The Woodrow Wilson Center Press
The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain
Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks
These essays by some of the most distinguished historians and literary scholars in the English-speaking world explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between supposedly truthful history and fact-based fiction in British writing from the Tudor period to the Enlightenment. Despite the many theoretical questions posed, the discussions primarily focus on concrete works, including those of Thomas More, John Foxe, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon.
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Chapter List
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