ABSTRACT
MODERN ADVANCE in the study of Renaissance historiography has concentrated mainly on Italy; the application of its results to English Renaissance historiography and literature has been curiously long delayed. This is strange, since the tracing of rhetorical themes in the English Renaissance has grown in recent years into a formidable output of studies. In this enthusiasm for rhetoric it seems to have been forgotten that history as developed in the Italian Renaissance was itself a branch of rhetoric allied to moral philosophy; that arising out of the emphasis on history there arose new schools of historical thought which transformed the old assumptions; that of all the Renaissance themes adopted in England in the sixteenth century the new emphasis on history was one of the most prominent. In England the old style of chronicle history still held the field throughout the century, though humanist influences came flowing in. Hall and Holinshed are chroniclers; a humanist educator, like Ascham, advises study of ancient historians for their style, and Thomas Elyot in The Governour and Walter Raleigh in his History of the World quote Cicero on the moral value of history. Humanist emphasis on exemplarism – on history as moral philosophy teaching right conduct by taking historical personages as examples of virtues and vices (this was of course also a medieval tradition) – was taken for granted, and humanist imitation of ancient historians flourished. How far the more advanced types of critical historical thinking really penetrated English theory or practice in the period is a moot question.
