Reading History in Early Modern England by D. R. Woolf

Abstract

^EVlTfWS D. R. Woolf. Reading History in Early Modern England. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 346. $69.95 (U.S.) cloth. The aim of this erudite, richly informative book is “to com­ bine historiography with the history of books, readers, and li­ braries” (5) in early modern England. Coming ten years after the same author’s The Idea of History in Early Stuart Eng­ land, it is based upon the sound premise that such a historio­ graphical study must take account of the interaction of readers, publishers, printers, and booksellers of the period. Thus it is conducted in the light of recent histoire du livre studies (by Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Adrian Johns, and others) with a specific focus on historical writings. These are defined by Woolf as not only traditional chronicles and narratives but also “antiquarian works, historical philology, sacred genealogy and history, and biography or autobiography” (177). The array of sources used to expound this examination of over two cen­ turies of the production, distribution, and reading — by both men and women — of historical writing is formidable: family papers, borough and county records, letters, diaries, memoran­ dum books, wills and inventories, private library lists, publish­ ers’ advertisements, booksellers’ bills and accounts, and auction sale catalogues, to name only some. The book begins with the medieval chronicle produced in the monastic scriptorium for a relatively small number of read­ ers and ends in the early eighteenth century when twenty-two percent of all books published (in the 1720s) were historical. Prom the expensive, illustrated folios to the cheaper quartos and octavos, history books were increasingly bought throughout the period by the aristocracy, gentry, and prosperous members of the urban middling sort who by the early eighteenth cen­ tury had a variety of historical genres and formats from which to choose. History became a subject of serious study among ESC 28, 2002 ESC 28, 2002 the educated classes, and a going concern for businessmen as well as for scholars and statesmen. Works of history were also to be found in the growing number of libraries— private and institutional — at different levels of society. The Tudor printing house turned the medieval chronicle into a vendible intellectual commodity for readers with an interest in England’s past, and, thus, as a genre it survived the dis­ solution of the monasteries. Retaining its annalistic format, it became the work of printers such as Caxton and de Worde. But in time chronicles came to be denigrated by humanisttrained Elizabethan and Jacobean historians who privileged style and selectivity over inclusiveness. From the late sixteenth century, as Woolf clearly traces, the chronicle engendered what he terms “parasite” genres; they include the newspaper, al­ manac, antiquarian treatise, and the history play that consti­ tuted “a formidable part of the Elizabethan and Stuart popu­ lation’s sense of history” (237). In spite of the title of the first chapter, “The Death of the Chronicle,” Woolf shows that, for the chronologically-minded at any rate, interest in the chroni­ cle form did not disappear: the urban chronicle proved popular, exemplified by Stow’s Annals (first edition, 1592) that contin­ ued to be updated and re-issued for some twenty-six years af­ ter the author’s death; in 1629 a reader abstracted the major events in a long historical text “into annals for easy reference” (90); and the godly “found annals the most satisfactory way to record God’s actions in recent times” (63). Concurrently, longer works like Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614) were epit­ omized. Towards the end of the seventeenth century a list of historical writings drawn up by Bishop Tanner shows that an impressive number of medieval and modern chronicles was still available (236). The surviving medieval originals were becom­ ing collectors’ items to be edited in the early eighteenth cen­ tury by scholars like the Oxford antiquarian and self-publisher Thomas Hearne and sold quite well by subscription in very small print runs. As for readers in the post-typographic age, it was a com­ mon practice for them to purchase a historical work in unbound quires and then have them bound interleaved to permit the writing of annotations more extensive...