Early Modern Historiography

This essay surveys recent work by literary critics on early modern English history writing and attempts to provide a perspective on the relatively marginal status of historiography within early modern literary studies. In associating the emergence of humanism closely with the beginning of early modernity, historians and literary critics have created a division within early modern historiography that elevates the “humanist” history at the expense of the chronicle, often dismissively characterized as a “medieval” literary form and neglected as a focus of study. This division has in turn produced a narrowly specific understanding of the forms of writing that qualify as humanist histories, omitting drama, philosophical dialogues, and much of the period's Latin‐language historiography. Many contemporary critics, however, have undertaken projects that attempt both to broaden current understandings of humanist historical thought and to integrate chronicle texts more fully into the study of early modern literature. These projects include formal analytical studies that survey more and more genres of writing as well as new editions of early modern historiographical texts, produced across a wide range of media.