F. J. Levy. Tudor Historical Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xii + 306 pp. $27.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8020-3775-6.
Reviewed by Daniel Woolf (Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Edmonton)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2005)
Fritz Levy's classic account of historical thought under the Tudors is finally back in print, slightly less than four decades after its first (Huntington Library, 1967) edition. It has long been a hard-to-get volume, so the reprint is very welcome. When the book first appeared, there was remarkably little available that systematically examined the total historiographical output of Tudor England from its late medieval roots in authors such as Robert Fabyan and the antiquary William Worcestre, through the advent of humanism, the debates over the past sparked by the Henrician divorce and Reformation, the late flourishing of the Elizabethan chronicle, the explosion of antiquarian interest following the 1586 publication of Britannia by the schoolmaster William Camden (the subject of Levy's 1959 Harvard PhD thesis), and the politically attuned biographical histories of the 1590s and the reign of James I. As alternatives to Levy, one had a number of literary treatments, especially those by Shakespeareans such as Lily B. Campbell, and F. Smith Fussner's rather idiosyncratic 1962 volume, The Historical Revolution. There were selected works on antiquarianism, notably a 1956 edited collection by Levi Fox and the works of the archaeologist Stuart Piggott and medievalist David Douglas (both more interested in the Augustan end of the early modern era). The chronicles had been dealt with in the closing chapters of C. L. Kingsford's pre-World War I study of fifteenth-century historical literature. There was also Denys Hay's important Polydore Vergil (1952), on the career of the first "English" humanist historian. Perhaps most important, one had the brilliant but more narrowly focused analysis of seventeenth-century thinking about the Norman Conquest in J. G. A. Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957; 2nd ed. 1987).
Among the more general works, Fussner's volume had considerable merit, but was overly driven by a desire to locate the roots of modern historiographical method in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century. It thus neglected important contemporary genre differences, judged its texts by post-Rankean standards of research and objectivity, and had little to say about the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century. Levy cast his own book very differently. It was focused on historical "thought," but ranged out of "thinking about the past" as it occurred in the sixteenth century and into the material outcomes of that thinking: namely, the increasing number of historical works produced in the post-print era between Caxton's late fifteenth-century editions of Higden's Polychronicon and The Brut, and Francis Bacon's History of the Life and Reign of King Henry VII (1622). The chapters of Levy's book tell a chronological tale, but one obliged to dart back and forth, especially in its later chapters, as genres began to crystallize under the broader rubric of "hystories." It is a story that puts Tudor historiography within a sixteenth-, not twentieth-century, scholarly context and avoids the hunt for the origins of modern methods, the Whiggish Achilles heel of Fussner's work and, sadly, of many in the forty years since, especially those concerned with antiquarianism.
The argument of Levy's book, if there actually is a central argument, might be summarized thus: a basis of historiographical activity existed in the early sixteenth century, given wider circulation through print; the advent of continental humanist thought via such figures as Polydore Vergil, Erasmus, and the home-grown Sir Thomas More had a leavening effect on both thinking and writing about the past, conceptually providing a sense of anachronism, perspective and periodicity previously lacking, while also furnishing humanist models of organizing the raw materials of the past in non-annalistic form (and occasionally providing an odd hybrid such as Edward Halle's Chronicles). The intrusion of the Reformation necessitated acquisition of a more detailed understanding of the British past, especially in the area of church history, and the collection and editing of important medieval texts; this religious theme and humanist interest in the Romano-British past (including the historicity of murky figures such as Brutus the Trojan) dovetailed in Elizabeth's reign with the development of antiquarianism. Meanwhile, the traditional chronicle, written in English, expanded past its fifteenth-century town limits into national chronicles by Richard Grafton, John Stow, and the super-chronicler Raphael Holinshed; these, along with such media as history plays and the poetry of middling sorts like Anthony Munday, helped make the reading of history more popular. (Levy here offers a more understated view of the popularization of history than that provided by Louis B. Wright's earlier Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England, 1935.) Finally, the century's flirtation with the past concluded with another humanist import, the Tacitean-inspired "politic history" of John Hayward and Sir Henry Savile, written in the shadow of discontent and fear as the reign of the heirless queen drew to a foreseeable close, and continued by others such as Bacon and (less clearly) Camden himself as the rule of Elizabeth's Scottish successor offered fresh contexts and new political problems.
In re-reading Tudor Historical Thought for this review, I was struck by two things: first, the beauty and economy of Levy's prose, which renders this book a pleasure to read (something historiographical works often are not), and secondly, the durability of most of the author's judgments on particular historians and his categorical framework. "Politic history," for instance--a term first used by S. L. Goldberg--was popularized by Levy as the descriptor for the group of works, principally written between 1590 and 1622 that focused on questions of governance and offered a Tacitean, Boteran, and even Machiavellian analysis of royal lives and reigns (biography and history being largely the same thing in the case of monarchs, so far did the shadow of king or queen extend over the kingdom). As a category if not quite a genre (it is not quite interchangeable with Bacon's own notion of "perfect history"), politic history has proved especially durable.
All in all, this is still the first book that any student with a beginning interest in the subject should read. It is worth reflecting on what has changed in the field since this book first appeared, and where new arguments have been made or new perspectives offered. The precise role and impact of humanism (and the chronology of that impact) have been questioned or at least restated, and certain authors such as John Foxe have now become a cottage industry unto themselves. There have been a least a dozen books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical thought and writing. We know much more about the chronicles and their readership today, and postmodernism and history from below have raised the chroniclers' stock within the history of history, most notably in Annabel Patterson's provocative Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (1994). The various books by Joseph M. Levine have deepened and contextualized our understanding of antiquarianism in its more philological form, while other authors have studied the post-Camdenian chorographers. The history of science has also featured prominently at the Restoration end of the early modern period, as, for instance, in Michael Hunter's 1975 volume on John Aubrey, Barbara Shapiro's several books on probability and facts,[1] and, more problematically, Stan Mendyk's 1989 study of the chorographers. We have also had histories of readership and of the circulation of historical knowledge, and lots and lots of articles, book chapters, and literary studies of individual figures. Alternative modes of communication such as ballads, libels, chapbooks, and especially oral tradition have been well studied, as have popular perceptions of the past by scholars such as Keith Thomas, Andy Wood, Margaret Spufford, and Adam Fox.[2]
What do we not have? We still lack a full-scale work on Camden, and though there have been several excellent studies of the greatest antiquary of the next generation, John Selden, even he has proved too big a quarry to be contained in a single book. The lawyers and legal-historical thought pre-Selden and Henry Spelman have never been properly done. (Levy, by his own subsequent admission, reluctantly abandoned them as too big an addition to his already lengthy research.) Perhaps the most significant change has been a broadening of the sources used for studying the past of the past. Levy's book is essentially a detailed textual analysis, based largely on the prodigious print output of the period as available in the Folger Shakespeare Library, along with supporting materials such as published correspondence. There are a small number of manuscript references, notably in the antiquarian chapter. Beginning with the medievalist May McKisack's study of archival scholarship about the Middle Ages in the sixteenth century, closer examination of the actual manuscript sources used (and produced by) the historical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became more frequent, and the most recent books even go beyond London and out into the localities and family archives in search of materials. Much of this subsequent activity, be it noted, has focused disproportionately on the seventeenth century (though there is still, strangely, no general history of Restoration historical literature, a vast topic). Significantly, no one has found it necessary or worthwhile to attempt a brand new history of the Tudor historiographical enterprise.
Perhaps the greatest service of any book is to stimulate further research on its subject; remaining readable and insightful in the face of two subsequent generations of scholarship, as is the case with Tudor Historical Thought, is a much rarer achievement, and one to be celebrated.
Notes
[1]. Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), reviewed on H-Albion, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=91891022723625 [ed. note].
[2]. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), reviewed on H-Albion, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=46131009478806 [ed. note].
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Citation:
Daniel Woolf. Review of Levy, F. J., Tudor Historical Thought.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10124
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