ABSTRACT
The narrativizing of history has been held up as the crucial development of sixteenth-century historiography. Despite the fact that it was Italian in origin it was exported to England by Polydore and theorized by Thomas Blundeville according to the precepts of Francisco Patricio, and Accontio Tridentino' it facilitated a focus on the national dimension of English history. As ever more Englishmen re-enact, appropriate and incorporate English history, the history of the nation becomes national history via a process of anchoring the knowledge of what it must have felt to be English in the past in the minds of the present members of the nation. The transference of venerability onto the nation was arguably a precondition for the emergence of a sense of national identity. Transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging the topography with historical significance, providing the expanse of the land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to the spatial one.
