Holinshed's Nation: Ideals, Memory and Practical Policy in the Chronicles. By IGOR DJORDJEVIC.

Abstract

Holinshed's Nationconsiders Rafael Holinshed'sChronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587) as a serious and intentional exercise in historiography whose agenda appears in its rhetorical strategies. This study confines itself to the portion of the Chronicles for the years 1377–1485 (those of Shakespeare's history plays) and focuses on how the Chronicles offer a ‘mirror for policy’ through three principle tropes — chivalry, politic monarchy, and the ‘commonwealth ideal’. While these tropes occur throughout the 1377–1485 narrative, the predominant ideal shifts from chivalry to commonwealth over time. After an initial chapter spent wrestling with preceding studies of the Chronicles, critical and historiographic theory, and the textual complications presented by the two editions, Igor Djordjevic divides his study into three sections. The first focuses on the reign of Richard II and Richard's failure to achieve the chivalric ideal; the second on the Hundred Years' War (principally on Henry V) and the definition of English national character through ‘heroic, chivalric and honour paradigms’ (p. 140) associated with English chivalry as opposed to ‘French faintheartedness’ (p. 144). It also introduces the ideal of the politic ruler. The third considers how, during the Wars of the Roses, ‘the political discourse of the factions vying for power is dominated by the rhetorical formulae of “commonwealth” and “France”’ (p. 169). During this time ‘all actors on the political stage continually claim that the chivalric conduct to the governing, noble estate, and the defence (or reconquest, after 1453) of France are a public good for all the estates of the English commonwealth’ (p. 169).