The Uses of History in Early Modern England
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Huntington Library Press
Published: November 15, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 459
ISBN-13: 9780873282192
Subjects: British & Irish history: c 1500 to c 1700; History of religion; c 1500 to c 1600; c 1600 to c 1700; History; History - General History; History: World; England; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Europe - Great Britain - General; General; History / General; Historiography; 16th century; 17th century; 18th century; Great Britain
Description: The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, these essays consider "literary" and "factual" writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth.