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This chapter focuses on what was perhaps the pre-eminent early modern antiquarian book: William Camden's Britannia (1586). It suggests that Camden's work was the first English antiquarian text to find a means of organization adequate for its encyclopedic scope. Revisiting Camden's networks of correspondents and friends, and drawing on extensive archival research, it argues that the key to Camden's success as an antiquary was collaboration. The Britannia should be seen not as the product of one brilliant mind, but as a public collaborative project, which united scholars and schoolmasters — both Continental and provincial — with Camden himself at the heart of this nexus, collating the great mass of antiquarian material. Collaboration therefore needs to be understood as an important antiquarian method.

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.

This chapter considers the antiquarian interest in linguistic traces, examining how writers of an antiquarian bent turned to etymology and names to access the past and unearth historical origins, and sometimes also to establish narratives of genealogical descent. The belief was widespread that the name of a people or place was a form of record, memorializing ancestors or founders. As such, etymology was a highly effective means to know the past, and so the etymological approach united writers and scholars from various backgrounds and in different genres. The chapter focuses on the papers delivered at the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, William Camden's Britannia, and Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland. It also explains why etymology came to be such an important methodology for the antiquaries.

The Picts' Wall was a focus of considerable interest during the late sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth. Late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and during the succeeding reign of King James, playwrights, poets, historians, antiquaries, and mapmakers were intent on exploring the character and history of England and establishing an identity for the English. In this context, William Camden's influential volume Britannia used classical texts to construct an ancestral geography for the kingdom. This chapter focuses on Camden's image of the character of the Picts' Wall and compares this with the creation of a living spirit for the monument in ‘Song XXIX’ of Michael Drayton's poetical work, Poly-Olbion (1622). The chapter explores the relationship of these works to the Wall's function in bounding contemporary England, and makes some observations on the relationship between history and story in the writings of Camden and Drayton.

In his Annales of Queen Elizabeth (1615, 1625), William Camden presented Elizabeth's success in managing the nation's commercial and financial interests as a product of her rejection of any selfish goals, and her absolute commitment to the interests and welfare of the Commonwealth. This chapter considers the consequences and significance of such an approach. Chief among these, it is argued, was the development of a narrative that employed conventional classical ideas of virtue, honour and 'exemplary' behaviour to discuss a range of contemporary economic issues and debates.

This chapter asks: Where do we start with the many verdicts of history on such a monarch, such a woman, and where do we end? This chapter draws attention at the outset to Archbishop Matthew Parker's use of the word ‘chronicled’. Although the historical chronicle was a literary genre which saw a good deal of cutthroat competition in Tudor England, there was a notion that there ought to be only one more or less official and reliably authentic account of the recoverable past. Commentators on William Camden's Annales have often assumed that the book was a celebration of a great monarch, if only, it seems, because that must have been what the author intended. The discussion also considers where the idea of Elizabeth the Protestant paragon and national heroine came from.

This chapter explores the history of Britannia. It looks at her many representations on coins, prints, medallions, and argues that she became an important means of uniting the country under William and May following the Glorious Revolution, and then again under Anne after the Act of Union in 1707. It contends that Britannia became entwined with Elizabeth I and British queens, and also with depictions of the Church of England as female. Britannia was popularised through theatres, masques, pleasure-gardens, and exhibitions, and her evolving depictions are explored from Roman times to 1800. The chapter concludes with a discussion of John Flaxman’s plans to erect a truly colossal Britannia at Greenwich in celebration of naval successes, and explores reasons why Britannia might be a less powerful figure in 1799.

This chapter examines the miscellany’s links with antiquarian compilation and chorography (the branch of geography concerned with the particulars of a specific region or place). Its primary interest is with textual production in the two fields, and with the practices of annotation and organization that allowed antiquaries and chorographers to turn their heterogeneous notes into orderly narratives. The manuscript miscellany, it argues, was essential to the kind of assemblage scholars carried out here. Compilers discussed in the chapter include William Lambarde, Edmund Tilney, George Owen of Henllys, Abraham Ortelius, and most extensively William Camden. The chapter shows that this kind of antiquarian assemblage was most commonly conceived as a kind of stitching or tailoring, in keeping with one of the more frequent early modern metaphors for textual and miscellaneous production.

This chapter describes the community inhabited by Hakluyt during his formative years. Ample evidence of this community survives today: many of the buildings he walked through survive today; most of the books that he read can still be found; and chroniclers, heirs to a venerable medieval tradition, provided details about what shaped the lives of English men, women, and children. The writings of the antiquarian William Camden, Oxford's early modern historian Anthony a Wood, and the annalist John Stow, among others, depicted a nation caught in entangling political struggles at home and on the seas. They also told of a society coping with periodic moments of bizarre apparitions and tragedy caused by natural catastrophe. If Hakluyt was in any way representative of his time, he stood in awe of odd celestial sightings, feared the seemingly capricious actions of England's Catholic rivals, and devoured information about serious crimes and monstrous births.

This chapter examines the way in which The Faerie Queene itself remembers and relates to native literary and historical traditions — Arthurian history and faerie romance — mirroring English history. It also considers how Spenser's earlier work, The Shepheardes Calender, is also the matter, in both the textual and physical senses, of a remembered native literary tradition. The activities of Matthew Parker, John Bale, William Camden, John Dee, John Stow, Robert Cotton, and the circle of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries in seeking out, studying, lending, and preserving medieval manuscripts and other monuments provide a significant backdrop to the concerns of this study. The driving force behind this antiquarian scholarship was ‘the spirit of nationalism’, the desire to use histiography to promote the greatness of the English protestant nation.

During the Renaissance and Reformation historical writing underwent dramatic changes in Europe and England. The recovery of many of the texts of classical antiquity that began in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became a focus for university scholars and literary circles. The German scholar Martin Luther, who protested against papal indulgences in 1517, provided the foundation for a radically different approach to the scriptures and to the study of the past. A school of historians led by Matthias Flacius Illyricus produced a series of volumes that showed that the Church had changed significantly over time in its teaching and practices. In England the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries sought to avoid legends, distortions, and ideological assumptions and find a new approach to the investigation of the past. William Camden, a member of the society, helped to provide a new kind of history, one that significantly influenced Fuller.

In 1695, a new edition of Camden's Britannia was published. Although there was little additional information on the Picts' Wall, antiquarian interest in the monument increased significantly during the early decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter explores the new interpretations of the Wall that developed during the first half of the eighteenth century, up to the Jacobite uprising of 1745–6. It examines the conceptual role of the Wall with regard to the unity and disunity of England and Scotland, the results of the Act of Union of 1707, and the concomitant revival of interest. George Smith's particular interest in the Roman fort at Castlesteads (Cumbria), exemplifies a new approach to the Wall's remains.

Reformers in England saw losses as well as gains in the Reformation. John Leland and John Bale recorded the contents of monastic libraries. Matthew Parker recovered manuscripts from the past. The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, comprised of lawyers, scholars, and country gentlemen, developed methods of ascertaining accurate information about the past. William Camden, the author of Annals of Elizabeth (1615, Latin) and Britannia (1586, Latin), wrote a new kind of history: dispassionate, based on reliable evidence, and concerned with changes in society. Fifty years after Camden’s lifetime, Thomas Fuller followed methods and approaches that the antiquaries and their successors employed, while developing ideas very much his own.

Chapter 3 turns to Ben Jonson’s first laureate chapbook, His Part (1604), written for James I’s first royal entrance into London. Here, Jonson imagines the Inns of Court as a lodestone that disrupts the imperial compass marking the king as the pole star of the state. Instead, Jonson points to the ordinary people at the center of the king’s newly conjoined realm. Jonson’s poems measure the commonwealth according to the standards of civic identity in ways that anticipate the practicality of the numeric distance tables in Norden’s Intended Guyde (1624). An archival discovery of King James’s personal copy of the Guyde also shows the presence of popular cartography at the highest spheres of British governance, and offers a fresh perspective on the kinds of geographical knowledge shaping the intersections of space, place, and national identity in the early seventeenth century.

Chapter 5 turns to Milton’s exploration of custom as it informs Britain’s ancient territories of civic liberty in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637/45). Milton’s poetic map of the uneasy lands around the Welsh border juxtaposes competing visions of the land as massive or minuscule with rival definitions of its character as a Crown holding or a distinct nation. Like the pocket cartography it physically resembles, the poet’s publication is a rebus that argues on both lexical and image-based levels for a British government whose magistrates serve as temperate and virtuous representatives of the commons, acting in relative autonomy within the polity.

This chapter examines how writers in the past perceived the different pays of the regional study area. It starts with the sixteenth-century topographers, John Leland and William Camden; then moves on the seventeenth century with the views of both national travellers, such as Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe, as well as a number of local writers. For the eighteenth century it considers the qualitative accounts of local topographers, along with reports to the Board of Agriculture by the likes of Charles Vancouver which provide a national perspective. The chapter concludes by exploring how local communities may have perceived their landscape as reflected in folklore. A key question is to ask whether the pays that can be identified based on modern cartographic sources have had any reality in the past. The very clear answer is that they did.

This chapter examines notes on the life of Sir Walter Ralegh, and discusses how he wrote “History of the World.” He rushed to publish his work in 1614. The Introduction talks about the impact of his work, which was published during a tumultuous period, and after his execution in the year 1618. It also explains in detail the focus of each chapter of the entire book.