ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is intertwined with the larger story of sixteenth-century cultural history, a period that witnessed profound cultural, social, religious, and political reform. In Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles as in the Acts and Monuments, the narrative of reform was littered with visual reminders of the historical consequences of religious and political corruption. Sir Philip Sidney, Holinshed, John Derricke and John Foxe all essentially agreed along with Blundeville that one of the most important reasons for reading history was to "be stirred by example of the good to follow the good, and by the example of the euill to flee the euill." The book describes argument that the brief flourish of narrative historical illustration that preceded the emergence of a more recognizable native tradition of illustration has important implications for our understanding of the early modern English historical imagination and the representation of the past.
