ABSTRACT
The chronicling of intellectual movements varies considerably as a function of the era in which these movements themselves occurred. Intellectual historians have traditionally relied on various kinds of material - such as letters, journals, public artifacts, and hearsay - to create their subject matter. The chapter examines the course of intellectual history in the context of literary circles. It describes the scholarly treatment of literary circles from several different centuries in terms of the sources of documentation used in creating history. The chapter explores the percentage of citations relying on personal documents vs. that relying on secondary reports and public artifacts. It suggests that there is an important methodological distinction between history as built from the direct observations of those having intimately experienced it, and history as inferred and interpreted from secondary information and/or fictional artifacts. The history and biography of the Elizabethan writers show little reference to such artifacts.
