The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800

by Edited by Donald R. Kelley , David Harris Sacks

• ISBN13: 9780521521239
• ISBN10: 0521521238
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays by some of the most distinguished historians and literary scholars in the English-speaking world explores the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction in British imaginative and historical writing from the Tudor period to the Enlightenment. The historians discuss the questions of truth, fiction, and the contours of early modern historical culture, while the literary scholars consider some of the fictional aspects of history, and the historical aspects of fiction, in prose narratives of many sorts. The interests and inquiries of these learned, imaginative, and venturesome scholars cross at many points, casting significant new light on and offering numerous insights into the problematic and interdisciplinary areas where 'history' and 'story' meet, interact, and sometimes compete. Despite the theoretical questions posed, the discussions primarily focus on concrete works, including those of Thomas More, John Foxe, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Donald Kelley and David Harris Sacks

2. Example and truth: Deggory Wheare and the ars historica J. H. M. Salmon

3. Truth, lies and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography Patrick Collinson

4. Thomas More and the English Renaissance: history and fiction in Utopia Joseph Levine

5. Ancestral and antiquarian: Little Crosby and early modern historical culture Daniel Woolf

6. Murder in Faversham: Holinshed's impertinent history Richard Helgerson

7. Foul, his Wife, the Mayor, and Foul's Mare: anecdote in Tudor historiography Annabel Patterson

8. Thomas Hobbes' Machiavellian moments David Wooton

9. The background of Hobbes' Behemoth Fritz Levy

10. Leviathan, mythic history, and natural historiography Patricia Springborg

11. Adam Smith and the history of private life Mark Phillips

12. Protesting fiction, constructing history Paul Hunter

13. Contemplative heroes and Gibbon's historical imagination Patricia Craddock

14. Experience, truth, and natural history in early English gardening books Rebecca Bushnell.