The Uses of History in Early Modern England.

Paulina Kewes, ed. The Uses of History in Early Modern England.

San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2006. x + 450 pp. index. illus. $39.95. ISBN: 0-87328-219-1.

History has long been perceived as utilitarian in its purpose, but a particularly rich manifestation of this perception was evident in the dramas, poems, chronicles, and ecclesiastical and political histories of early modern England. Since F. J. Levy published his important Tudor Historical Thought in 1967, scholars such as Daniel Woolf have contributed to our understanding of how the past was thought about and employed during that period: but few have attempted to trace changes in historical thought over the longue duree from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Uses of History in Early Modern England, an impressive and ambitious collection of essays by leading scholars, seeks to address this issue, incorporating recent literary and historical scholarship to explore how a "deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and of history" was put to use for a variety of political, religious, or commercial purposes, from within a multiplicity of genres and discourses (2). While a short review cannot do justice to the nineteen essays that extend over 400 pages in this volume, a few contributions may be singled out as indicative of the book's larger purpose and scope.

Gazing beyond the purview of the Tudor and Stuart periods into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries begs for larger conclusions about the nature of historical writings and their critical transformations over time. In an introductory essay, the volume's editor, Paulina Kewes, thus argues that "Broad analogy and oblique allusion typical of Elizabethan and early Stuart [historical] writings ... gave way, by the mid-seventeenth century, to narrowly conceived parallels and personation"--as in the partisan histories of the Civil Wars--"only to be replaced by more understated forms of historical commentary in the eighteenth" (14). This was not a Whiggish progression, however, though the past was viewed through the prism of the present in terms of the uses to which it could be put: rather, as Daniel Woolf writes in a brilliant essay, "[t]he general tendencies in early modern historical thought might best be summarized as a set of transitions, interconnected but not running in series" and determined by particular "indexes of change." Such indexes include, over the course of the early modern period, the "acquisition of a historical mental map" and "the emergence of a sense of the past as continuous process" with causality rather than simple analogy and exemplarity now playing a central role (36).

Traditional accounts of Tudor historiography tended in their teleological model to "seriously distort" the nature and purpose of historical texts, according to David Womersley, with the idea of an emerging "secular" history overlooking the continuing importance played by religion: indeed, "the recovery of true religion" in the Reformation "demanded nothing less than a root- and branch rewriting of the past" (99). Felicity Heal, in an outstanding contribution, elaborates on the manner in which, for Catholic and Protestant controversialists, "the issue was not the acceptance or rejection of the tools of history, but what type of history spoke most directly to their claims" (111). In a later essay, John Spurr similarly discusses the "way the church's history, and especially the testimony of long and not-so-long dead Christians, was used in religious debates" in the seventeenth century (310); at the same time, for sixteenth-century men such as Robert Parsons or John Foxe, while "[u]niversal Christian history retained great importance ... it was the particular and local experience of that history that proved most bitterly contentious" (114). John Foxe of course is unavoidable in any study of Protestant historiography, with the Acts and Monuments, according to John King, "epitomiz[ing] the multiplicity of historical languages that flourished in early modern England" (129). King proceeds to use his remarkable knowledge of Foxe and his book to explore the compiler's (and, in John Day, publisher's) use of prefaces, indexes, and calendars to differentiate among doctrinally true and false readers, and to mark and divide the book--to mark and divide, in a sense, history itself. Catholics had a response to all this, as King discusses; in a characteristically masterful study, Christopher Highley focuses on the textual history of one such response, Nicholas Sander's Schismatis Anglicani (1585), which uses "rhetorical and literary devices to heighten the appeal" of a counternarrative detailing the reigns of Henry through Elizabeth (152).

Highley has done a great service in calling attention to this overlooked "oppositional Catholic history" (167), which straddles a number of different texts and discourses. Indeed, as the volume's scholars point out in consistently enlightening essays, history could be deployed from such different genres as plays (Richard Dutton's study of Henry V), grocers' speeches and civic events (Ian Archer's interesting discussion of the circulation of historical knowledge in London), and even petitions (as in David Cressy's essay on "remembrancers" in the Civil War). Individual authors are also examined as they utilize the past toward particular ends: thus does Martin Dzelzainis write of Milton and the discourse of the Norman invasion, while Paul Seaward treats Clarendon through the lens of Tacitist history, and Andrew Starkie explores the church histories of Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier. Rounding out the volume from the other side of the temporal spectrum are essays by Eve Tavor Bannet on secret histories and an elegantly written examination by Karen O'Brien on history and the novel in the eighteenth century. Fittingly, the final essay is written by F. J. Levy, who is singularly responsible for unleashing the energies that made such previous explorations possible. Though Levy urges that more work needs to be done--for example, on the narrative structures and the role of exemplarity in historical writing--until that happens The Uses of History in Early Modern England stands as an essential and eminent crossdisciplinary contribution to the history of history, or the historiography of historiography, and all the uses to which malleable Clio was, and continues to be, put.

SARAH COVINGTON

Queens College, The City University of New York