family heirloom, rather than buying it for himself [54]. Contrast Platt's rather simple holdings with the much more intense historical interest evident in the highly informative, and entertaining, letters written by his London agent to the retired ex-sheriff of Devon, Richard Coffin of Portledge.
25. The agent, Richard Lapthorne, was paid by Coffin to send him news from the capital, and also to negotiate with booksellers, private owners and auctioneers the piece-by-piece assembly of a private library for his rural employer, who was obsessed with collecting both old chestnuts like Higden's Polychronicon and the latest thing in county chorographies. Their extensive correspondence lies, miscatalogued and badly arranged by a Victorian archivist (and thus far unused historiographically), in the Devon record office [55]. Even printed sources, other than texts, have something yet to say on the subject, such as the library sale catalogues and printed subscription lists which became increasingly commonplace in the last quarter of the seventeenth century [56]. It must suffice here to mention, in this latter connection, the single example of one Augustan potboiler, the Great Geographical and Historical Library written by Louis Moreri, and first published in an English edition, by subscription, in 1694. Its lengthy and relatively complete subscription list yields a detailed picture of its readers, their social and economic position, occupation (from peers down to the blacksmith of one Dorset village) and geographical distribution; the exercise can be repeated with the subscription lists for a variety of other books, historical and otherwise. All of this is a vast enterprise, and beyond the capacity of any single scholar. Years of further research into the perception of the past in Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian England will be needed, along with parallel re-investigations of historical texts and their relationship to the imagination such as we are engaged in at this conference. This may seem like a depressing return to the drawing board, but it should not. We have, after all, spent several decades and many large volumes in an attempt to trace our scholarly pedigree back to Adam, and to excavate the foundations of modern historical scholarship. Those foundations and that pedigree support a model of historical enterprise that, rather like the Catholic church, has long ceased to command the obedience of all its members, and is even less in need of saint-worship. If the high road is to be abandoned, we can still be grateful for the change of scenery and all the distractions that will detain us on the way, like the Saxon silver that glinted in a cowherd's eye on a spring morning nearly four centuries ago.

[*] Dalhousie University.[B]

[1] The epigraph from Elton is taken from his review of Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England, (Durham, NC, 1979): History and Theory, 20 (1981), 92-100, quotation at 92. The incident of Blundell's coins is offered for illustrative purposes here; the facts are more complex than this summary account suggests. For more details, and an attempt at a «thick description» of the event, see my forthcoming article «Little Crosby and the Horizons of Early Modern Historical Culture», in Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds. ), The British Historical Imagination, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the Woodrow Wilson Center, forthcoming). [B]

[2] My usage of this expression derives not from Sande Cohen's problematic semiological investigation of the modes of current academic historical signification in his Historical Culture: on the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1986), but from the annaliste-inspired usage in Bernard Guenée's remarkable book, Histoire et culture historique dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980). [B]

[3] E. Fueter, Geschichte der Neuren historiographie (first published 1911; 2nd ed., Munich and Berlin, 1936), 1-333. An immediate terminological clarification seems called for to avoid confusion. I shall throughout the paper use the term 'historian' to refer to writers of history (narrative or, in some cases, antiquarian) past and present, and the term 'historiographer' to refer to those persons, past or present, who have written about the writing of history. Similarly, 'historiography' will here be taken as the study of the history and nature of historical writing or historical thought, as opposed on the one hand to 'history' (writing about the past) and, on the other hand, what I shall call an era's 'historical culture', a term I shall explain in greater depth below. [B]

[4] Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern (2nd ed. , Chicago, 1994). In his anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, 1991), which does not, of course, reach modern times, Donald R. Kelley devotes over two hundred pages, nearly half the volume, to selections originating in the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Enlightenment.[B]

[5] Most of the above surveys tend to be Eurocentric in approach, and not surprisingly, valorize the European, and in most cases Anglo-Germanic, approach to history that has dominated North American scholarship from the mid-nineteenth century to the relatively recent past. For an innovative, but little imitated, attempt to explain historiographical development on a wider, comparative scale, see, in addition, J. G. A. Pocock's classic essay on «The Origins of Study of the Past: a Comparative Approach», Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4 (1961-2), 209-46. More recently, Donald Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature (Tucson, AZ, 1988) melds Pocock's approach with experiences gleaned from anthropological fieldwork in a manner reminiscent of Marshall Sahlins. Brown's work is impressive in its usage of Indian, southeast Asian and oriental sources to obtain a broader picture of the relations between society and history, but it is fatally flawed by its author's subscription to an extreme version of the same positivist assumptions that I will outline below. This is clearest in Brown's thesis that there are epistemologically more «sound» (Brown's term, passim) historiographies in some (open caste or class) societies and «unsound» in others (closed caste and rigidly hierarchical) societies, as opposed simply to different ways of perceiving and representing the past. [B]

[6] Georg G. Iggers and James Powell (eds.), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY, 1990). [B]

[7] I do not altogether exempt some of my own previous work, in particular my recent book on The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990), from these criticisms: despite its avowal of a non-teleological position, it, too, inevitably ends up writing a chapter in the history of history in which «modern-minded winners» such as John Selden are opposed to «traditionalist losers», such as the Tudor chroniclers. [B]

[8] On the turning of history into a 'discipline', an important essay is Hayden White's «The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation», in his The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987), 58-82. This disciplining, closely related to the seminar format adopted by German and North American graduate schools in history since Ranke, has also had serious implications for the exclusion or marginalization of women within the historical profession. See Bonnie G. Smith, «Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: the Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century», American Historical Review, vol. 100 no. 4 (Oct. 1995), 1150-76.[B]

[9] J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge, 1987: first published in 1957); Donald R. Kelley, «History, English Law and the Renaissance», Past and Present, 65 (1974), 24-51. For a critique of this argument see C. W. Brooks and K. Sharpe, «Debate: History, English Law and the Renaissance», Past and Present, 72 (1976), 133-42. [B]

[10] One work that avoids making such judgments by focusing on histories written under the aegis and generally in honor of the crown is Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980). [B]

[11] The most recent contribution along these lines is Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995).[B]

[12] As one commentator has remarked recently in a different context, «We read the beginnings of modern historiography in humanist philology and dialectic because historiography is what interests us; what motivated our humanist proto-historiographers, however, was less a philosophical interest in the discursive explication of the past than a practical interest in the uses to which what we think of as tropes of historical discourse might be put»: Lorna Hutson, «Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England», Representations, 41 (1993), 83-103, at p. 85. I thank Fritz Levy for drawing my attention to this essay.[B]

[13] F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (London, 1962), 275-321. [B]

[14] For an insightful examination of the role of competing ideologies and understandings of the social world in a single historical text hitherto deemed to be a mere mouthpiece for Tudor propaganda, see Annabel Patterson's Reading Holinshed s Chronicles (Chicago, 1994). [B]

[15] For helpful comments on the meaning of 'belief' in past societies, see Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? an Essay in the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago and London, 1988), 1, 5-16, 27-57.[B]

[16] F. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 131. «[...] Leland's [method] was that of the humanist critics of sources, of Valla and his followers, and was essentially the better of the two. Polydore demolished Arthur on logical grounds, but the argument was a negative one. Leland defended Arthur by showing that a negative argument was fruitless and made his point by a careful examination of the surviving sources».[B]

[17] See, for instance, Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: the Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: the Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992). [B]

[18] The claim of Foxe to be both a reliable historian and at the same time a creator of fictions is gradually being established by scholars such as Patrick Collinson and Thomas S. Freeman; a projected critical edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments now underway under the direction of Prof. David Loades should assist in this endeavor.[B]

[19] Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 36-68. The best exploration of this problem for England is Joseph Levine's dissection of the Augustan struggle with the epistles of Phalaris: Levine, The Battle of the Books (Ithaca, NY, 1991), esp. 47-53. [B]

[20] May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1971), 170-76. [B]

[21] On the Poly-Olbion, see Anne Lake Prescott's incisive essay, «Marginal Discourse: Drayton s Muse and Selden s Story », Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), 307-28; cf. Parry, Trophies of Time, 109-13. There is a similar tendency to explain away rather than actually to account for the continuing usage of the term 'history' to describe the exploits of manifestly unhistorical characters like Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Southampton. Mark Phillips current work on the origins of non-fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century demonstrates, among other things, that the tension was increased during the eighteenth century as the boundaries hardened. For general work on the history/fiction frontier in the period see William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: the Dilemma of the Renaissance Story-teller (Cambridge, MA, 1973); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: the Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983); and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600- 1740 (Baltimore, MD, 1987).[B]

[22] BL MS Lans. 897, fo. 11r. For the use and criticism of oral tradition from Leland to the early eighteenth century, see my «The Common Voice: History, Folklore and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England», Past and Present, 120 (1988), 26-52. [B]

[23] Thus Herbert Butterfield invokes Ranke's name, and his notion of universal history, at the beginning of a late chapter of The Origins of Modern Science (London, 1957), 175. For a demonstration of the dominance of the Germanic model, and of Ranke in particular, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the 'Objectivity' Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York, 1988), 21-31. [B]

[24] On this account, Round is even better than Stubbs as a student of the medieval constitution because the latter merely standardized the use of a complete run of hitherto obscure chronicles — becoming a kind of Victorian Muratori — whereas Round and later Maitland, best of all, waded further into the muck of the «working historian» and used many non-narrative documents. For a recent apotheosis of Maitland by a historian not known for a high regard of his predecessors, see G. R. Elton, F. W. Maitland (New Haven, CT, 1985). [B]

[25] Ironically, Fussner even overlooked the fact that Ayscu did indeed use some original documents: Fussner, Historical Revolution, 179; compare Woolf, Idea of History in Early Stuart England, 58-61. [B]

[26] Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 57-9, 78-91, and ch. 8, passim. [B]

[27] T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950); S. Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape: Essays in Antiquarianism (Edinburgh, 1976) and Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency (New York, 1989): Piggot speaks (ibid., 13) in terms of the 'achievement' of the seventeenth century, and conceives of humanist scholarship respectively in artifacts and manuscripts as «interdependent paths to the discovery of classical antiquity»; unlike David Douglas he gives little credit to the religious fervour that animated most of the Augustans accomplishments. On the other hand, consider the language of the opening to Douglas book: «a long succession of highly distinguished Englishmen brought to its proper culmination the best sustained and the most prolific movement of historical scholarship which this country has ever seen»: Douglas, English Scholars 1660-1730 (London, 1939, 2nd ed., London, 1951), 13; cf. Douglas consistent stress on the antiquaries search for historical truth. On research into the more remote periods of British history see, most recently, see Arthur B. Ferguson's Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham, NC, 1993).[B]

[28] Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 9. [B]

[29] Levine, Humanism and History, 15.[B]

[30] The ways in which the profession handles rebels or dissenters can be seen in the hostile reception of J. H. Froude's work by rivals such as E. A. Freeman, in the Lamprecht controversy and broader Historikerstreit of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in a recent controversy such as the «Abraham affair», for which see Novick, That Noble Dream, 612-21. It is interesting that the methodological conservatism that besets treatments of early modern historiography mirrors Anglo-American work in early modern English history, which for the period 1500-1700 is remarkably resistant to theoretical challenges from outside — certainly when compared to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where cultural history, marxism, and literary theory have had much greater influence. [B]

[31] Most recently, see Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1970); Donald J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1969); Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981). These are relatively late additions to the bibliography, but earlier work by Felix Gilbert, Myron P. Gilmore and Arnaldo Momigliano, to name but a few, combined with the general usage of Fueter as a reliable source for non-English developments, unquestionably played a part, for instance in Fussner's section on «The Renaissance climate of opinion», in The Historical Revolution, 1-17; another important source, with direct connections to the English materials, is Pocock's account of the French «prelude to modern historiography», in his The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 1-29. [B]

[32] As Hayden White showed several years ago there is a fundamental, Jakobsonian metonymic/metaphoric deep structure underlying even the barest of annals. Hayden White, «The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality», in The Content of the Form, 1-25, esp. 6-20.[B]

[33] Herein lies another corollary assumption, that stories about the past, historical stories, must necessarily be connected if they are to be properly meaningful. This is a view the origins of which lie in the humanist era but that achieved its current axiomatic status in the last century, owing to the simultaneous maturation of both the nineteenth-century history and its fictional counterpart, the realist Victorian novel. Conversely, it is not a coincidence that the recent turn away from the general and temporally-expansive character of most twentieth-century western historiography, in the direction of microhistory, has come at a time when the status of the novel, and of continuous realist narratives in general, is in some doubt. Early modern readers were probably considerably better able to make sense of an episodic account of the past like Holinshed's Chronicles or Foxe's Book of Martyrs than their successors from the mid-eighteenth century on. See Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, passim. [B]

[34] Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970), 66-67. Struever's argument derives in part, as so many accounts of Renaissance historiography, from Hanna H. Gray's seminal article, «Renaissance Humanism: the Pursuit of Eloquence», Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 497-514, and from the writings of Jerrold Seigel. In her stress on rhetoric Struever anticipated Hayden White, who, in Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), and his two collections of essays published since, would go further still in this direction, making linguistic categories a matter of timeless, preconscious agency — a poetic deep structure that precedes and configures such acts of authorial style as emplotment, ideology and explanation.[B]

[35] The use of the reign is not, as is often assumed, a classical strategy of organization in the strictest sense, unless one refers to the historical writing of the late imperial period, which did not in any case figure prominently in the Renaissance search for models. It should be added that some chroniclers were not as literarily naive as we once thought. Edward Hall, for one, had a very clear unifying principle and a rhetorical strategy in mind when he cast his work both as annals and as a connected series of reigns leading to the titular Union of the two houses of York and Lancaster. Professor Patterson's work on Holinshed should similarly oblige us to look at that mammoth, multiauthored work as more than an ugly vein of ore for refined Shakespearean gold.[B]

[36] «To the medieval chronicler, information in itself had a positive virtue since he thought in terms of a world-view in which everything might have value or relevance»: thus Louis Green, in words that could easily apply to an English chronicler like Hardyng or Stow, compares the writings of Giovanni Villani with the «proto-humanist» work of Goro Dati, Chronicle into History: an Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles (Cambridge, 1972), 114.[B]

[37] One example is the tendency among late Renaissance scholars to stress the importance of the vogue for the pithy, hard-edged Tacitus at the close of the sixteenth century as a model for realistic political history, in place of an earlier reliance on Livian models, without taking much account of the reasons why most early Renaissance writers preferred Livy's style in the first place. [B]

[38] The seemingly timeless tension between those who would narrate the past as a story and those who would merely recount the facts as they happened, a quarrel between narrative and analysis, is problematic only if we assume that language is separable from content, that it is little more than an embellishment that can be changed at will: the wallpaper, furniture and carpet adorning the rooms in an otherwise solid edifice, rather than essential to its architecture and fabric. This is a naive position, one that North American students often make when they complain that we have «graded the paper only for the style or grammar and not for the content», but it is an enduring one, especially when we are dealing with the classicizing rhetorical culture of the early modern period. [B]

[39] John Clive, Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973); Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: a Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984); Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, 1989), esp. chapt. 2; Dominick LaCapra, «Rhetoric and History», in History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 21, 35, and passim, and Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 5; White, Metahistory and other works cited above. [B]

[40] J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT, 1985); Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, OH, 1985), xiii. [B]

[41] On Clarendon, however, see Martine Watson Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, PA, 1985). [B]

[42] Italian Renaissance historiography has typically elected to value the work of an aristocrat or wealthy (albeit ambitious) citizen such as Guicciardini or Machiavelli above the court-sponsored historiography of a Giovanni Simonetta or Francesco Filelfo, though recent work, for instance by Gary Ianziti and Diana Robin, has shown that such patronage, and even the directive to write polemic and panegyric, produced works that were far from valueless and that were often more complex than previously thought: Ianziti, Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas (Oxford, 1988); Robin, Filelfo in Milan (Princeton, 1991). The assumption that patronage and official sponsorship is a necessarily corrupting influence is ethnocentric and flies in the face of the experience of other historically sophisticated cultures. In ancient and medieval China, to take the best example, historical writing could only properly take place within a bureaucratic context which, it should be added, seems just as applicable, mutatis mutandis, to the nineteenth-century German historical school. See David McMullen, State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge, 1988), 159- 205; Denis Twitchett, The Writing of Official History under the T'ang (Cambridge, 1992); John S. Brownlee, Political Thought in Japanese Historical Writing from Kojiki (712) to Tokushi Yoron (1712) (Waterloo, ON, 1991).[B]

[43] Consider, for instance, the standard anthologies: Peter Gay, et al., Historians at Work (4 vols. , New York, 1972-75); Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present (2nd ed, New York, 1972). [B]

[44] I suggest that the problem here is not simply a habit of focusing exclusively on too narrow a range of historians; nor, even, is it a matter of redefining the ground over which we search, and looking, as Arthur Ferguson did, for historical thought in polemical tracts, or as Pocock did, in legal and antiquarian treatises. These approaches differ only in degree, not in kind: all assume that the ultimate and defining subject for the historian of history is other historical writers texts. Once again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as we do not delude ourselves that the closest and most minute analysis of Camden or Clarendon, and the most thorough contextualization of the debate on the Norman Conquest and the ancient constitution, give us anything like a complete picture of the historical thought or consciousness of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[B]

[45] See, for instance, Elton's review of Ferguson's Clio Unbound in History and Theory, cited above, n. 1.[B]

[46] It is worth adding that some anthropologically-inspired historians, especially current Annalistes and representatives of what has been called the symbolic interactionist school at Princeton, influenced especially by Clifford Geertz, have pointed to the inadequacy of the assumption that what is contained in archives is necessarily true, and to the importance of listening to what past populations were saying, fact or fantasy, and to the ways in which they said/silenced it, and to the social negotiations implied in such dialogues. In addition to Robert Darnton's examples in such volumes as The Great Cat Massacre, see Natalie Zemon Davis dissection of pardon tales in her Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA, 1987).[B]

[47] David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), xvi. The phrase derives originally from L. P. Hartley's novel, The Go- Between.[B]

[48] C. Phythian-Adams, «Ceremony and the Citizen: the Communal Year at Coventry 1450-1550», in Crisis and Order in English Towns, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (London, 1972), 57-85, at p. 59; Thomas Deloney, The pleasant history of John Winchcomb [or] Jack of Newbery (eleventh ed., London, 1630), sig. A3v. [B]

[49] Acquittance between Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon and John and Edmund Barnyard, 16 Oct. 1570, in The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, I, 1556-1577, ed. A. H. Smith et al., Norfolk Rec. Soc., 46 (1978-9), 17; R. H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge, 1990), 98.[B]

[50] The Journal of William Dowsing of Stratford, Parliamentary Visitor, ed. C. H. Evelyn White (Ipswich, Suffolk, 1885), 29.[B]

[51] Four successive spring terms spent trolling England's county record offices has taught the present writer that there is much to be learned from casting the net more widely into several different types of source, and from endeavouring to use these in different ways. Local family collections, as much as the British Library or the College of Arms in London, contain a vast array of material that could be used to cast light on a whole range of topics in the history of historical culture: the building of family monuments and the relative importance (or lack thereof) of ancestry in the production of kin and individual identity; the passage of time as experienced by both individual and community, and recorded in an enormous number of diaries, journals, memoranda books and almanacs; and the increasing importance of written documents as opposed to memory and oral discourse as a medium for preserving the past. [B]

[52] For two starts along this direction see Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (London, Creighton lecture, 1983); David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), esp. 1-33.[B]

[53] Hertfordshire Record Office, D/EP F29-37 (diary of Sarah Cowper); Herts. RO D/EP F38, F39, F49 and F96 (diary of Sarah Cowper). Dame Sarah's history of the world is mainly taken from William Howell, An Institution of General History (1661), and can be found in Herts RO, D/EP F. 41. This MS consists of 755 closely written quarto pages, beginning with the Flood and ending, somewhat more summarily, with the previous two centuries. I owe the identification of its source as Howell to Anne Kugler, who is completing a study of Dame Sarah's life and writings. In many ways, the history is less interesting than the various tales and stories, historical and gossipy, with which she leavens her diary and commonplace book. The question of an emergent and distinctively female sense of the past in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is another topic crying out for investigation. Is there something to Joseph Addison's (alias Isaac Bickerstaff) description of the fine women at a ladies meeting as a series of musical instruments, one of whom, a «Welsh harp», «is one of those female historians that upon all occasions enters into pedigrees and descents, and finds herself related, by some offshoot or other, to almost every great family in England: for which reason she jars and is out of tune very often in conversation, for the company s want of due attention and respect for her»? The Tatler, 157 (11 April 1710) ed. George Aitken (4 vols. , 1898-9), III, 230-31. [B]

[54] Kent Archives Office, Maidstone, PRC 11/22/53, inventory of Edward Platt of Graveney, 30 January 1659/60.[B]

[55] See, eg, Richard Lapthorne to Richard Coffin, 27 March 1697, Devon R. O. Z19/40/6 (Portledge Library, Letter Book D), unfoliated.[B]

[56] The availability of these on microform has been somewhat patchy to date, since they have not been a priority for reproduction by UMI and other firms. The Project for the History of the Book in England, and the former University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Project for Historical Biobibliography, which has been analyzing book subscription lists for over twenty years (and has now evolved into a broader database on the history of book-ownership and reading), are making important contributions in this area which will have implications for the development of historical culture. For an example of the use of their findings, see W. A. Speck, «Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700-50», in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. I. Rivers (Leicester, 1982), 47-68. As a way of ascertaining what sorts of second-hand books, history and otherwise, were being released on the market through auction, the present writer has analyzed the contents of a selection of posthumous Restoration sale catalogues; such exercises, though laborious and time-consuming, have great potential to inform us about historical tastes in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I hope to publish the results of these researches in the near future.[B]