The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles

by Kewes, Paulina; Archer, Ian W.; Heal, Felicity

• ISBN13: 9780191750533
• ISBN10: 0191750530
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2013-01-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577, 1587), issued under the name of Raphael Holinshed, was the crowning achievement of Tudor historiography, and became the principal source for the historical writings of Spenser, Daniel and, above all, Shakespeare. While scholars have long been drawn to Holinshed for its qualities as a source, they typically dismissed it as a baggy collection of materials, lacking coherent form and analytical insight. This condescending verdict has only recently given way to an appreciation of the literary and historical qualities of these chronicles.

The Handbook is a major interdisciplinary undertaking which gives the lie to Holinshed's detractors, and provides original interpretations of a book that has lacked sustained academic scrutiny. Bringing together leading specialists in a variety of fields - literature, history, religion, classics, bibliography, and the history of the book - the Handbook demonstrates that the Chronicles powerfully reflect the nature of Tudor thinking about the past, about politics and society, and about the literary and rhetorical means by which readers might be persuaded of the truth of narrative. The volume shows how distinctive it was for one book to chronicle the history of three nations of the British archipelago.

The various sections of the Handbook analyze the making of the two editions of the Chronicles; the relationship of the work to medieval and early modern historiography; its formal properties, genres and audience; attitudes to politics, religion, and society; literary appropriations; and the parallel descriptions and histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The result is a seminal study that shows unequivocally the vitality and complexity of the chronicle form in the late sixteenth century.

Author Biography

Paulina Kewes is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research interests focus on early modern drama, politics, and historiography. She is the author of Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (1998) and 'That Great Matter of Succession' and Elizabethan Political Culture (2012) and, editor or co-editor of Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2006), and The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2013).

Ian W. Archer has been Fellow and Tutor in History at Keble College, Oxford since 1991. His primary research interests lie in the history of early modern London, and he has also published on history and memory. He is a Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society.

Felicity Heal is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Her research interests lie in the religious history of Britain and Ireland during the Reformation, in the social history of the gentry, and in gift giving and reciprocity in early modern England. She has written extensively on all these subjects. She is consultant editor for the sixteenth-century section of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.