Nicholas Popper’s book, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance, is a detailed and fascinating analysis of the History of the World. Its virtues are the way in which Popper uses Ralegh’s work to reflect upon a number of key aspects of late Renaissance culture, above all the status of history but also politics, travel, and counsel. The Ralegh that emerges from this study is a serious but flawed character whose career never recovered from the political fallout from the accession of James I.

Popper opens his work by discussing the status of history within early modern European culture. He argues that in this period, “history served as a laboratory for responding to the instability that battered European culture between 1400 and 1700” (3). This is a fascinating argument, particularly as Popper demonstrates throughout the course of the book the extent to which not only intellectuals, but also active politicians in the early modern period shared the sense of history as a testing ground for policies and ideas. Each of the following chapters works through specific aspects of Ralegh’s approach to history. Chapter 1 illustrates the extent to which for Ralegh and his contemporaries the study of history was closely bound up with the role of counselor. Popper suggests that as history provided a laboratory for causation, Ralegh’s decision to spend his time in the Tower of London writing the History of the World did not represent a retreat into scholarship. Rather it was part of an on-going campaign by Ralegh to demonstrate his continued potential utility to King James. In these terms the History of the World was an extended advert for Ralegh’s skills as a royal counselor. Chapter 2 considers the sources of the History of the World. Popper brings considerable skill to tracking down and explaining the impressive and encyclopedic sources that Ralegh drew on when producing his work. Chapter 3, entitled “Reading,” is one of the strongest in the book. Popper relates Ralegh’s history writing to his status as an explorer and demonstrates the ways in which for Ralegh history became a form of traveling. In particular, as early modern historians subjected ancient sources to geographical analysis the techniques they developed could be applied to a range of other registers and texts. The fourth chapter discusses narrative and the ways in which Ralegh shaped history in his work. Popper comments that, “In the History, [Ralegh] reanimated … fragments of the historical record with judgment, reason, and logic into a coherent narrative that was certified by his experience administering travel” (207). A real pleasure of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance is the sense it gives of Ralegh the author using the resources of history to imaginatively escape from the confines of his prison. The final two chapters deal with the presentation of the work and its reception.

My one criticism of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance is its limited engagement with religious issues and in particular histories of the Reformation. It seems a shame that Popper did not discuss in more detail the relationship between Ralegh’s work and the other major piece of Tudor historiography, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Clearly Foxe was writing in a very different context than Ralegh, and yet he clearly saw his role, as did Ralegh, as being some kind of counselor to Elizabeth. Certainly Foxe addressed his work to her, albeit in ways that changed with the various editions of his massive work. It is also arguable that with the sections on the primitive church that Foxe added to later editions of Acts and Monuments, he was presenting history as a religious laboratory. It may be that Popper decided that to engage in detail with religious historiography would make his work unwieldy and disperse its focus. And indeed this may well have been the case. I would, however, hope that in the future Popper might find time to apply the ideas developed in Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance to English Reformation historiography.

It would, however, be a mistake to finish this review on a critical note. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance is a fine scholarly work that makes an important contribution not only to the field of Stuart historiography, but more generally early modern intellectual history. Popper ends his book looking back at Ralegh “the aging explorer,” who when all his dreams seem to have been shattered, “faintly drew the tattered past around him, hoping that in history he would find his salvation” (298). A lovely ending to an excellent work.