The Uses of History in Early Modern England

Abstract

This fine, beautifully produced, and remarkably priced collection of essays, previously published as a volume of the Huntington Library Quarterly, manages to be both extremely diverse while also appearing to have a fairly firm agenda. It seeks to move away from thinking about an ‘historical revolution’, and the growing sophistication of historical scholarship during the early modern period, in order to concentrate upon what we might think of as History during revolution(s). The editor seems to have carefully picked an impressive array of scholars, whose collective strength is that only some of them readily spring to mind in relation to existing scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical writing. This has been done in order to explore the ‘uses’ of history ‘in all its shapes and forms’ (p. 11). There appears, in other words, to have been a conscious and thoroughly modern concern to highlight a variety of formats and genres, authors and readers, historiographical approaches and academic disciplines, based upon the idea that prior appreciation of historical writing has been inadequate and incomplete as a consequence of its focus upon scholarly, weighty and expensive tomes, at the expense of polemical and popular works, as well as ecclesiastical and literary writings. The dazzling breadth of the articles which are included here as a result of this agenda can certainly be considered to be one of the volume's strengths, and there is little chance here to do adequate justice to the richness of its contents.

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