The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain

• 1. Introduction Donald Kelley and David Harris Sacks; 2. Example and truth: Deggory Wheare and the ars historica J. H. M. Salmon; 3. Truth, lies and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography Patrick Collinson; 4. Thomas More and the English Renaissance: history and fiction in Utopia Joseph Levine; 5. Ancestral and antiquarian: Little Crosby and early modern historical culture Daniel Woolf; 6. Murder in Faversham: Holinshed's impertinent history Richard Helgerson; 7. Foul, his Wife, the Mayor, and Foul's Mare: anecdote in Tudor historiography Annabel Patterson; 8. Thomas Hobbes' Machiavellian moments David Wooton; 9. The background of Hobbes' Behemoth Fritz Levy; 10. Leviathan, mythic history, and natural historiography Patricia Springborg; 11. Adam Smith and the history of private life Mark Phillips; 12. Protesting fiction, constructing history Paul Hunter; 13. Contemplative heroes and Gibbon's historical imagination Patricia Craddock; 14. Experience, truth, and natural history in early English gardening books Rebecca Bushnell.

"The essays in The Historical Imagination in every instance bring to light elements of authorship that are worth pondering. Inherited notions are successfully challenged....the remarkable thing about the inception of this project: the singular good sense of bringing together a group of eminent writers to reassess criteria and conventions, particularly of historical authority, in a time of historiographical revolution. The editors are to be commended." William Rockett, 16th Century Jrnl