Conclusions: History and Truth-Telling

Week 10

Tutor: Mark Knights and Naomi Pullin

In this closing seminar we will reflect on the themes and topics covered throughout the module and to think more broadly about whether history can be regarded as a 'truthful' discipline in light of postmodern critiques about stable truths. The preparation for this week will centre on how far ideas about 'truth' shaped the histories that were produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will also dedicate some time to discussing your plans and ideas for your essays and to get feedback from your peers.

Required preparation

• Read Paulina Kewes, 'History and its Uses', Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), introduction 1-33.
• Choose from Bacon, Hobbes or Clarendon from the primary sources.
• Read Beverley Southgate, 'What and Why? The Future of History', in her History: What and Why? Ancient, Moderns, and Postmodern Perspectives (1996), 113-47.

Seminar questions

• How was history written in the early modern period?
• How far was early modern history writing concerned with 'truth'?
• In what ways did postmodernism challenge historians' claims to objectivity and historical truth?

Key texts

• Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’ in The Experience of Authority in early modern England ed P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (1996).
• Ronald Hutton, 'Clarendon's History of the Rebellion', English Historical Review 97, no. 382 (1992), 70-88.
• Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (3rd edn, 2019), chapter 5 'The Status of Historical Knowledge'.
• Donald Kelley, 'The Theory of History', in Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (eds), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988).
• D. R. Kelley and D.H. Sacks (eds.), The historical imagination in early modern Britain: history, rhetoric and fiction (Cambridge, 1997)
• Keith Thomas, 'The Perceptions of the Past in Early Modern England' (1983), The Creighton Century, 1907-2007 (2009), 181-218.

• Daniel R. Woolf, 'From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700', Huntington Library Quarterly68 (2005), 33-70.

Primary sources

• Francis Bacon 'Civil History', from his The Advancement of Learning (1605) [excerpt].
• Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion (1702-04) [excerpt] [NB this was written between 1646 and 1648, revised in the 1670s and first published in 1702]
• Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, Or the Epitome of the Civil Wars of England (1682 edn) [excerpt] [NB this was written in 1668 but not published until after Hobbes's death in 1681]

• Richard Gough, The History of Myddle (London, 1981 edn).

Further reading

• Ian W. Archer, 'Discourses of History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart London', Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 109-132.

• Margaret Aston, ‘English ruins and English history: the dissolution and the sense of the past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 36 (1973), 231-55.

• Rebecca Bullard and Rachell Carnell (ed.) The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 (2017)

• Peter Burke, 'History, Myth, and Fiction: Doubts and Debates' in José Rabasa, and others (eds) The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 3: 1400-1800, Oxford History of Historical Writing ( Oxford , 2012)
• Patrick Collinson, 'Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs', in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays(2003), 151-178.

• F. Fussner The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and thought 1580-1640 (1976)

• Noelle Gallagher, Historical Literatures: Writing About the Past in England, 1600-1740 (2012).
• R. B. Haldane, 'The Meaning of Truth in History (1913)', in The Creighton Century, 1907-2007 (2009), pp. 29-54.
• Felicity Heal, 'Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past', in Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 109-132.
• Mark Knights, ‘The Tory Interpretation of History in the Age of Party’ in Kewes (ed) The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2005).
• Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: The Origins of Modern English Historiography (1987).

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Foxes, Firebrands, and Forgery: Robert Ware's Pollution of Reformation History',The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 2 (2011), pp. 307–46.

• R. McGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (1974).
• Graham Parry, The trophies of time: English antiquarians of the seventeenth century (Oxford UP, 1995).
• Imogen Peck, Recollections in the Republics: Memories of the British Civil Wars in England, 1649-1659 (2021).
• Charlotte Lydia Riley, 'Why History Should Always Be Rewritten', in Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History Now? How the Past and Present Speak to Each Other(2020), pp. 280-295.
• Johann Sommerville, ‘History and Theory: the Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought’, Political Studies (1986).
• Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth Century Britain (2004).
• Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (1990).
• Daniel Woolf, Reading history in early modern England (2000).
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1700 (2003).