The idea of history in early Stuart England: erudition, ideology, and 'The light of truth' from the accession of James I to the Civil War (review)

Reviews 163 Watt sees her work as a mosaic of historical fragments whose individual shapes suggest conflict and discontinuity but whose juxtaposition sublimates these into a pattern of consensual values and 'commonplace mentalities'. O n the one hand, in a post-Foucauldian world this might seem an undramatic conclusion. O n the other hand, perhaps the timing of Watt's book is just about right. It m a y seem carping to mention blemishes in such a well written and produced book, but 'illicit' for 'elicit' on p. 17 should have been picked up. Damian Grace School of Social Work University of N e w South Wales Woolf, D. R., The idea of history in early Stuart England: erudition, ideology, and "The light of truth' from the accession of James 1 to the Civil War, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xii, 377; R.R.P. US$45.00. Side-stepping the debate over the existence of an 'historical revolution' in early m o d e m England, Dr Woolf has nevertheless produced a monograph that should take its place as the standard discussion of early Stuart historical writing. The heart of the book is a detailed examination of historians' work, literary and scholarly, from about 1603 until the end of the 1620s. There is a short discussion of the moribund condition of historical scholarship and writing in the 1630s (pp. 242-47), and the book concludes with a rapid survey of the scene in the 1640s and beyond. All of this Woolf accomplishes with literary grace and considerable erudition in both printed and manuscript sources. If there is a fault with this book it lies in the occasionally episodic feel of chapters two to six, where summaries of various historical works sometimes obscure the development of the book's main themes. That said, however, the accounts of individual writers are often superb. This is particularly the case where Woolf examines writers who use fairly sophisticated legal and constitutional concepts to structure and shape their writing. Thus his treatments of Samuel Daniel (chapter two), and Sir John Hayward (pp. 106-15) are both first-rate. In general Woolf does well with the interesting writers (Bacon, Camden, Selden), but has a harder job interesting us in the likes of Francis Godwin. Throughout the book Woolf s judgment seems secure. He is properly sceptical of claims made about James I's fear of the image of good queen Elizabeth, and of claims about James's fear of scholarship in general (pp. 105-6, 122-24). And, while always aware of the political message latent in historical work, Woolf is both careful to avoid overly simple readings of complex texts, and also hesitant in the face of the evidential difficulties that make giving political readings to works of fiction, historical nanative, or scholarship so 164 Reviews hazardous. There is nothing here of the forced reading that has maned some of the work of the so-called new historicists. T w o principal themes unite the book. The first, which culminates in the penultimate chapter on John Selden, is an analysis of the way in which an initiaUy sharp distinction between the antiquarian-scholar and the historian-writer broke down. Selden, especially in The Historie of Tithes (1618), fused the two genres into a sort of philological history, thus bringing us a step closer to the m o d e m image of the historian as both researcher in original documents and writer; although, Woolf is properly guarded on the question of the modernity of seventeenth century historical writing throughout his chapter on Selden. If this theme owes something to Arnaldo Momigliano's views on the contribution of antiquarianism to modern historical method, the second may owe a little to Pocock's views on the conditions that produce genuinely historical thought. Woolf argues that before the Civil War, English historical writers eschewed controversy, had no concept of the role of interpretation in history, and worked within a nanow ideological consensus (esp. pp. 29-44). The only exception to this lay in the areas of ecclesiastical antiquarianism and history, where there were real disputes, particularly over the historical pedigree of the ecclesia Anglicana...