There are nineteen essays in this volume, all originally published in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2005, including a valuable, largely historiographical introductory essay by Paulina Kewes, titled “History and its Uses,” and concluding with an afterword of reflections by F. J. Levy. Ten of the contributors are from English institutions, eight from American universities, and one, Daniel Woolf, from a Canadian university; ten are historians and nine specialists in English literature. The essays span the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, with ten focusing on the period before the mid-seventeenth century and six on the long eighteenth century. Woolf's essay analyzes what he sees as the five crucial changes in thinking about the past from 1500 to 1700, and Fritz Levy surveys what he sees as the principal changes in the historiographical approaches to the writing of history in early modern England from his own initial explorations in the 1960s to the present.

The essays range widely from Blair Worden's exploration of the relationship of poetry and history in the English renaissance to Karen O'Brien's of the relationship between history and the novel in the eighteenth century. Poetry and history were seen as complementary, Worden suggests, as means of instruction in virtue. By the end of the eighteenth century, O'Brien argues, historians were borrowing from novels the importance of the peculiarities of character, and historical novels were expected to avoid anachronism. David Womersley attacks the accounts of F. Smith Fussner, F. J. Levy, A. B. Ferguson, and others, a long generation ago, who claimed that a revolution in historical understanding took place during the renaissance as writers of history moved from providentialist explanations to secular views of “politic” history with its focus on causation and its awareness of anachronism, a focus on technique rather than substance in a period in which religious ideologies were of paramount importance in shaping historiography. As if to respond to Womersley's diatribe, the next three essays—Felicity Heal's essay on how Catholic and Protestant polemicists used the past, John N. King's on Foxe's prefaces to the Book of Martyrs, and Christopher Highley's on Nicholas Sander's influential Schismatis Anglicani—all deal precisely with the impact of the Reformation on historical thought, and in fact two further essays—John Spurr's on the problematic nature of church history and biblical authority for Anglican defenders of their embattled establishment and Andrew Starkie's on the combative and conflicting accounts of Gilbert Burnet's and Jeremy Collier's histories of the English Reformation—are concerned with religion and history as well.

Richard Dutton views Shakespeare's Henry V as an expression of the anxieties surrounding the succession in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, as the use of history to express contemporary worries, although one might wonder whether Shakespeare's audience experienced or understood the play in that context; it is equally difficult to imagine apprentices in the pit catching all the subtle resonances to contemporary events that Dutton perceives. Arthur H. Williamson's stimulating attack on the views of those, David Armitage in particular, who find the presence of English imperial thought in what he sees as an anti-imperial ideology of republicanism and liberty, as an ideology of commerce rather than imperial rule, is very suggestive but seems only remotely related to the writing of history and the understanding and uses of the past.

The problem all such collections of essays present to the reader is that of coherence, of pursuing and expressing a common theme or subject matter. The last five essays on the post-Restoration period have a kind of unity created by Mark Knight's references in his essay to one or another of them, but this is the exception. Paul Seaward's exploration of the roots of Clarendon's conception of history in the works of Tacitus and Machiavelli, Davila and Strada, is illuminating but has only a remote connection with Eve Tavor Bannet's reflections on the vogue of “secret” histories in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ian Archer, who has written on the subject before, once again explores early modern Londoners' perception of history and knowledge of the past. Martin Dzelzainis examines Milton's and the Levellers' perceptions of England's past, particularly of the role played by the concept of the Norman Yoke, and concludes that their understandings differed substantially. As is true of most such collections of scholarly papers, some essays will interest the reader more than others, and there is no way in a short review to do justice to each, or even to mention them all. That said, it is worth noting that this collection demonstrates as few others the degree to which problems of an important aspect of cultural change attract the interest of scholars both of history and literature in a way that was not common in the past, and there is no question that such collaborative efforts have enriched our understanding. It would perhaps be churlish to ask for more than that.