The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800

✍ Scribed by Donald R. Kelley (editor), David Harris Sacks (editor)

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 390
• Series: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
• Edition: 1St Edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Frontmatter......Page 2
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
WOODROW WILSON CENTER SERIES......Page 14
1 - Introduction......Page 16
2 - Precept, example, and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica......Page 26
3 - Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography......Page 52
4 - Thomas More and the English Renaissance: History and fiction in Utopia......Page 84
5 - Little Crosby and the horizons of early modern historical culture......Page 108
6 - Murder in Faversham: Holinshed's impertinent history......Page 148
7 - Foul, his wife, the mayor, and Foul's mare: The power of anecdote in Tudor historiography......Page 174
8 - Experience, truth, and natural history in early English gardening books......Page 194
9 - Thomas Hobbes's Machiavellian moments......Page 225
10 - The background of Hobbes's Behemoth......Page 258
11 - Leviathan, mythic history, and national historiography......Page 282
12 - Protesting fiction, constructing history......Page 313
13 - Adam Smith and the history of private life: Social and sentimental narratives in eighteenth-century historiography......Page 333
14 - Contemplative heroes and Gibbon's historical imagination......Page 358
Contributors......Page 376
Index......Page 378
Titles in the series......Page 390