ABSTRACT
The Tudor regime matched its hold on present events with a firm grip on the understanding and interpretation of the past. It has long been recognized that history was a genre of growing importance in sixteenth-century England, one which could be used either to support or to subvert official policy. Most studies of Tudor and Stuart historical writing have touched on this topic in the course of discussing contemporary attitudes to history and the social, religious or political benefits to be gained from its study.1 The purpose of this chapter is not to repeat these treatments of historywriting as such; rather, it is to explore various types of connections between authority and history in the sixteenth century-between power and the past. ‘Power’ can be taken in this context to mean not merely the administrative and legal instruments through which a government (local or national) enforces its wishes, but the very image of potency that authority projects upon the governed. As one recent study puts it, power is ‘a symbolic medium whose functioning does not depend primarily upon its intrinsic effectiveness but upon the expectations that its employment arouses in those who comply with it’.2 Power thus embraces the narrower term ‘ideology’; it is ideology which both provides power-relationships with their intellectual foundations, and rules the production of their governing symbols and texts, which include but are not confined to what is commonly called ‘propaganda’.3
