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  • Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton
  • Lauren Silberman
Andrew Escobedo . Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiv + 262 pp. index. $45. ISBN: 0–8014–4174–9.

In his important book, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England, Andrew Escobedo offers a provocative argument describing how an English sense of nationhood develops in a paradoxical dialectic of loss and recovery, as England strives to locate itself with respect to its past and to its future during the century [End Page 334] or so marked out by the twin traumas of the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution. Escobedo brings to bear careful reading of significant Renaissance texts and a thorough knowledge of contemporary work in Renaissance historiography as he develops his complex and compelling account. He pairs texts by Foxe, Dee, Spenser, and Milton — one early, one late — in order to register the historical change in a consciousness that, by and large, eschewed theoretical notions of progress as it coped with a sense of the novelty of English nationhood. Escobedo organizes his study into three categories: antiquarian, apocalyptic, and poetical. He describes how the antiquarian impulse that led, in sixteenth-century England, to a more careful and rigorous examination of the documentary record of its own past also exposed the lack of documentation for much of what had traditionally been believed to be authentic British history. A reinvigorated focus on the apocalypse gave ultimate purpose to British history while at the same time threatening to deny mortal history any sense of significance independent of its apocalyptic end. Similarly, poetry has the power to adorn and amplify history and to round out a necessarily incomplete documentary record, but at the risk of tainting history as no more than an empty fiction.

Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England makes a thoughtful contribution to the contemporary scholarly discussion of Tudor and Stuart historical consciousness. The book is the most engrossing when Escobedo brings his historiographic insights directly to bear on specific texts and uses a close reading of those texts to illustrate and illuminate the paradoxes of historical consciousness he so subtly delineates. Particularly compelling in this regard are his discussions of encapsulated histories in The Faerie Queene: the Briton Moniments and the Elfin Chronicles in book 2 and Merlin's prophecy and Paridell's genealogy in book 3. The book is less satisfying when, for example, he seeks to extract Milton's philosophy of history from a wide selection of his writings.

Escobedo's analytical framework is admirably subtle and supple. He is particularly alert to the dialectic of novelty and tradition, connection and estrangement at play in sixteenth and seventeenth century historical awareness. He puts forward the implicit, fascinating contrast between the way the Protestant Reformation represented — at least to some extent — a historical given, an un-avoidable historical rift which Tudor England needed to assimilate intellectually and the extent to which the English Revolution was made possible by that very shift in consciousness. One wishes that Escobedo had addressed in a moremethodical way the issue of how intellectual history interacts with political events. One unfortunate impediment to a more systematic pursuit of this issue is reflected in Escobedo's formulation of a central point: "The historical dilemma of the Renaissance nation derives from its bad timing, cultivating a sense of historical loss before it develops a model of historical progress" (17). Despite a healthy awareness that he might be channeling a Whig interpretation of history, Escobedo tacitly accepts positivist assumptions of progress as an objectively real, inherently good thing. These working assumptions tend to color the way he treats historical change over the period he examines and limit his ability to achieve perspective on the very [End Page 335] subject of progress as it is considered throughout that period. It is not entirely clear that the notion of progress was unavailable to the Renaissance nation in the same way that, for example, the airplane or the fax machine, were unavailable. Classical scholar Eric Havelock (The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics [1957]) and philosopher Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of...

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