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King, Commons, and Commonweal in Holinshed's Chronicles
Journal article   Peer reviewed

King, Commons, and Commonweal in Holinshed's Chronicles

Robert Zaller
Albion (Boone), v 34(3), pp 371-390
2002
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/4054738
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Abstract

Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles was the most ambitious English historical work of the sixteenth century. It was also the last work in the English chronicle tradition, and as such has remained relatively unappreciated both as an achievement in its own right and by its influence on contemporaries. Yet in its construction of national identity and its parsing of the proper relation between the royal estate and the commonwealth, it has much to say about the assumptions of late Tudor culture. The reasons for Holinshed's historical neglect are not far to seek. Compared to newer Renaissance models such as Polydore Vergil's Anglicae Historiae that were already replacing it, it lacked the narrative cogency that characterized the best Continental historiography. As the product of several hands—Reyner (or Reginald) Wolfe, the printer-scholar who first conceived it as a universal geography-cum-history; Holinshed himself, Wolfe's former assistant, who produced the histories of England and Scotland; Richard Stanyhurst, whose history of Ireland was based on the work of Edmund Campion; and William Harrison, whose prefatory Description of England has received far more attention from scholars than the work it was meant to introduce—it lacked the unity that a single author could bring to disparate materials. Moreover, it was, like other chronicles, a composite that incorporated the work of earlier authors, a palimpsest that presented as history what was in good part uncritical historiography.

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