From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500-1700

Abstract

Drawing on recent work in early modern historiography as well as original sources, Daniel R. Woolf argues that several fundamental changes occurred in the perception of “history” in early modern England that collectively led, by the early eighteenth century, to the development of “historical knowledge” as a category, whereas two centuries previously there had been histories and some knowledge of the past, but no sense of the historical as a distinctive mode of cognition. Five key transitions are identified and discussed: the development, among consumers of history, of a “mental map” allowing for easier navigation through the record of the past; the increasing primacy of causal relationships over exemplary ones; the heightening of a visual sense of the past; an understanding that historical knowledge was not confined to works classically termed “histories” but could be con119. The sort of line-by-line counting of chronicles in the STC and Wing catalogues undertaken by the present author in 1986 over a period of two months can now be done, it is somewhat depressing to admit, in a matter of minutes using modern search engines. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.149 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 06:02:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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