9 One of us?
-
Patrick Collinson
Abstract
One of the best-informed essays on William Camden was written by its quondam president, Sir Maurice Powicke. As Powicke reminds us, Camden was a cosmopolitan. So to ask whether he was one of the many is to face a paradox. Yet it was with Camden's works that this insular detachment began. The translations of Britannia and of his Annales of Elizabeth, not translations which he undertook personally, served to create an educated rather than learned English readership which appropriated his scholarship and turned it into a piece of English apartness, exceptionality and self-discovery. The philology of his Britannia may have been ‘pitiful’.But then, the foundations of historical criticism were not yet laid. What Camden did was to help to create the atmosphere in which they could be laid.
Abstract
One of the best-informed essays on William Camden was written by its quondam president, Sir Maurice Powicke. As Powicke reminds us, Camden was a cosmopolitan. So to ask whether he was one of the many is to face a paradox. Yet it was with Camden's works that this insular detachment began. The translations of Britannia and of his Annales of Elizabeth, not translations which he undertook personally, served to create an educated rather than learned English readership which appropriated his scholarship and turned it into a piece of English apartness, exceptionality and self-discovery. The philology of his Britannia may have been ‘pitiful’.But then, the foundations of historical criticism were not yet laid. What Camden did was to help to create the atmosphere in which they could be laid.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of abbreviations vi
- Acknowledgments vii
- Introduction 1
- 1 The politics of religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England 36
- 2 The Elizabethan exclusion crisis and the Elizabethan polity 61
- 3 Servants and citizens 98
- 4 Pulling the strings 122
- 5 Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history 143
- 6 Biblical rhetoric 167
- 7 John Foxe and national consciousness 193
- 8 Truth, lies and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography 216
- 9 One of us? 245
- 10 William Camden and the anti-myth of Elizabeth 270
- 11 John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism 287
- Index 309
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of abbreviations vi
- Acknowledgments vii
- Introduction 1
- 1 The politics of religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England 36
- 2 The Elizabethan exclusion crisis and the Elizabethan polity 61
- 3 Servants and citizens 98
- 4 Pulling the strings 122
- 5 Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history 143
- 6 Biblical rhetoric 167
- 7 John Foxe and national consciousness 193
- 8 Truth, lies and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography 216
- 9 One of us? 245
- 10 William Camden and the anti-myth of Elizabeth 270
- 11 John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism 287
- Index 309
