Erudition and the Idea of History in RenaissanceEngland1IIiiiiil..1IiiiII@
D. R. Woolf
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 11-48.
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Erudition and the Idea ofHistory inRenaissance England
by D. R. WOOLF
I t has become a commonplace that Tudor and early Stuarthistoricalauthors recognized a formal distinction between"antiquities"and "history," yet neither the grounds nor the extentof the distinc-tion has been explored in depth. Because some Tudorhistorical writ-ers could and, on occasion, did ignore it inpractice, the distinctionhas sometimes been deemed a technicalityof only minor interest.Nearly twenty-five years ago, F. SmithFussner described what hetermed an English "historical revolution"between 158o and 1640, arevolution which witnessed the rise ofhistorical writing in some-thing like its modern form.' FromFussner's point of view, it mat-tered only that men were bringingnew sources and innovative, criti-cal research methods to the studyof the past; whether they calledthemselves historians, scholars,philologists or antiquaries was oflit-tle importance. Whether ornot one accepts his general thesis, there isno doubt that theperiod witnessed substantial and significant changesin historicalwriting and in public consciousness of the past. Fussnerwasjustified in arguing that the early modern historical mind cannotbestudied simply by reading works which call themselveshistories.And, since sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men held toan Eras-mian notion ofknowledge as a unified Wissensthafi, not as aseries ofcompartmentalized disciplines, Fussner was right to pointout thatideas and practices from one branch ofknowledge oftenseeped intoanother; in this case, "history" absorbed the"scientific," empiricaloutlook of a few great minds, and especiallythat of Fussner's hero,Francis Bacon. 2
IF. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution (London, 1962). Forcriticism of theFussner thesis by scholars who wish to stresscontinuity rather than change in Englishhistorical thought,seeJoseph M. Levine, "Ancients, Moderns and the ContinuityofEnglish Historical Writing in the Later Seventeenth Century, " inStudies in ChangeandRevolution,ed. PaulJ. Korshin (London, 1972),pp. 43-75; Joseph Preston, "Was therean Historical Revolution?,"Journal oftheHistoryof Ideas, 33 (1977), 353-64.
2Fussner, Historical Revolution,pp. 274, 299-321. Some of'theproblems raised in thepresent essay receive attention in GeorgeNadel, "Philosophy of History before His-toricism," History andTheory, 3 (1963-64), 291-315. For intellectual context seeEugene F.Rice, Jr., The Renaissance Idea ofWisdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1958),pp. 93-105; Fritz Caspari, Humanism andthe Social OrderinTudorEngland (New York, 1954),pp. 164-65, 343-44; Gerald R. Cragg,Freedom andAuthority: a Study ofEnglish Thoughtin theEarlySeventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1975); BarbaraJ. Shapiro,Probability andCertainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton,1983); Basil Willey, TheSeventeenth-Century Background (Anchoredn., New York, 1953), pp. 11-3 I.
[ 11 ]
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Other writers, less attracted to the notion of an historicalrevolu-tion, have been more cautious in discussing contemporarydistinc-tions among types ofhistorical enterprise. F.J. Levyincludes a chap-ter on antiquarianism in his Tudor HistoricalThought, but makes itclear that the antiquaries, Camden, Lambarde,and their successors,did not regard themselves as historians. Morerecently, Arthur B.Ferguson has made much the same point, even morestrongly. In hisview, historians were men oflittle imagination whowrote about thegreat dead and their great deeds; those who tackledother aspects ofthe past, such as social and cultural change, werenot considered his-torians by their contemporaries. Essentially,Ferguson accepts thenotion ofan historical revolution, but one inwhich historians playedlittle part."
The fact of such a split between "erudition" and "history"seemsclear enough, and this essay will offer a number ofexamples inorderto drive the point home. Yet it is far less clear just how andwhen"history," in the formal sense, came to mean somethingbroaderthan past politics, and conversely, precisely when learnedscholarsbegan to consider themselves as historians. Equally vagueis theprocess whereby history finally absorbed some ofthe methodscom-monly practised by "ancillary" disciplines such as legalphilology,numismatics and epigraphy. By paying close attention tothe mean-ings assigned by contemporaries to terms like "history" or"histo-rian" and "antiquities" or "antiquary," it may be possibleboth tochart changes in the idea ofhistory and to relate suchchanges to theirintellectual and social context. The evidence whichfollows willshow, I hope, that a watershed ofsome significanceoccurred early inthe seventeenth century, when a few students ofantiquities, mostnotably John Selden, stopped denying that theywere historians andasserted instead that no matter what sourcesthey studied, no matterwhat aspect of the past they wrote about,and no matter what formtheir writings took, they were indeedhistorians and what they didwas history.
* * * * *Professor Arnaldo Momigliano once observed, in a nowfamous
essay, that Renaissance students of the past, and especially ofthe an-
3F.J. Levy, TudorHistorical Thought (San Marino, Cal.,1967), pp.148-59,279-85;Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of theSocial and Cultural Past in Renais-sance England(Durham, N.C.,1979), pp. 78-125.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 13
cient world, were remarkably reluctant to write new narrativeac-counts ofGreek and Roman history. 4 Since the ancient historianshadusually lived in or shortly after the times of which they wrote,andsince they had collectively covered the subject bothexhaustively and(more importantly) elegantly, any attempt by modernmen to imi-tate them would be regarded as an act ofhubris. Withthis restrictionin mind, many sixteenth-century writers eschewedaltogether thenarrative of great events for a topical, oftentopographically-organized, account oftheir nations'antiquities.
Nowhere was this more true than in Tudor England. There wasnogood ancient example of an antiquarian treatise available(themuch-praised Varro had vanished into oblivion, leaving only afewscraps), so those students ofthe non-political past who sooncame tobe called "antiquaries" were forced by default to turn togeographyas a model. In organizing their accounts of the past, theyfollowedStrabo, Ptolemy and Pliny, rather than Thucydides, Caesarand Ta-citus, partly because there were adequate medievalprecedents for do-ing so (for example, the writings ofGeraldofWales), but principallybecause they and the historians werewriting about different sorts ofthings. It was one thing to writeabout England's Roman past and itssurviving remnants, and quiteanother to attempt to supplant Taci-tus. The former was a usefuland reverent casting oflight upon bur-ied ancient culture; thelatter was a pretentious waste of time. As aresult, Momiglianoargued, no one before Gibbon saw fit to con-struct a freshnarrative account of ancient history, based on a thor-oughreexamination ofall available sources. 5
This pious dread ofthe ancient masters did not, ofcourse,preventthe writing of historical narratives of the non-classicalpast. ·It mayeven have encouraged such projects. What better burdencould theadmirer ofLivy take up than to do for his own nation whatthe Pad-uan had done for the Roman republic? In early modernEngland, aselsewhere in Europe, narrative history commonly took twoforms.A moribund medieval chronicle tradition lingered through thesix-
4Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian,"Journalofthe War-burg and CourtauldInstitutes, 13 (1950), 285-313,reprinted in his Studies in Historiogra-phy (London, 1966), pp.1-39. Momigliano's thesis has been qualified by H. J. Eras-mus inThe Origins ofRome in Historiography from Petrarch to Perizonius(Assen, 1962),pp. 34,36,44,58,123·
5Arnaldo Momigliano, "Gibbon's Contribution to HistoricalMethod," Studies inHistoriography, pp. 40-55.
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teenth century to breathe its last in the seventeenth.Meanwhile, theinfluence of humanist rhetoric triggered thedevelopment in theElizabethan era of a more sophisticated andelegant political narra-tive, the authors ofwhich confined theirgaze principally to medievaland modern times; they emulated thepractice ofthe ancients withoutstealing their material. In theseventeenth century, this traditionwould spawn such classichistories as Bacon's Henry VII, Claren-don's History oftheRebellion and Burnet's History ofhis Own Times:"These were literarymasterpieces ofa kind, but they were, it is gener-ally agreed,devoid of the minute erudition gradually being amassedbyantiquaries and archivists from Leland in the 1530S to Hearne,Madoxand Rymer in the early eighteenth century. Change wouldcome, butnot until the late eighteenth century, when Gibbon syn-thesized hisvast learning into the polished phrases of The Decline andFallofthe Roman Empire, a work of history which unashamedly ad-dressedissues of the social and cultural past with the same careandinterest with which it narrated imperial politics.
Momigliano concerned himself primarily with historicalinvesti-gations of the classical world, and his comments on thedistinctionbetween antiquaries and historians ofthe non- orpost-classical worldare, understandably, less full. But it is clearthat he did not ascribesuch importance to this distinction withregard to the non-classicalpast:
While the student ofLatin and Greek antiquities did not feelentitled to considerhimselfa historian, the student of theantiquities ofBritain, France and the restwas only formallydistinguishable from the student of the history ofthosecountries-and therefore was inclined to forget thedistinction. In the sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries therewere both antiquarians and historians (of-ten indistinguishablefrom each other) for the non-classical and post-classicalworld, butonly antiquarians for the classical world."
While it is true that there were indeed both sorts of writers onthemedieval past, where there was only the one kind for antiquity,it isless clear whether the student of the British, French orGerman pastreally could "forget the distinction" with the easewhich this state-
60n "politic history," see Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, ch.vii; Eduard Fueter,Geschichte derneueren Historiographie (Munichand Berlin, 191 I), pp. 166-70; Leonard F.Dean, Tudor Theories ofHistory-Writing (University of Michigan Contributions inModernPhilology, no. I, April, 1947).
7Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Studies inHistoriography,p.8.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 15
ment implies. Other writers, though following Momigliano'slead,have been less sanguine on this score, and it seems probablethat, asfar as the theory of history-writing is concerned, much ofwhatMomigliano holds for studies of the ancient past can beextended tomedieval history as well. Professor J. G. A. Poco*ck putthe caseforcefully in 1957:
It is one of the great facts about the history of historiographythat the criticaltechniques evolved during the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries were onlyvery slowly and very late combinedwith the writing of history as a form ofliterary narrative; thatthere was a great divorce between the scholars and anti-quarians onthe one hand, and the literary historians on the other; thathistoryas a literary form went serenely on its way, neither takingaccount ofthe criticaltechniques evolved by the scholars, norevolving similar techniques ofits own,until there was a kind ofpyrrhonist revolt, a widespread movement of scepti-cism as towhether the story of the past could be reliably told at all. 8
More recently, the works of Professors Donald R. KelleyandGeorge Huppert have argued persuasively that the "foundationsofmodern historical scholarship" were laid not by literaryhistorianscomposing elegant narratives of res gestae, but by Frenchphilologistsand archival researchers such as Guillaume Bude,Etienne Pasquier,Nicolas Vignier, Jean du Tillet and the brothersPithou.? Huppertcontends further that the developments of theFrench Renaissancedid not lead in a straight line toward thetriumph ofmodern historicalmethods. On the contrary, erudits likePasquier were either brushed
SJ.G. A. Poco*ck, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law(Cambridge, 1957;Norton edn., 1967), p. 6. For historicalpyrrhonism, see Paul Hazard, The EuropeanMind, 1680-1715, trans. J.L. May (1953), pp. 48-52; Julian H. Franklin, jean BodinandtheSixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History(New York,1963), pp. 83-102; Richard Popkin, The HistoryofScepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza(znd ed.; Berkeley, 1979), p.II I; Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu ofjohn Dry-den(Ann Arbor, 1956), pp. 16-46; Shapiro, Probability andCertainty,pp. 11g-62.
9Donald R. Kelley, Foundations ofModern Historical Scholarship:Language, Law andHistory in the French Renaissance (New York,1970); George Huppert, The Idea ofPerfectHistory: HistoricalErudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (UrbanaandChicago, 1970). Professor Kelley has commented elsewhere on thelack of attentionpaid by English scholars and lawyers to Frenchlearning, though he makes ofJohnSelden a conspicuous exception:"History, English Law, and the Renaissance," PastandPresent, 65(1974),24-51. But cf. the reply to this by C. Brooks and K. M.Sharpe,"Debate: History, English Law and the Renaissance,"PastandPresent, 72 (1976), 133-42. For a critique of the notion of"historicism" present in the above works, see Za-chary S.Schiffman, "Renaissance Historicism Reconsidered," History andTheory, 24(1985), 170-82.
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off as pedants or, worse, lumped with the atheists andfreethinkersas "libertines" in the following century. In practicalterms, theseFrench scholars had ignored the distinction betweenhistory properand erudition, but such a formal distinction remainednonetheless.While it remained, one can talk of the rise of a modemhistoricalmethod, but not of a modern concept of "history." By theeight-eenth century, it seems, the bellelettristic historiographyof theFrench court and the technical erudition practised by theBollandists,the Maurists and others, were as far apart as possible,operating inparallel, non-intersecting grooves, though occasionalexceptions likeVico-who was entirely unappreciated in hisday-sprang up alongthe way. 10
This is a case of a revolution accomplished and then betrayed-orat least ignored. Although the erudits were unappreciated inlateVaIois and Bourbon France, some ofthem seem to have realizedthatwhat they were doing constituted history. The popular,vernacularwriters described by Huppert, men like Pasquier and laPopeliniere,may have grasped this notion rather more quickly thanmore learnedscholars such asJoseph Scaliger: partly because theywere less dutifulstudents of the classics, and partly because agrowing fascinationwith the Middle Ages often subdued theirinterest in antiquity. Pas-quier's huge, seemingly formless andrandom Recherches into theFrench past assume that their subject is"history. "11 La Popeliniere,himselfa traditional narrativehistorian, argued that historians shouldbe narrating things otherthan politics.P But in England the caseseems to have been ratherdifferent. Not only did historians and anti-quaries remainvirtually oblivious of each other's existence, or per-
10Huppert, Perfect History, pp. 5, 170-82. Cf. W. J. Bouwsma,"Three Types ofHistoriography in Post-Renaissance Italy," Historyand Theory, 4 (1965), 303-14; EricCochrane, Historians andHistoriography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981),pp.479-93·
11Etienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France, in Pasquier,Oeuvres (2 vols.; Amster-dam, 1723), 1,441,908.
12Henri Lancelot Voisin, Sieur de la Popeliniere, Histoire desHistoires: avecL'Idee del'Histoireaccomplie (1 vol. in 3 parts;Paris, 1599), represents an attempt to integrate cus-tom, religion,climate and other "social" topics into a general narrative; cf.HerbertButterfield, Man onhis Past(Cambridge, 1955), pp. 205-206;G. W. Sypher, "Similari-ties between the Scientific and HistoricalRevolutions at the End of the Renaissance, "Journal ofthe HistoryofIdeas, 26 (1965), 353-68; Myriam Yardeni, "La conceptiondeI'histoire dans l'oeuvre de la Popeliniere," Revue d'histoiremoderne et contemporaine, 11(1964), 109-26.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 17
versely unwilling (as it seems to us) to help each other inwritingwhat la Popeliniere craved, an "histoire accornplie"; theydid noteven recognize that they were all essentially doing, indifferent ways,a subject called history.
Men who wrote histories were called historians (Latin,historici) inElizabethan England, or historiographers, or sometimes"histori-cians." Occasionally they were called chroniclers even if:like JohnSpeed, they thought that they were superior to themedieval andearly Tudor chroniclers whose accounts they plunderedremorse-lessly for the materials with which to construct theirown.P Themeaning ofthe word history (Latin, historia) itselfis muchmore prob-lematic and fluid. Different writers used it in differentcontexts tomean different things. At its most fundamental level,however, it al-most always meant either (a) a story (the two wordsare often usedinterchangeably) of some sort or, less commonly, (b)an inventoryoffactual knowledge, for example, a "natural history."14
Both these senses have respectable classical pedigrees. Thelatterdoes not immediately concern us, since it does not typicallyinvolvean account of the past. Natural history began withHerodotus'sLo'toQLa (an enquiry which included matters of the pastas well as ofgeography and nature) and continued in the works ofAristotle,Pliny, Theophrastus and others. 15 The natural historianwas one whosurveyed and drew up an inventory or list of naturallife and of thecomposition of the world or the cosmos. Since therewas as yet nonotion ofevolution, such an inventory inevitablydepicted a world ofstasis, not of change; it made no distinctionbetween past and
13Examples of these different terms may be found in a widevariety ofsources fromactual histories to parliamentary debates: T.E. Hartley, Proceedings in the Parliaments ofElizabeth I, I(London, 1981), p. 28; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London,1610ed.), 1,8; Thomas Pie, An houreglasse contayning acomputationfrom thebeginning oftime toChrist (London, 1597), pp.85-86.
14For an Elizabethan instance of "history" as a kind of registeror record, see thespeech of Pisanio in Cymbeline (Ill, v, 98-99):"This paper is the history of myknowledge/Touching her flight."
15R. G. Collingwood, The IdeaofHistory (znd ed.; Oxford, 1961),Part One, passim;Gerald A. Press, The Development oftheIdeaofHistory in Antiquity (Kingston and Mon-treal, 1982); J. KarlKeuck, Historia: Geschichte des Wortes und seinerBedeutungen inderAntike und der romanischen Sprachen (Emsdetten, 1934). Cf. therecent Gottingen Uni-versity doctoral dissertation by JoachimKnape, "Historie" im Mittelalter und fru-herneuzeit, SaeculaSpiritalia, 10 (Baden-Baden, 1984). I owe this last reference tothekindness ofFritz Levy.
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present. The absence of a temporal dimension is reflected inthesynchronic-that is, non-narrative-form of all natural historiesofthe period. Robert Fludd's Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet etminoris me-taphysica, atque technica historia (Oppenheim,1617-1621) is a good ex-ample of history-as-inventory. ThomasHobbes similarly consid-ered history as the register ofall factualknowledge, distinguishing itfrom philosophy (or science) whichdeals with matters conditional.":Bacon's list of projected"histories" (of the winds, oflife and death,etc.) is largelydevoted to the composition ofsuch inventories, a pur-suit whichmanifestly has little to do with the exploration ofthe past,thoughBacon often dabbled in this also.'? His awareness of the con-fusioncaused by the fact that one word, historia, which he equatedwith"experience," signified two really mutually exclusive typesofdiscourse led Bacon, following a long line ofcontinental arteshistori-cae,18 to construct an elaborate taxonomy of historieswhich in itsfinal from neatly divided history into two majorcategories, civil andnatural.
History as "story" is more complex. In common parlance, aplaycould be a history, or a "tragical history," or a "historicalcomedy,"or even, somewhat redundantly, a "chronicle history. "19Poems
16Leviathan, I, ix. Similar taxonomies can be found in GreyBrydges, fifth LordChandos (attribution questionable), Horaesubsecivae: observations and discourses (Lon-don, 1620), pp.194--95; Peter Heylyn, Microcosmus, ora littledescriptionofthegreatworld(Oxford, 1621); and Degory Whear, Relectioneshyemales de ratione et methodo legendiutrasque Historias civilesetecclesiasticas (znd ed.; Oxford, 1637; trans. Edmund Bohun,London,1685).
17Works ofFrancis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (7 vols.;1861-74), IV, 303-304; George Nadel, "History asPsychology in Francis Bacon'sTheory of History," History andTheory, 5 (1966), 275-8); Fussner, Historical Revolu-tion, pp.ISO-53, 253-62; Arno Seifert, Cognitio Historica: Die Geschichteals Namenge-berin derJruhneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin, 1976), pp.116-38; Arthur B. Ferguson, "TheNon-Political Past in Bacon'sTheory of History, "Journal ofBritish Studies, 14 (1974),4-20; D.S. T. Clark, "Francis Bacon: The Study of History and the Scienceof Man"(Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1971); Leonard F. Dean,"Francis Bacon's The-ory of Civil History-Writing," in EssentialArticlesfor the Study of Francis Bacon, ed.Brian W. Vickers(Hamden, Conn., 1968), pp. 211-35; LisaJardine, Francis Bacon:Dis-covery and the Art ofDiscourse (Cambridge, 1974), pp.I63ff.
180n the artes historicae, contemporary manuals onhistory-writing, see BeatriceReynolds, "Shifting CurrentsofHistorical Criticism,"Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 14(1953), 471--92 and, more recently, Girolamo Cotroneo, I trattatisti del "ArsHistorica"(Naples, 1971).
19E.g. Lewis Machin and Gervase Markham, The dumbe knight(London, 1608), an"historicall comedy" which involves fictionalpersonages; or John Ford, The chronicle
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 19
were also often considered histories, especially but notexclusivelywhen they versified events generally accepted as havingactually oc-curred. Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars was considered ahistoryboth by its author and by his sternest critic, BenJonson,who com-plained that for a history of civil wars it was remarkablydevoid ofbattles. 20 A variety ofprose forms were also calledhistories. Besidesthe obvious candidates-Bacon's History of theReign ofKing Henrythe Seventh (1622), Camden's Annales (1615-1627)and the like--narratives of current events, which would now bedeemed journal-ism, were commonly referred to as histories: forexample, the news-books which reported events on the continent.PSo, too, were workswhich dealt with a romanticized and atemporalpast, didactic piecessuch as the venerable allegories, the GestaRomanorum and the SevenWise Masters ofRome, and works forentertainment such as the chival-ric romances: the History ofGuyofWarwick, Palmerin ofEngland, anda dozen similar tales. 22 Allthese genres have two features in common:they tell stories, true orfalse, about real or imaginary men andwomen who lived in the remoteor the recent past; and they take theform not ofa synchronicinventory ofinformation but ofa diachronicnarrative.
During Elizabeth's reign, certain conventions of usage begantodevelop. It became more common to distinguish betweenhistoryproper, a truthful account of real events, and poetry orfable, the ac-count of the verisimilar or fabulous. Aristotle hadmade a rigid dis-tinction between history and poetry (whichdefenders ofpoetry suchas Sidney were quick to exploit), whileCicero, the touchstone on
historie ofPerkin Warbeck (London, 1634) which concerns realones. Shakespeare's "his-tories" also provide an excellentexample.
2°Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars (London, 1595-1609), ed.Laurence Michel (NewHaven, 1958), I, 6 and introduction. Otherexamples include Francis Hubert's verseHistorieofEdward the second(London, 1629) and the many historical poems of MichaelDrayton andThomas May. Cf. E. B. Benjamin, "Fame, Poetry and the OrderofHis-tory in the Literature of the English Renaissance," Studiesin the Renaissance, 6 (1959),64-84.
21E. g., Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England,Scotland and Ireland ...1475-1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R.Redgrave (London, 1926), no. 3528, by"N. C.".: The modern historyof the world. Or an historicall relation since the beginning of1635(part eight of the Swedish Intelligencer), 1635. .
22Margaret Spufford, Small Books andPleasantHistories(London,1981), pp. 219-57;R. S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval ChivalricRomance during the English Renaissance(Menasha, Wisconsin,1919).
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most matters of good form, had developed the literary conceptofhistory still further. In De inventione, he listed historia asone of threebranches ofnarratio--the other two beingfabula andargumentum. His-toria dealt with the true account of things done inthe remote past,argumentum with a fictional but plausible action ofthe sort found intragedy or comedy, andfabula with the completelyimaginary.P
This nomenclature, primarily a rhetorical one-for history intheclassical tradition was conceived ofas a branch oforatory-wasrein-forced by Cicero's own defense ofhistoria and its moralvirtues in Deoratore. In this extremely influential work, a historywas defined as abook (or speech) about the past, not as the past inits totality, a senseof the word current today. For Cicero,historia was not simply an-other kind of literature: it was asource of correct action and humanwisdom, the lux veritatis andmagistra vitae. The well-known passagefrom De oratore which praiseshistory for its didactic effectiveness ac-quired the status ofatopos in Elizabethan historical theory, soon be-coming anincantation chanted in preface after preface. By 1581, ithad grownso familiar that John Marbeck could define history in amere twolines simply by citing Cicero with no further comment:"What anhistorie is. Tullie calleth an historie the witnesse of times,thelight ofvertue, the life ofmemorie, maistres oflife. "24
Like history, "antiquities," the remnants of the past, canbegrouped easily into two broad classes. The written accounts ofthemore remote past-chronicles, histories and records-touchedonantiquities in the sense of"matters pertaining to the distantpast" (i.e.to antiquity). Since the political facts of the distantpast were oftenvery sparse, narrative accounts often dealt inpassing with antiquitiesin this sense, such as the religion oftheancient Britons, or the laws ofthe Saxon kings. Brian Melbanckereferred to "auncient antiquities"in this sense in 1583. RichardWhite ofBasingstoke could include, inhis Latin HistoriarumBritanniae Libri XI, notes and comments on anti-quitates, meaningthings that occurred in antiquity, without ever con-
23Aristotle, Poetics, ix. 1-3; Cicero, De Inventione, I,XiX.27-xxi.30 (trans. H. M.Hubbard, Loeb ed., 1960, pp. 55-63);William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: the Dilemma ofthe RenaissanceStory-teller (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 5; Robert Scholes andRobertKellogg, The Nature ofNarrative (Oxford, 1966), pp.57-81,99-105; LennardJ. Davis,Factual Fictions.' The Origins oftheEnglish Novel (New York, 1983), pp. 42-70.
24Cicero, De oratore, 11,36 (ed. E. W. Sutton, Loeb ed., 1942,p. 307); John Mar-beck, A bookeofnotes and common-places (London,1581), p. 492.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 21
sidering himself an antiquary in the alternative sense of astudent oftopography, monuments and philological problems. JohnSpeed'sHistory refers to antiquities in the former sense, and itsearlier chap-ters are devoted partly to a description of thecultures, religions andinstitutions of the Britons, Romans, Saxonsand Danes, largely be-cause ofwhat Speed regarded (despite thereadily available, ifunver-ifiable, sources such as Tacitus andBede) as the uncertainty and pau-city of historical facts in thisperiod. For him, such an antiquariandigression could only be afiller, and from the Norman Conquest on,his book is astraightforward narrative ofevents. 25
In a different but closely related sense, "antiquities" couldalsomean, more tangibly, the actual physical remains of the pastwhichby the end of the sixteenth century were turning up ingrowingquantities. Old coins, charters, manuscript chronicles,bones, fossils,funeral urns, and a wide variety of legal recordswere the "antiqui-ties" which the "antiquary" studied so that hecould make somesense out of "antiquity," the obscure past. But thewritten form inwhich he expressed his views did not take the formof a narrative,and he did not call his work a history. Thesurviving essays of theElizabethan society of antiquaries are agood example. These exploita wide range of legal records, munimentsand non-literary evidencesuch as coins and seals in order to dealwith a variety of topics whichwould now be deemed historical: theorigins ofknights or of the earlmarshal's office, the beginning ofland measurement, the earlyChristian church, and the division ofEngland into shires. Yet notone ofthese brieftracts is called ahistory, nor is there any hint amongthem that their authorsconsidered them to be so. This seems to benot only because thesediscourses were non-narrative (for in a crudesense, they were,since they generally followed the development ofinstitutions andcustoms chronologically) but for a number of otherreasons: becausethey dealt with things rather than men, with cus-toms orinstitutions rather than with events; because they were de-void ofmoral or exemplary content; and, finally, because their au-
25Brian Melbancke, Philotimus (London, 1583), sig. Aii"; RichardWhite of Basing-stoke, Historiarum Britanniaelibri (I-XI) cum notisantiquitatum Britannicarum (Arras andDouai, 1597-1607); John Speed,The historie of Great Britaine (London, 1611). JohnCaius, however,used the terms antiquarii and historici indiscriminately todescribe thesources for his De antiquitate CantabrigiensisAcademiae libriduo (London, 1568) and theHistoria CantabrigiensisAcademiae ab urbecondita (London, 1574), but he seems to havebeenthe exception rather than the rule.
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thors were almost entirely unconcerned with therhetoricalconventions of form which applied to truehistory-writing.P' Inother words, contemporaries had few doubtsthat whatever historywas, it did not include antiquarian writings.There were points ofcontact between the two-the past was still thepast, no matter howit was studied-but we do well not tounderestimate the importanceofformal distinctions to minds whichplaced a high premium on elo-quence and order.
* * * * *The distinction between history and antiquities was aconsequence
oflate Elizabethan over-exposure to the rays ofcontinentalrhetoric.It was not the indigenous inheritance ofan unbrokenmedieval con-vention, and earlier in the century it seems to havemattered a gooddeal less. John Leland, the first great Tudorantiquary, did not recog-nize such a distinction. Leland'sprojected magnum opus was to becalled "De Antiquitate Britannica,or els civilis historia," of whichthe first part (fifty books)would deal, in a narrative form, with "thebeginninges, encreacesand memorable actes of the chief tounes andcastelles of theprovince allotid to hit." A second section wouldchronicle thekings, queens and nobles from British times to his ownday. We allknow what happened to Leland, and it is worth remem-bering that hisElizabethan disciples knew it, too. The problem ofputting his vaststore of data into a rhetorically satisfactory formdrove himinsane. All that remains of his grand design are its database, themanuscript collections now known as the Itinerary andtheCollectanea. Useful as these have proven to later scholars, theonlysection ofeither which is cast in anything like a narrative ispart vii ofthe Itinerary, a brieftravelogue written in the firstperson. Leland wasthe Marley's ghost ofTudor historical writing,and one ofthe conse-quences of his failure was that he was thefirst and last Tudor anti-quary to attempt a general history fromnon-narrative sources. 27
26Thomas Hearne, A Collection of Curious Discourses (reviseded., ed. JosephAyloffe, 2 vols.; London, 1771); on the societyitself, see Linda Van Norden, "The El-izabethan College ofAntiquaries" (Ph.D. thesis, University of California at LosAngeles,1946), and "Sir Henry Spelman on the Chronology of the ElizabethanCol-lege of Antiquaries," Huntington LibraryQuarterly, 13(1949-50), 131-60; May McK-isack, Medieval History in the TudorAge(Oxford, 1972), pp. 85-93; Joan Evans, A His-tory ofthe SocietyofAntiquaries (Oxford, 1956), pp. 7-13; Joseph M. Levine,"TudorAntiquaries," History Today, 20 (April, 1970), 278-85.
27Leland's Itinerary in England, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (znded.; Carbondale, Ill.,1964), I, xlii; IV,I-35; Collectanea, ed.Thomas Hearne (3 vols. in 4 parts; Oxford,1715); T. D. Kendrick,BritishAntiquity (1950; reprint London, 1970), pp. 45-64.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 23
Nevertheless, there is little sign of a firm distinction beforethereign ofElizabeth. It appears to have arisen amid the sharpincrease inthe publication of antiquarian and topographicaltreatises which be-gan in the 1570S and continued through the lasttwo decades of thecentury. Sheer volume soon demanded some sort ofmodus vivendibetween new and old forms of writing about the past,particularlysince acceptance of the Ciceronian rhetoricalconception of historiaand the rules of discourse which governed italso reached a high wa-termark at about the same time. Even so, itwas still possible for Sid-ney, as late as the 15 80S, to confusethe two types ofwriters about thepast in his witty but ratherunfair caricature of the historian:
The historian scarcely giveth leisure to the moralist to say somuch, but that he,loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorisinghimself (for the most part)upon other histories, whose greatestauthorities are built upon the notablefoundations of hearsay;having much ado to accord differing writers and topick truth out ofpartiality; better acquainted with a thousand years ago thanwiththe present age, and yet better knowing how this world goeth thanhowhis own wit runneth; curious for antiquities and inquisitiveofnovelties; a won-der to young folks and a tyrant in table talk,denieth, in a great chafe, that anyman for teaching of virtue, andvirtuous actions is comparable to him. "I amtestis temporum, luxveritatis, magistra vitae, nuncia vetustatis. "28
There is an obvious internal contradiction in this caricaturewhichSidney either did not see or chose to ignore: his historianwas bothobsessed with old records like the new-fangled antiquaryand at thesame time reliant "for the most part ... upon otherhistories" likethe old-fashioned chronicler. Such a confusion ofterms was useful,ofcourse, to his argument that poetry, the actofimagining or makingthe past, was superior to any form of writingthat sought to recordthe merely factual and, as far as Sidney wasconcerned, the unknowa-ble. 29
With this sword of Damocles suspended over their heads, itishardly surprising that the antiquaries sought to distancethemselvesfrom the narrative historians and chroniclers. Thus itwas the anti-quaries themselves, first and foremost, whopersistently proclaimed
28Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (rst ed., London, 1595, writtenc. 1581-83), ed.Geoffrey Shepherd (znd ed.; Manchester, 1973), p.105.
29Sidney's polemic was not entirely sincere, since in a letterto his brother, Robert,he accorded history limited usefulness as ateacher of political action, though not as ateacher of morality:The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat(repr.Cambridge, 1962), Ill, 130-33; F. J.Levy, "Sir Philip Sidneyand the Idea ofHistory, "Bibliotheque d'humanismeet renaissance, 26(1964), 608-17.
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their independence of the aims and rules ofhistory-writing,abdicat-ing the title of historian at the same time. If Camden'sBritannia,which was unquestionably the most widely-read andinfluentialbook oftopographical antiquities, makes one thing clear,it is that itsauthor believed that he was not a historian. Hederived his title of"chorographer" from geography rather thanhistory. Not only didCamden persistently disclaim any intentionofwriting a history, "re-membring my selfe to be a choregrapher":he went out of his wayto abort any unconscious slips into anarrative of men and deeds. Atone point, his discussion of therazing ofReading Castle by Henry IIleads him briefly into a paeanon that king's great deeds. The brakesare applied almost instantly."But these are things without our ele-ment," he apologizes. "Let usreturne againe from persons toplaces." Elsewhere, he aborts anaccount ofthe successive invaders ofthe Isle of Thanet, "which Ileave to historians ... least I mightseeme to digresseextraordinarily." The description of Barclay Cas-tle,Gloucestershire, occasions mentioning the murder ofEdward 11,asubject which Camden "had rather you should seeke inHistorians,than looke for at my hands." At another point he begs"leave for awhile to play the part of an historiographer, which Iwill speedilygive over againe as not well able to act it. "30 Theseremarks illustrateboth the strength and the flexibilityofcategories like "historian" and"antiquary," for, paradoxically,Camden was obliged to state thedistinction only at those pointswhere he was, in effect, ignoring it.
It was not that Camden thought he was better or worse than are-counter ofnames and dates. On the contrary, his disclaimers wereasign that he did not wish to be judged by the rhetoricalstandardswhich applied to historians. With his classical training,he knew per-fectly well that the Britannia lacked both the form andthe function ofa history. It is true that Camden and many otherElizabethan topog-raphers achieved an order of some sort bydividing their works bycounties, and by following a pre-existingspatial pattern (followingrivers imaginatively in their prose, fromtown to town, as they hadfollowed them literally on theirtravelsl.P A few others, like John
30William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (London,1610), pp. 340, 363,369,371. The corresponding passages in the 1607Latin edition are at pp. 206, 239, 256,260-61. Cf. Stuart Piggott,"William Camden and the Britannia," Proceedings of theBritishAcademy, 37 (1951), 199-217; F. J. Levy, "The Making ofCamden'sBritannia,"Bibliothequed'humanisme et renaissance, 26 (1964),70-97.
31For other examples, see Thomas Habington's A Survey ofWorcestershire (writtenin the 1630Sand 1640s, ed. J. Amphlett, 2vols. Worcestershire Historical Society; Ox-
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 25
Norden, used different systems, such as the alphabet, toorganizetheir materials.F But they all eschewed chronology, thesine qua nonof history. Moreover, the antiquaries subscribed to thewidespreadnotion that historians should properly be men ofstate,diplomats ormilitary leaders. Most of the greats-Thucydides,Polybius, Jo-sephus and Tacitus-had been politicians or generalsthemselves, andthis sort ofman had the personal experience andsocial stature neces-sary to the re-teller of remote events andindispensable to the histo-rian ofrecent times. The studentofantiquities needed linguistic agil-ity, an enthusiasm for thepast and a large capacity for tedium: he didnot have to beJuliusCaesar.
There is thus a certain irony, ofwhich Camden himselfwaspain-fully aware, in the criticisms of his Britannia by RalphBrooke, theobnoxious York herald who would plague him and theCollege ofArms for several decades. Brooke accused Camden-quiteerrone-ously-ofpretending to the title ofhistorian, since theBritannia dealtwith the pedigrees ofgreat families, andincidentally with their greatdeeds, often (this much was true)inaccurately. Brooke's argumentwas simply that scholars were nothistorians and never could be, be-cause of their lack ofpoliticalexperience:
And doubtles for a meere scholler to be an historian, that musttake up all byhearesay, and uncertaine rumors, not being acquaintedwith the secretes andoccurrences of state matters, I take it (asmany other affirme with me) verieunfit, and dangerous. 33
Camden could not have agreed more. As far as we can tell, hebe-lieved to the end ofhis days that the Britannia was not ahistory. Andeven when, late in life and doubtless with Brooke'sstinging attackstill in mind, he finally did write a history, theAnnales, he found itheavy going. He complained to his friend,Jacques-Auguste deThou, that he found history-writing a tiresome,odious task, en-forced on him against his will by royal command.The man whowrote one of the greatest works of chorography andperhaps themost meticulously-researched political history of theage, a man
ford, 1893-99), I, 184, where the work is framed as a "flight"on "our Pegasus ofWorcestershire"; Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion(London, 1612), for which see furtherbelow, carries this poeticdevice even further, invoking muses and river spirits.
32John Norden, Speculum Britanniae, Part One, Middlesex(1593).33Ralph Brooke, A discoverie ofcertaine errours publishedinprint in the muchcommended
Britannia (London, 1596), "To maister Camden"; Mark Noble, AHistory ofthe CollegeofArms (London, I 804), pp. 240--45.
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whose interests were as wide as his intellectual circle, did notrecog-nize the essential similarity ofhis two masterpieces. 34
Camden's older friend and disciple, John Stow, also believedthathe was writing something quite different in kind from themanyChronicles and Annales he had produced over the years when hepub-lished his Survay ofLondonin 1598. At no point does he callthis worka history of London, and like Camden, Stow avoidedslipping intonarrative. The only "history" in the book is abriefprefatory accountof the ancient Britons and Romans. WilliamClaxton, one of Stow'scorrespondents, shared his friend'srecognition ofthe distinction. Hepraised Stow for "proceding to thepublishing ofsuch grave historiesand antiquities ofworthy memorie," by which he meant the chroni-cles and other sources, bothdocumentary and architectural, thatStow had "published" insofar ashe had used them as evidence in hiswork. Claxton suggested thatStow augment the book, "becausenever any hath taken the like matterof antiquitie in hand. "35 Eventhose, like Thomas Martin, whoactually wrote history from archi-val sources, rather than fromchronicles, could not make the concep-tuallink between theirpursuit and that of the antiquaries. Martin'sLatin biography ofWilliam of Wickham exploits a wide range ofmanuscript and archivalmaterial. When he came to list the most fa-mous writers on Wickham,however, he termed Leland "antiquitatiscum primis studiosus," andCamden the author ofa descriptio ofBrit-ain. Of all his sources,only two merited the title of historiographus:the fifteenth-centurychronicler, Thomas of Walsingham, and theearly sixteenth-centuryItalian emigre, Polydore Vergil. 36
Ifthe historians and antiquaries could agree so readily to anamica-ble divorce, how can one expect their lay readers to haveattempted areconciliation? Casual comments illustrate how thedichotomy hadbecome axiomatic by the beginning of the seventeenthcentury. The
34Camden to de Thou, 10 August, 1612: Bibliotheque National,Paris, CollectionDupuy, MS 632, fols. I03r-v (a copy of this is inBodleian Library, Oxford, MS Smith74, fols. 25-28). For theAnnales, see H. R. Trevor-Roper, Queen Elizabeth's FirstHisto-rian:William Camden and the Beginnings ofEnglish "Civil" History (Nealelecture, Lon-don, 1971). The breadth of Camden's interests areillustrated in the admirable librarylist compiled by Richard L.DeMolen, "The Library ofWilliam Camden, " Proceedingsofthe AmericanPhilosophical Society, 128, no. 4, 327-409.
35John Stow, A survay ofLondon, ed. C. L. Kingsford (2 vols.;Oxford, 1908), I, 3;Claxton to Stow, 10 April, 1594, Brit. Lib. MSHad. 374 (D'Ewes papers), fo1. 21.
36Thomas Martin, Historica descriptio complectens vitam,acresgestasbeatissimi viri Gu-lielmi Wicami... (London, 1597), sig.C2.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 27
anonymous author of a Jacobean manual for aspiring courtiersrec-ommended that a courtier be both "an excellent antiquary, andwellred Historian." Henry Peacham, who took a similar view,treatedhistory and antiquities in different chapters of TheComplete Gentle-man. Richard Brathwait had more respect for the"laborious andju-dicious antiquaries" ofhis day than forhistorians, but he asserted thathistorians who did venture todabble in erudition benefitted none butthemselves, since they"hardly can communicate the best of theirknowledge unto others"-afairly clear statement ofthe unsuitabilityofnarrative as a mediumfor the communication ofscholarly detail. 37When Fulke Grevillesought to erect a history lectureship in 1615, aplan which did notreach fruition for another twelve years, Sir Johnco*ke warned him tochoose his man carefully. The ideal candidatefor the job would bean historian learned in matters of theology andchurch history,perhaps even a divine, "able to joyne church andcomonwealthtogether w[hi]ch to separate is to betray." If Grevilleelected sucha historian, his endowment would be productive,"wheras if you plantbut a critical antiquarie instead of an historian,nothing can beemore unthriftie nor vaine." Since co*ke's letter goeson to revealthat he himself had acquired a good deal of knowledgeabout epitaphsand funeral laws, his distinction suggests not that hefound thepursuits of the antiquaries dull or unimportant, but that hefeltthey did not belong in a university history lectureship. 38 Theatti-tude of Bacon, who embraced the notion of thestatesman-historianwith a special fervor, is much the same. Hefound antiquities interest-ing, and he praised the "industriousmen" who unearthed and stud-ied them, but he did not consider themto be historians; at best, theywere research assistants.:'?
* * * * *So far we have demonstrated that the distinctionbetween history
on the one hand and antiquities, erudition or scholarship ontheother, was as rigid, perhaps even more rigid, than has beenprevi-
37A. D. B., The Court of the most illustrious James the first(London, 1619), p. 46;Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman(London, 1622, 1634), ed. Virgil B. Heltzel(Ithaca, N. Y., 1962),pp. 62-63, 117-27; Richard Brathwait, The schollers medley(Lon-don, 1614), pp. 61, 80.
38co*ke to Greville, 15 September, 1615, printed in N. Farmer,Jr., "Fulke Grevilleand Sir John co*ke: An Exchange ofLetters on aHistory Lectureship and Certain LatinVerses on Sir Philip Sidney, "Huntington Library Quarterly, 33 (1969-70),217-36.
39Bacon, Works, 11, 334; IV, 303-4.
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ously recognized, particularly toward the end of Elizabeth'sreignand early in her successor's. Yet exceptions to the rule didoccur: be-cause the concept of history, for all Cicero's influence,was still in astate offerment; because the same writers often didin fact write bothsorts ofwork; and, most importantly, whatever therhetorical neces-sity of a formal distinction, there was acountervailing tendency inthe Renaissance mind which allowed it toapply insights borrowedfrom one sphere ofknowledge to problemspresented by another, allfor the love of that elusive goddess,Truth. Geography had alreadyproven useful; now, as lawyersjoinedheralds in the study ofthe past,the legal humanists' loveofphilology began to exercise an even morepotent influence, as ithad done earlier in France.t'' Furthermore, asthe comments byPeacham, Brathwait and other courtly writersmake clear,antiquarianism was fast acquiring social acceptability. Bythe endof the sixteenth century, the traditional civic humanistcon-ception ofthe historian as orator was giving way to a newerpatrioticideal ofthe complete gentleman, an ideal which encourageda certainamount of erudite learning. As the courtier-soldier of thesixteenthcentury gradually evolved into the virtuoso of theseventeenth, legalscholars such as Sir Edward co*ke, Sir John Daviesand Francis Tateand collectors such as Sir Robert Cotton and theearl ofArundel be-came involved in the affairs of the kingdom in away quite unlikemost of their Tudor predecessors: in this, theywere following thelead not of Camden, but ofWilliam Lambarde. Thisredefinition ofthe social function of erudite learning, which madeit almost as ac-ceptable a pursuit as traditional history, wasbound to contribute to afruitful interchange between the two,albeit initially a slow one.
At the same time, there was a growing awareness amongfin-de-siecle Englishmen, as earlier among Frenchmen, that theylived in anunstable world. The crises of the last years ofElizabeth's reign andthe political debates ofJames forced men toturn to the past for solaceand reassurance: it was no longersufficient to analyze vicissitudesimply in terms of the rise andfall of fortune's wheel. What some ofthem found was that time couldchange not only dynasties but soci-eties, not only individuals butinstitutions. As the confessional con-troversies that had dominatedsixteenth-century political discourse
40Richard Schoeck, "The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries andMen of Law, "Notes and Queries, n.s. I (1954), 417-21; McKisack,Medieval History in the Tudor Age,pp. 78-82.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 29
faded-for the moment-into the background, attention wasdi-rected to the common law and its institutions.
This heightened awareness of time and mutability was a two-edgedblade. On the one hand it could lead some, such as Sir Edwardco*ke,to avoid the spectre ofchange altogether by denying it ormin-imizing its importance: the "common-law mind" and the mythwhichit spawned of an "immemorial" ancient constitution, unal-tered bythe Norman Conquest, indicate a conscious attempt to pushtheorigins ofthe common law so far back in time that they lay, inef-fect, beyond history. On the other hand, though, closeexaminationof legal institutions through the documents which theyhad gener-ated over the centuries could lead to consciousness notonly ofchange, but ofdevelopment. Closely linked to this was anascent senseofrelativism, an understanding that the phenomenaofthe past had tobe understood on their own terms as the productsof specific timesand locations. It was this sort of historicalverstehen which led SirHenry Spelman, the greatest legal mind amongthe antiquaries, tothe realization that Norman England, with its"feudal" system, dif-fered fundamentally both from Anglo-SaxonEngland and from thesociety ofhis own time.f
Hints of the view that erudite study had an important role toplayin the search for knowledge ofthe past, and with it thebeginnings ofthe expansion of the definition of history to includeany survivingportion of the past can be found as early as 1591 inLambarde's Ar-chion. Lambarde refers in this work, which remainedin manuscriptuntil 1635, to "some records ofhistory" that he hadseen concerningthe earl marshal's court: clearly an antiquariantopic.F In the Peram-bulation ofKent (1572), the first of thecounty chorographies, Lam-barde highlighted the principalrhetorical problem facing the topog-rapher: how to describe thepast without writing a history. Havinglisted the Anglo-Saxon kingsofKent, he immediately apologized forhaving lapsed intohistory:
Now, although it might heere seeme convenient, before I passedany further,to disclose such memorable things, as have chancedduring the reignes of all
41poco*ck, Ancient Constitution, pp. 91-123; Ferguson, ClioUnbound, pp. 259-311.42William Lambarde, Archion, ora comentaryupon the high courts ofjustice in England
(London, 1635), p. 53. The dedication to Sir Robert Cecil isdated 22 October 159I.Retha M. Warnicke, William Lambarde,Elizabethan Antiquary: 1536-1601 (Chichester,1973), pp. 27-35·
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these forenamed kings: yet forasmuch as my purpose specially isto write a to-pographie, or description of places, and nochronographie, or storie of times(although I must now and then useboth, since one can not fully bee performedwithout enterlacing theother) and for that also I shall have just occasionheereafter inthe particulars ofthis shyre, to disclose many of thesame....43
The tensions between descriptio and narratio, betweendispositionalong spatial or along temporal axes, leap out ofthispassage. Historyand antiquarian chorography were distinct genres,but how couldone keep them apart? The trick was to reconcilecontent with form,the presentation oftruth embodied in factualdetail with the require-ment that the presentation itselfbe bothorderly and aesthetic." Therambling, disorganized, and often dullprose of this and many othertopographical works shows that thesolution was not close at hand.
Antiquities also seeped into history in the work ofFrancisGodwin, successively bishop of Llandaff and of Hereford.Godwinhad accompanied Camden on the latter's antiquarianperegrinationsand was himself a keen collector of antiquities whoused archivalsources and manuscript chronicles to compile hisCatalogue of theBishops of England. 45 His narrative of the reignsof Henry VIII,Edward VI and Mary, the Annales ofEngland, beginswith an urgentplea for a new history which will supersede PolydoreVergil's AnglicaHistoria:
It being therefore to be wished, and is much desired, that someone versed inour Antiquities would (as learned Mr. Camden hathalready done for the de-scription of the Island) consecrate partofhis learned labours to the eternitie ofBritaine, not in reformingthat obsolete Virgilian history, but in composing anew one; ourantiquaries may justly be taxed ofsloath.
43Lambarde, The perambulation of Kent (znd ed.; London, 1596),p. 23. Cf. Lam-barde's DictionariumAngliae topographicum &historicum (rst ed.; 1730). In the dedicationto the PerambulationLarnbarde explains that he called this work a dictionary and notahistory "because it was digested into titles by order ofalphabet,and concerned the de-scription ofplaces. "
44Lambarde's friend, Sir Thomas Wotton, actually referred to thePerambulation as ahistory in his commendatory letter to the second(1596) edition-but only because itdid some of the things he thoughta history should do, such as recounting the deeds ofthe county'sgreat men in "good words well placed, eloquently"! Ibid., epistlededica-tory; Thomas Wotton, "To his countriemen, the gentlemen ofKent, " ibid., sigs. A3-A4v •
45Godwin to Camden, 27 May 1608 and 9 October 1620, in GulielmiCamdeni et il-lustriumvirorumad G. Camdenum epistolae, ed. ThomasSmith (London, 1691), pp. 109,308; W. M. Merchant, "Bishop FrancisGodwin, Historian and Novelist," Journal ofthe Historical Societyofthe Church in Wales, 5 (1955), 45-5 I.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 31
Godwin was calling for a new history, and he recognized that hisan-tiquary friends were the ones to write it. It is unclearprecisely whatform he thought it should take, but we may draw aclue from thetraditional character ofhis own Annales, in which,like any good his-torian, he offered a treasury of "examples ofmost eminent ver-tues. "46
A much less equivocal call for an erudite history came fromtheenterprising virtuoso and intellectual entrepreneur, EdmundBolton.Bolton's wide interests extended to heraldry, poetry,philology andcartography, as well as to English history. The"Academ Roial"which in vain he tried to establish would haveincluded both anti-quaries and historians, and the extant plans forit suggest that hemade little distinction between the twO. 47 Inhis Hypercritica: ora ruleofjudgmentfor writing orreadingourhistories, written between 1618 and1621, he expressed the hopethat someone would write a new "uni-versal history for England,"even at the cost ofhaving "to turn overso many musty rolls, so manydry, bloodless chronicles, and somany dull and heavy pacedhistories, as they must who will obtainthe crown and triumphalensign of having compos'd a Corpus Re-rum Anglicarum. "48 UnlikeGodwin, Bolton practised what hepreached: his Nero Caesar,ormonarchy depraved (1624) is a striking ex-ception to Momigliano'srule, a narrative account of the reign ofNero which actually usesthe non-literary evidence ofcoins to verifythe accounts ofTacitusand Suetonius."?
Bolton's virtuosity allowed him to slip over the traditionalbound-aries ofhistory, into the realm ofphilological research, butthe short-
46Francis Godwin, Catalogue of the bishops of England (1601;revised ed., London1616); Rerum AnglicarumHenrico VIII, Edwardo VIet Maria regnantibus, Annales (Lon-don, 1616), translated by MorganGodwin as Annales ofEngland (London, 1630), sig.A2. Camden'sParisian friend, Pierre Dupuy, went further than Godwin, urgingCam-den to write a new English history "cum illis nummis &sigillis"-with coins and seals:Dupuy to Camden, 16 November 1618,in Camdeniepistolae, p. 263.
47W. E. Houghton, "The English Virtuoso in the SeventeenthCentury,"Journal oftheHistory ofIdeas, 3 (1942),51-73; Ethel M.Portal, "The Academ Roial ofKingJamesI," Proceedings ofthe BritishAcademy, 7 (1915-16), 189-208; R. Caudill, "Some LiteraryEvidenceof the Development of English Virtuoso Interests in the SeventeenthCen-tury" (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1975), pp.267-86.
48Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica: ora rule0fjudgment forwritingorreading ourhistories,in CriticalEssaysofthe SeventeenthCentury, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1907), pp. 83,93,97·
49Bolton, Nero Caesar, ormonarchie depraved (London, 1624); thesources for this canbe gleaned from Bolton's notes and letters inBrit. Lib. MS Harl. 6521.
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ness ofhis attention span and the relative shallowness ofhiseruditionprevented him from doing anything ofsubstance while he wasthere.And, like Godwin, he had missed the essential point: one didnotneed to integrate antiquarian detail into a "new" narrativehistory ofEngland to be doing history. For that matter, one did noteven haveto write a history ofEngland at all, for entities otherthan kingdomsor individuals have a past. Thus, while both thesem*n-like FrancisBacon-exhibited a certain logical dissatisfactionwith the prevailingrhetorical hierarchy that kept erudition frominvading the territoryofthe historian, neither had the necessarysense ofhistorical develop-ment that would allow him to deal withthe non-political past histor-ically.
* * * * *Before Elizabeth's reign was out, she had beenpetitioned by Sir
Robert Cotton and two associates to establish a national"library andan academy for the study of antiquities and history."The suppli-cants' goal was the preservation of "the matter ofhistory of thisrealm, original charters, and monuments." This was asignificantstep. These suitors did not yet recognize the work oftheantiquary asbeing history in a formal sense, but it is clear thatthey were ready toview antiquities as constituting the matter fromwhich historyshould be written. A virtuoso himself: Cotton blurredthe distinctionbetween history and antiquities still further bybuilding a huge li-brary ofboth narrative (chronicle) andnon-narrative sources for his-tory, especially medieval history. 50It was in this library, under Cot-ton's aegis, that the young JohnSelden set to work in the 1610S, andit is probably these fortuitouscirc*mstances, combined with thecatholicity ofhis interests, thatled Selden eventually to disregard thedistinction entirely and, asa result, redefine "history" in somethinglike its modern sense.Selden cannot take all the credit for this. Heworked within anenvironment and among other scholars sympa-thetic to his views-ifhe had not, then his most striking insightswould have amounted tolittle. Yet it is in his works, read widely in
SOHearne,CuriousDiscourses, 11,324; on the Cottonian library,see Kevin Sharpe, SirRobert Cotton, 1586-1631: History andPoliticsin Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979),ch. ii; Fussner, HistoricalRevolution, eh. iii: and C. E. Wright, "The Elizabethan Soci-etyofAntiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library, " in TheEnglish Librarybefore 1700, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright(London, 1958), pp. 176-212.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 33
ensuing decades, that we encounter the most profound,articulateand original comments on the scope and purpose ofhistoryyet madeby any Renaissance Englishman. If the laurel of"discovering" feu-dalism is to go to Spelman, Selden at leastdeserves credit for recog-nizing that discoveries of this sort laywithin the ambit of the histo-nan.
Selden's particular contribution to the Renaissance theory ofhis-tory has never really been recognized, partly because hisstatus as animportant and influential thinker has been hidden,until very re-cently, by his convoluted and at timesincomprehensible style (aproblem exacerbated by his preference forwriting in Latin), andpartly because his most important work inthis regard, The historie oftithes (1618) has long been famous forquite different reasons. Cot-ton's friend, Henry Peacham, admiredthe young lawyer and calledhim "the rising star of good letters andantiquity," the heir of Cam-den. 51 To a point, the compliment waswell-placed, but Selden was anantiquary ofquite a different sortfrom either Camden or Lambarde,though he shared some oftheinterests ofeach. Unlike those wander-ers, who went to greattrouble to search for coins, monuments andmanuscripts scatteredfrom one end of the country to the other,Selden was a philologistwho confined his searches for the most partto the shelves of anumber of libraries; where he used physical re-mains such as theArundel marbles, they had generally been un-earthed, and in somecases already published, by others; in a literalsense, he was quiteprepared to let others do the spadework while hesat back andinterpreted what they turned up. In the early years ofhiscareer,his interests lay primarily in the development ofEnglish lawfromearliest times to his own day. Like Cotton and several membersofthe defunct society of antiquaries, Selden wrote about the pastwithone eye on the present. He first wrote a series ofworks on En-glishlaws and institutions; beginning with the AnalectonAnglo-Britannicon (written c. 1605 but only published on thecontinent in1615) and culminating in the second, enlarged editionof Titles ofHo-nour(163 I), these revealed an increasingly deepunderstanding ofEn-gland's "ancient constitution." His learning wasall the more sophis-
51Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, pp. 62-63, 124. Still themost exhaustivestudy of SeIden's early career is the regrettablyunpublished study by the late ProfessorDavid S. Berkowitz, "YoungMr. Selden. Essays in Seventeenth Century Learningand Politics"(Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1946).
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ticated because it was based upon continental as well asBritishsources. The story ofSeIden's constitutional ideas and ofhisattemptsto put them into effect in parliament has been well toldelsewhere. 52We are more concerned with his attitude to the writingofhistory andto the relationship he perceived between thephilologist and the his-torian.
From this angle, Selden's early works seem quiteunremarkable.Although it is organized by reigns, he in no placecalls his first workof legal scholarship, the Latin Analecton, ahistory; nor does he con-sider .its comparatively few non-narrativesources to be historical.The same can be said ofthat book's moresophisticated successor, theJani Anglorum Facies Altera (1610),which shows a substantiallygreater debt to French philology,especially to the work of the manwho was to become Selden's idol,the great linguist and chronologer,Joseph Scaliger.P TheJaniAnglorum is, in a sense, a narrative, since itfollows thedevelopment of the English constitution chronologi-cally, from theAnglo-Saxon era to the seventeenth century, after thefashion oftheantiquaries' discourses, but in much greater depth. Yetit does notrecount great deeds, it points no morals, and it certainlylackseloquence: by the contemporary definition, at least, it wasplainlynot a history, and its author was not a historian. 54 ThatSeldeninitially accepted the rhetorical distinction is revealedexplicitly in apassage which recalls Carnden's protestation in theBritannia. In hisillustrations to the eleventh song of MichaelDrayton's Poly-Olbion(1612), he records the names of the sevenoriginal Anglo-Saxonkingdoms (the heptarchy), their dates, and themanuscript andprinted authorities for these. But he stops short ofgiving a narrativeaccount of the process whereby the kingdom ofWessex graduallyachieved hegemony, referring the reader elsewhere:"How in timethey successively came under the West-Saxon rule, Imust not tell
52H. D. Hazeltine, "Selden as Legal Historian," in FestschriftHeinrich Brunner(Weimar, 1910), pp. 579-630; Paul Christianson,"YoungJohn Selden and the AncientConstitution, 1610-1618,"Proceedings ofthe AmericanPhilosophical Society, 128(1984),271-315; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: theirOrigins and Development (Cam-bridge, 1979), pp. 82-100.
530n Scaliger, perhaps the best-equipped student ofantiquityofhis day and a mas-ter ofphilological methods, see AnthonyGrafton,joseph Scaliger: A Study in theHistoryofClassicalScholarship, I (Oxford, 1983), 101-33, 180-226.
54Selden, Analecton Anglo-Britannicon libri duo (Frankfurt,1615), injoannis Seldenisjurisconsulti opera omnia, ed. DavidWilkins (3 vols. in 6 parts; London, 1726), 11, 940 ff.;janiAnglorum Facies Altera (London, 1610), Opera omnia, 11, 974.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 35
you, unless I should untimely put on the person of an historian.Ourcommon annals manifest it." Elsewhere, he comments that"history,not this place, must informe the reader of moreparticulars of theDanes. "55
In the first edition of Titles ofHonour (1614) one finds thebegin-nings of a shift in attitude. This work is organized onhierarchicallines; title by title, from emperor down to esquire,though withineach title Selden follows chronological principles,tracing each titlefrom its origins to, the present. The breadthoflearning in this book,particularly in continental sources, isquite remarkable, but no moreso than the prefatory statementcontaining Selden's views on the usesofphilology.
As Selden envisaged it, the purpose ofall research and writingwasthe discovery oftruth. Like the most erudite ofhiscontemporaries-Bacon, Fludd, and Spelman, to name but a few-Seldenbelievedthat the pursuit oftruth knew no disciplinary boundaries:or, at least,that whatever the nature ofsuch boundaries in theory,they were notunpassable in practice. Indeed, in the second editionof Titles, hewould expand on this view, using the metaphor ofaworld oflearn-ing divided into islands (one recalls Bacon's"intellectual globe") tocharacterize the scholar's search forknowledge:
It is said that all isles and continents (which are indeed butgreater isles) are soseated, that there is none, but that, fromsome shore ofit, another may be dis-covered.... Certainly thesevered [sic] parts of good arts and learning, havethat kindofsite. And, as all are to be diligently sought to be possessed byman-kind, so everyone hath so much relation to some other, that ithath not onlyuse often of the aid of what is next it, but, throughthat, also ofwhat is out ofken to it. 56
Selden allowed that the "vast circle ofknowledge" could bedividedalong disciplinary lines, but at the same time he assertedthe freedomofone discipline to borrow from another.
55Selden, "Illustrations" to Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (PartOne, 1612), inWorks ofMichael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel (znd ed., 5vols.; Oxford, 1961), IV, 246,272.
56Selden, Titles ofHonour (rst ed.; London, 1614), epistlededicatory, sig. aj; TitlesofHonour (znd ed.; London, 163I), inOperaomnia,111,99. The first edition includes anextensivebibliography of SeIden's sources (sigs. Ddd4V-FfIV). Furtherinformation onSelden's reading list appears in D. M. Barratt, "TheLibrary ofJohn Selden and ItsLater History," Bodleian LibraryRecord, 3 (1950-51), 128-42,208-13,256-74; and in].Sparrow, "TheEarlier Owners ofBooks inJohn Selden's Library," BodleianQuarterlyRecord, 6 (1931),263-71. These can be supplemented by themanuscript library list andcorrespondence in BodI. Lib. MSS SeldenSupra 108-109, I I I and 123.
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Books such as Selden's have one oftwo functions, declares theau-thor: verum and bonum, each contributing something to theperfectionof man. Titles ofHonour is a work of "verum chiefly, inmatter ofstory and philologie." By "story," it is plain that hemeant "his-tory." Philology, on the other hand, was Selden's mapthrough thelabyrinth ofantiquity. It consisted for him not simplyin the study ofa thing through the study of the words signifyingit, but, more im-portantly, in the establishment ofthe historicalcontext within whichcustoms, laws and institutions arose. Seldencalled his notion ofhis-torical context "synchronism," andphilology was the key to it, themaster science which could be usedas a bridge from one island oflearning to another: from antiquitiesto history. 57 It is probably fair tosay that Selden placed an evenhigher emphasis on philology than didhis French predecessors. Inthe wide sense he gave it, it could bemixed with history in a workofthis sort. And by so closely associat-ing "story" and"philologie," he came within a hair's breadth ofequating them.
This conceptual leap Selden made four years later, in Thehistorie oftithes. A detailed investigation ofthe customs andinstitutions oftith-ing in the history of the English church and inother countries frombiblical times to the end ofthe sixteenthcentury, the Historie was in-spired by a short essay ofScaligerwhich Selden had first read as earlyas 1612, and by a desire tocorrect a number of recent works whichhad asserted the clergy'sright to tithes jure divino. 58 This was no dryacademicdispute-not, we might say, an example ofirrelevant anti-quarianism.Over and above the obvious economic implications ofan attack onjuredivino tithes, Selden's research demonstrated conclu-sively thatthe canon law could only be effective when it was incor-porated,either by custom or statute, into the laws of individual na-tions.In his efforts to relate the true history of tithing practiceshewas lighting a match to read the label on a barrelofgunpowder.
57For "synchronism," see Selden's introduction to Poly-Olbion,Works of MichaelDrayton, IV, viii".
58JosephJustus Scaliger, Diatriba de Decimis, Opuscula variaantehac non edita, ed.Isaac Casaubon (Paris, 1610), pp. 61-70.Selden cites this in his illustrations to Poly-Olbion (WorksofMichael Drayton, IV, 186), and some notes in his hand onScaliger'sessay are to be found in BodI. MS Selden Supra 108, fols.187-90v • The works whichmay have aroused Selden's interest in theissue include Sir Henry Spelman, De non te-merandis Ecclesiis(London, 1613) and Foulke Robartes, The Revenue of the Gospelistythes, dueto the ministerie ofthe word, by that word(Cambridge,1613).
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 37
The consequence ofthis was to force Selden into calling his workahistory so that he could pose as a neutral in the tithescontroversy. Hehad to deny that he was writing a polemical tract,that he had a pointto prove. A "discourse on tithes," or a"treatise on tithes" would betaken as a partisan attack on theclergy; a history, on the other hand,being simply a narrativeofwhat had happened in the past, might notcause offence. As thingsturned out, this was almost incredible na-ivete, but the results ofthis rhetorical sleight-of-hand proved to beimportant in the longterm.
Selden deliberately cast in chronological form a book that ismani-festly a piece of erudite scholarship, of antiquarianphilology, at-tempting the difficult task of representing in anarrative the findingsofdetailed research in non-narrative sources.In one way, he simplyreturned to the original, Herodotean senseofloroptn (enquiry), pro-testing that he was not arguing a case butsimply writing a morallyneutral history in the tradition ofPlinyand Aristotle:
Neither is it any thing else but it self that is, a meernarration, and the Historieoftithes. Nor is the law ofGod, whencetithes are commonly derivd, more dis-puted in it, then the divinelaw whence all creatures have their continuing sub-sistence, isinquired after in Aristotle's historie of living creatures, inPlinie'snaturall historie, or in Theophrastus his historieofplants. 59
Yet there was one important difference between Selden's work andaconventional natural history: The historie oftithes dealt with thepastand its institutions, with a world offlux, not with the staticrealm ofnature. Selden had successfully conflated several differentmodes ofhistorical discourse, bringing the antiquary's sense ofthepast and theidea ofhistory as "inventory" under the same conceptualumbrella asthe historian quanarrator ofevents. In short, he hadseen both that asingle institutional aspect of the present,tithing, had evolved in sev-eral stages over the centuries, andthat the tale ofthat evolution mer-ited being told in ahistory.
In his methodological preface, Selden asserts that he wishes toes-tablish the veracity of the historical argument that tithes hadalwaysbeen paid to the clergyjure divino. This is not a matteroftheology butof"fact, that is practice [i.e., custom] and storie."He admits that hisbook, the first of its kind, is likely to beunpopular, and reminds thereader that such earlier scholars asReuchlin, Bude, and Erasmus hadalso been resented for theirerudition. The same lack of modesty
59Selden, The historie oftithes(London, 1618), facing p. I,italicized in original.
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which is obvious in this implied comparison of himself with suchapantheon of learning no doubt also allowed Selden to avoidCam-den's self-denying ordinance, the protestation that a scholarsuch ashe would never presume to interfere in the writingofhistory. Ifcon-tinental authors such as Bude, Cujas, Pithou andPasquier can bringphilology to the "rectifying of storie," asksSelden, "why then maynot equally a common lawyer ofEngland use thisphilologie?" A re-liable miniature ofeven the narrowest cornerofthe past could not bedrawn without an understanding ofthecomplete picture, and that inturn could only be achieved through asynthesis of philology withhistory. Selden had arrived, in theoryas well as practice, at a pointreached earlier by the Frenchscholars he cites, the alliance ofdifferentbranches ofknowledge inthe pursuit ofhistorical truth. 60
Another point needs highlighting. Selden distinguished betweenaconstructive study of antiquities on the one hand and anundisci-plined love ofold things on the other. He was careful toargue that hewas not interested in the flotsam ofthe past for itsown sake but in theproduction ofa meaningful, useful narrativewhich would illuminatenot only the history of tithing practices,but the entire institutionalframework ofthe church as it haddeveloped down to his own day:
For as on the one side, it cannot be doubted but that the toostudious affectationof bare and sterile antiquitie, which isnothing els but to bee exceeding busieabout nothing may soondescend to a dotage; so on the other, the neglect oronly vulgarregard ofthe fruitfull and precious part ofit, which givesnecessarylight to the present in matter of state, law, historie,and the understanding ofgood autors [sic], is but preferring thatkind of ignorant infancie, which ourshort life alone allows us,before the many ages of former experience and ob-servation, whichmay so accumulat yeers to us as ifwe had livd even fromthebeginning oftime. 61
He was not interested merely in "what hath been" but in itsrelevanceto "the practice and doubts of the present." Like manyother politi-cally active early Stuart antiquaries, Selden saw hiserudition as ameans ofcontributing to the common weal.
The effects of all this were threefold. First, Selden had givencon-structive and methodical antiquarian research a formal place inhis-torical narrative. Secondly, he had asserted the freedom of thehisto-
6OSelden, Historie, preface, pp. vi, xvi, xx; Francois Baudouin,De Institutione histo-riae universae et ejus cumjurisprudentiaconjunctione (1St ed.; Paris, 1561), repr. in Arteshistoricaepenus, ed. J. Wolf(Basel, 1576), p. 668; cited by Kelley,Foundations, p. 116.
61Selden , Historie, sig. a2-a3.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 39
rian to alight on any topic he chose: to write the history of"things"as well as ofmen and kingdoms. Thirdly, he had also denieda placeto the unmethodical antiquary, the man interested only incollectingcoins or examining old documents for their own sake,without alarger concept ofhistory against which to measure theirimportance.The passage quoted above puts Selden in precisely thesame categoryas George Huppert's philosophical scholars; the wordscould havebeen written by Pasquier or la Popeliniere, Selden lackedthe burninglove ofthe past for its own sake which drove some otherson endlesssearches for coins' and monuments while blinding them asto themeaning of their discoveries; instead, he directed hisresearch to theanswering ofbroad questions.
As an innovative experiment in the reconciliation oferuditionandstory-telling, the Historie was only partially successful.AlthoughSelden kept to a chronological structure in general, he wasunable tointegrate certain topics into this pattern. The earlydevelopment ofparochial organization, and of tithe jurisdiction,lent themselvesmore readily to separate treatment, which theyreceived in chaptersbracketed offfrom the story recounted in therest ofthe volume. Themain problem was that tithes could not bestudied in isolation fromother ecclesiastical developments. Theresult, therefore, mixed thetopical and the chronological uneasily.A better stylist, more capableof digesting and selecting from hishuge collection of information,might have succeeded in composing amore interesting and rhetori-cally satisfactory book. The weight ofSelden's learning buckles thenarrative skeleton underneath it.
But whatever its aesthetic shortcomings, Selden's book and theer-udition behind it frightened the clergy and their allies intorespond-ing. 62 The first two replies, by SirJames Sempill, afriend ofthe king,and Richard Tillesley, the archdeacon ofRochester, were light-weight and trivial: they did little more thanassert that Selden hadmisread his documents, or that, whatever therecord showed, titheswere the property of the priest by divineright. 63 But another re-
62InFebruary, 1619, the bishop of London had all unsold copiesof the book seizedfrom the booksellers; but, as Selden told theFrench scholar, Peiresc, he had managedto save and circulate themanuscript: Selden to Peiresc, 6 February, 1618/19, BodI. MSSmith74, fols. 163-6 5.
63SirJames Sempill, Sacrilege sacredly handled(London, 1619);Richard Tillesley, An-imadversions upon M. Selden's HistoryofTithes (London, 1619); a later example, in muchthe same vein, isRichard Perrot, ]acobs vowe, or the true historieof tithes(Cambridge,1627).
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sponse, that of the skilled polemicist and future bishop,RichardMountagu, was more thoughtful, and is ofinterest preciselybecauseit responds to Selden's principal rhetorical strategy, hisclaim that hewas only a historian, with an articulate reassertionof the traditionalview ofhistory's form and limits. Mountagu bowsto Selden's learn-ing but discounts the argument that this is only"a meere narration oftithes": "A meere narration is a plainerelation, nothing else. Historydisputeth not pro or con, concludethwhat should be, or not be: cen-sureth not what was well done, ordone amisse: but proposeth acci-dents and occurrences as theyfallout: examples and precedents untoposterity."64 Mountagu'scriticism of Selden's supposed pronuncia-tion ofrightness andwrongness in the Historie would at first seem toamount to a virtualreduction ofhistory ("plaine relation") to chroni-cle, therebydenying the historian the didactic role that almost all par-tiesagreed was an essential part of the rhetoric of history. But whathereally intends by this is not that history is amoral, but that itsles-sons should be so obvious from the narrative itself that thehistorianneed not intrude, heavyhanded, with his own explication ofthem.All Selden had done was make himself a party, "which nohistoriandoth or at least should do. " The reader must be leftalone to judge theevents and personages of the past for himself,following his ownmoral sense rather than the arguments ofaprejudiced author.
In addition, Mountagu continued, Selden had attempted tocon-found a straightforward narration with "philology andhumanelearning." Mountagu denounced "those French lawyers," theconti-nental philologists whom Selden had imitated, though hehimselfdidnot balk at using them to refute Selden on specificpoints. Correctingthe received view ofthe past was a "morbusepidemicus" among thephilologists, and Selden had only succeeded inundermining the cer-tainty in history. Instead of recounting thepast in its accepted formfor the sake ofedifying the reader, Seldenhad made ofhistory a bat-tle of "text against text: translationagainst translation." It is clearfrom these remarks that Mountaguhad failed to grasp the essence ofSelden's methodology: the strictattention to "synchronism" whichallowed the philologist todistinguish the best version of a sourcefrom among a numberofextant copies. To Mountagu this was mere
64Richard Mountagu, Diatribae upon thefirst part of thelateHistory ofTithes (London,1622), p. 16.
ERUDITION AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 41
pedantry which could do no more than confuse and mislead thein-nocent reader.
Mountagu was particularly adamant on the dangers ofdigging uptheremnants of antiquity which did not accord with the valuesandpractices ofthe present:
Whatsoever you have heaped and raked together out ofchartularies, leigierbooks, moath-eaten evidences, records,remembrances, etc., wherein yourgreatest adventure is, and mostglorious atchievement doth consist, is onely tobring in, set up, orratifie and confirme a custome to undoe the clergie by, andtobreake the necke, were it possible, oftheir Ius Divinum, by bearingup with,and giving life unto the Ius humanum positivum.
This clash between canon and customary law therefore entailedaconfrontation between two different outlooks on the nature andpur-pose of historical enquiry.P Mountagu objected to Selden'sbookprecisely because he perceived that it turned history, thegreatschoolroom ofmorality, toward the advocacy ofa position thatwasimmoral. His attack is the English counterpart ofthe chargesofscepti-cism and atheism laid against the erudits in Richelieu'sFrance.
Royal command prevented Selden from replying to his oppo-nents,though his venomous responses to Sempill and Tillesleyhavesurvived. 66 By 1622, he was at work on other projects. Thepublica-tion by Augustine Vincent, a heraldic deputy of the nowfrail Cam-den, ofA discoverie oferrours in Ralph Brooke's 1619catalogue of thenobility, afforded Selden an opportunity to fillout the thoughts onhistorical research in The historie of tithes.Selden's commendatoryepistle to Vincent's book praises the author'suse of unprintedsources, "the more abstruse parts of history whichlie hid, either inprivate manuscripts, or in the publick records ofthe kingdom." Thehistorian cannot live by printed books alone, andwhen the archivesare ignored, he adds, "you know what a deficiencymust thencecome into the knowledge ofhistory. " He includes acatalogue of thebest ancient and English historians, judging themnot according totheir elegance or the wisdom ofthe lessons theyteach, but accordingto their use of manuscript sources. Polybius,Livy, Suetonius andTacitus had all used the public records of theirday, and it is for that
65Mountagu, Diatribae, pp. 17, 24, 29, 73, 120, 123, 125- 6,217.66Selden, An admonition to the reader ofSirJames Sempill'sAppendix, Operaomnia, Ill,
1349-64; A reply to Dr. Tillesley's animadversionsupontheHistory ofTythes, Operaomnia,Ill, 1369-86.
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reason that their histories were still so valuable. Incomparison, thereis a dearth ofgood modern histories ofEngland,"except only the an-nals of Queen Elizabeth and the life and reignof King Henry VII,lately set forth by learned men of most excellingabilities. "67 Thispraise was directed at Camden's Annales andBacon's Henry VII; theformer ofthese had been painstakingly piecedtogether from state pa-pers, while Selden had helped in the writingof the latter by supply-ing the former lord chancellor withtranscripts ofpublic records. 68
In the second edition of Titles ofHonour, published in 163 I,Seldendrove the point home by offering an articulate redefinitionofhistorythat expanded the meaning ofthe word:
Under histories, I comprehend here not only the numerous storeof historiesand annals ofseveral states and ages, whereintheactions ofthem are put together insomecontinued discourseorthredoftime, but those also that otherwise, being writ-ten forsome narrow particulars, and sometimes underothernames, so shew usinexample what was done in erecting or granting or otherwise,concerning thetitles here medled with, that we may thence extractwhat conduces to the rep-resentation of the formes and patents oferections and grants, and of the cir-c*mstances and nature of thebeing of them. 69
This was a step beyond The historie oftithes. Selden hadreturned tothe organization of his earlier works, whereby time wassubordi-nated to topic, though he cont
![Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 11-48.culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/woolf... · 2020. 2. 13. · 12 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY Other writers, less - [PDF Document] (2024)](https://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?q=Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 11-48.culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/woolf... · 2020. 2. 13. · 12 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY Other writers, less - [PDF Document] (2024))
