Walter Ralegh's 'History of the World' and the historical culture of the late Renaissance

My dissertation is a full-length study of Walter Ralegh's 1614 History of the World. This massive volume was a best seller in seventeenth-century England, running through over a dozen editions, reprints, and abridgements in the century after its publication. Ralegh wrote the work while imprisoned in the Tower of London. Covering the period from Creation to 168 BC, it was composed with the help of a large library he was allowed to keep in his cell. He had been convicted on a trumped up charge of treason and spared execution only by the mercy of King James I. But royalists read him also; Charles I's chaplain produced an abridgement and a continuation of the "History", and the antiquarian Sir Thomas Browne quoted it verbatim (without citation). The "History" was given a prominent place on the bookshelves of readers in the seventeenth century, the first major English treatment of the ancient histories of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt, a historical classic in its own right.;Ralegh himself has often been portrayed as a herald of modernity. He has been characterized as a republican theorist, a man of science, an empire builder, a forward-thinking skeptic, a Cold War strategist, and a modern bureaucrat. I instead tie Ralegh's "History" to a pan-European polemical and scholarly context, and I show how his work was one manifestation of the culture of historical counsel in which diplomats and officials from Naples to Scotland participated. But I do not simply debunk Ralegh's image as harbinger of a new era. Rather, I show that elements many have defined as indicative of his modernity emerged from his immersion in an intellectual and political context in which erudite statesmen that interpreted new discoveries by ancient precedents and explained world transformations by meticulously scrutinizing alterations in the past. And by closely analyzing his sources---predominantly dense Latin tomes printed on the continent---I demonstrate how firmly these practices were embedded within the education and values of scholars and statesmen throughout Europe.;After a brief introduction concerning Ralegh's biography, my first chapter studies the place of history in the erudite political culture to which he belonged, and the status of knowledge about the past as articulated in his sources. History was the most fashionable discipline of the late sixteenth century. Princes, prelates and diplomats read histories as training grounds for public and ecclesiastical action, and scholars eagerly sought historical minutiae in obscure texts and far-flung locales. Having established what the field of history was, and why a man of action like Ralegh devoted so much energy to it, I move to a series of studies examining the particular forces that Ralegh believed structured events of the past. The first explores Ralegh's selection of sources in constructing his world chronology, arguing that the desire to comprehensively explicate exotic sources facilitated the erosion of venerated textual authorities. In the second, I use his rare geographical notebook to examine his methods of reading and note-taking, and I show how early modern techniques for assembling information generated novel ways of generating knowledge. The third study investigates Ralegh's understanding of the economy of historical change, showing how he attributed theological implications to the travel of the present by identifying the divine significance embedded in explorations and migration in the past. These chapters demonstrate that Ralegh constructed his "History" by methodically deploying techniques of observation and analysis that learned counselors throughout Europe practiced.;The subsequent series of case studies focus on historical forms that Ralegh traced in his "History". The first concerns the history of learning, and demonstrates how Ralegh drew vital lessons concerning intellectual authority and the appropriate objects of sacerdotal study by examining Near Eastern societies dead for millennia. The second considers Ralegh's study of military science and the role of war in history, showing how Ralegh assimilated and lamented the violent upheaval of his era through analysis of ancient warfare. The last examines his history of politics, closely analyzing how Ralegh saw providence at work in the transformations of empires, and detailing how Ralegh, like his contemporaries, used historical study to argue to either limit or expand monarchical authority. Lastly, an epilogue investigates how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers of the "History" approached the text with their own expectations while also imbibing Ralegh's idealized vision of world history.;The dissertation examines how early modern scholars deployed techniques of historical observation and analysis in the formulation of a modern vision of the world. Neither a Renaissance that passively inherited an easily-defined Western tradition, nor one that allowed new discoveries to brush the classical patrimony away, Ralegh's Renaissance struggled to find tools to understand the exploration of the New World in ancient Palestine, the revelation of Christianity amongst ancient Greeks, the military revolution amongst the ancient Hebrews, and the modern world in ancient Mesopotamia.