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

by Edited by Donald R. Kelley , David Harris Sacks

• ISBN13: 9780521590693
• ISBN10: 0521590698
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-09-13
• 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

Preface	ix
1 Introduction	1	(10)
Donald R. Kelley
David Harris Sacks
2 Precept, example, and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica	11	(26)
J. H. M. Salmon
3 Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography	37	(32)
Patrick Collinson
4 Thomas More and the English Renaissance: History and fiction in Utopia	69	(24)
Joseph M. Levine
5 Little Crosby and the horizons of early modern historical culture	93	(40)
D. R. Woolf
6 Murder in Faversham: Holinshed's impertinent history	133	(26)
Richard Helgerson
7 Foul, his wife, the mayor, and Foul's mare: The Power of anecdote in Tudor historiography	159	(20)
Annabel Patterson
8 Experience, truth, and natural history in early English gardening books	179	(31)
Rebecca Bushnell
9 Thomas Hobbes's Machiavellian moments	210	(33)
David Wootton
10 The background of Hobbes's Behemoth	243	(24)
Fritz Levy
11 Leviathan, mythic history, and national historiography	267	(31)
Patricia Springborg
12 Protesting fiction, constructing history	298	(20)
J. Paul Hunter
13 Adam Smith and the history of private life: Social and sentimental narratives in eighteenth-century historiography	318	(25)
Mark Salber Phillips
14 Contemplative heroes and Gibbon's historical imagination	343	(18)
Patricia Craddock
Contributors	361	(2)
Index	363