Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England.

In this series of essays Ferguson attempts to recover the historical consciousness of the period by examining a number of interrelated topics in six brief chapters. The first two consider English medieval and Renaissance forms of euhemerism - interpreting myths as traditional accounts of historical people and events. The next discusses the gradual realization that mythmaking was characteristic of a period in civilization. From here he turns to the "cave myth," the idea that the earliest humans lived primitively in caves and forests, only gradually developing civilization. The next chapter concerns another secular myth, that of the origins of Britain, and the assault on this legendary matter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After a brief "digression on giants" in biblical, classical, and legendary material, he concludes by looking at the unsatisfactory efforts in this period to devise a poetic history that would mediate between myth and scholarship. Ferguson provides an enticing taste of some perceptions of prehistory expressed by English Renaissance writers, yet readers will finish with the desire for a full plate.

This is a work of assertion not argument, which is expected given its length. In the introduction Ferguson sets out his central tenets. The first is a familiar notion about the age, that there was a Renaissance ability to believe in contradictory things, to tolerate ambiguity. The second is that their explorations of prehistory show a "subtly pervasive skepticism that was the product not so much of philosophical inquiry as of a rising conflict between the will to believe and a stirring discontent with explanations that did not square with reason and experience" (2). Those familiar with Ferguson's work will recognize his belief that English humanists, with their civic orientation rooted in native practicality, were inherently different from continental humanists, just as fifteenth-century writers were from sixteenth-century writers. Unfortunately, this means the book is sprinkled with remarks such as his view that Higden was "highly credulous" but Ralegh's gullibility was a "curious weakness" in his commonsense realism (25). Ferguson provides many references to the works of Renaissance writers (Bacon, Spenser, Selden, Camden, Ralegh, and Sidney pre-dominate), usually summarizing their views rather than providing analysis of particular passages.

Ferguson's essential perception regarding the English search for prehistory during this period is unfolded in the chapter on poetic history. As they questioned historical myth Renaissance writers demonstrated the utility as well as the limits of available critical methods. They realized that when seeking prehistory, ancient poets were an authoritative source and historical imagination a necessary tool. The problem, then, was how to assess what might be fact preserved in fiction. "If there was such a thing as a philosophy of prehistory, it evolved within the parameters of literary criticism" (114). As a result of efforts to write "poesie historical" English intellectuals were compelled to acknowledge that the attempt to recover prehistory involved verisimilitude and reasoned conjecture. Ferguson concludes that writers from More to Bacon realized "that a coherent reconstruction of the past required the ability to establish a hitherto unknown point from known ones, a sort of intellectual triangulation, something like what modern historians take for granted as the process of interpretation" (118). Utter Antiquity is worth reading for insights such as this. And we can hope that Ferguson's exploration of historical imagination will receive an extended treatment in the future.

Pat McCune ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN