Richard White and the legendary history of Britain

Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin studies

Volumn , Issue 51, 2002, Pages 245-256

  MacColl, Alan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249539755     PISSN: 07742908     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
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References (38)

1. Appearing in various combinations between 1597 and 1607, the eleven books of White's Historiae have a complicated bibliographical history. The version I have used is a single octavo volume consisting of the first nine, Historiarum Britanniae...libri [1-9], cum notis antiquitatum Britannicum (Arras: Gulielmus Riverius; Douai: Carolus Boscardus, 1597-1602).
2. Athenae Oxonienses, ed. by Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London: for F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1813-20), II, 118.
3. Anglicae historiae libri vigintiseptem (Basel: Michael Isingrinius, 1555), sig. f1v.
4. Though C.B. Millican's Spenser and the Table Round (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932) is indispensable as a record of sources, its interpretation of them is unreliable.
5. Sir Thomas Kendrick's more substantial British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950) treats the controversy only in terms of the history of Tudor antiquarianism. Neither book shows any awareness of the national and religious dimensions highlighted here.
6. They are touched on in passing by James P. Carley in 'Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books', in King Arthur: A Casebook, ed. by E.D. Kennedy (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 185-204.
7. The standard works on English historiography treat the legendary history of Britain as an irrelevance. For a brief outline of its key role in medieval and early modern English political thought, see my article 'King Arthur and the Making of an English Britain', History Today, 49 (March 1999), 7-13.
8. The idea of Britain in mid-sixteenth-century Scotland and England, and the part played by the British history in shaping the conception, are explored by Roger A. Mason in "The Scottish Reformation and Anglo-British Imperialism', in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. by Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161-86.
9. See Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 34-5.
10. Whatever may be the case in his other writings, the Assertio does not offer much evidence to support James P. Carley's claim that 'authority for Leland involved active scholarship and careful analysis of sources' ('Polydore Vergil and John Leland', p. 188).
11. Cologne: Johann Birckmenn, 1572; translated by Thomas Twyne as The Breviary of Britayne (London: R. Johnes, 1573).
12. 2 vols. (Basel: Ioannes Oporinus, 1557-59). A much shorter version had been published in Ipswich and Wesel in 1548 as a single quarto, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae scriptorum... Summarium.
13. The origin of Samothes and Albion end their short-lived career in Englend are summarised by Kendrick in British Antiquity, pp. 69-76.
14. Anglica historia (1555), sig. b3v.
15. 'Polydorus Vergilius... primo refert, quo loco scribit insulam Britanniam incolas habuisse statim post Noae diluvium, et habitatores eius primos Dei cognitionem habuisse perfectissimam' (De Antiquitate Cantabrigiensis Academiae libri duo (London: John Day, 1574), sig. Biiiv).
16. The firste volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London: H. Bynneman, 1577), sig. Biiiv.
17. The chronicles of England, from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ (London: H. Bynneman, 1580), sig. A8.
18. The Faerie Queene, II. x. 11, 6-7
19. and IV.xi.15-16.
20. As calculated by J.W. Binns in Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), p. 183.
21. Historiae, Book 1, sig. A3.
22. Martyrologium Romanum... notationibus illustratum (Antwerp: vidue et filii Ioannis Moreti, 1613), sig. Pp1.
23. Annales ecclesiastici, 12 vols. (Antwerp: Ioannes Moretus, 1610-42), VI, sigs. Ff3v, Tt6v.
24. Chronographiae libri quatuor (Paris: Martin Juvenis, 1580), sigs. V5v, X2v.
25. Historiae, Book 2, sig. H8.
26. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 28, 104-19, 147-9;
27. R.E. Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 45-6, 79.
28. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, p. 184.
29. See J.-F. Meillard et al., La France des Humanistes: Hellénistes I, Europa Humanistica (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 491, 493
30. and The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples, ed. by Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 320-22.
31. Sigeberti Gemblacensis chronica cum continuationibus, ed. by D.L.C. Bethmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores VI (Hannover, 1844), p. 311.
32. Sigebert, Chronicon (1513), sig. cii.
33. Iordanis de origine actibusque Getarum, ed. by Francesco Giunta and Antonino Grillone, Fonti per la storia d'Italia, 117 (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiono, 1991), cap. XLV (p. 97).
34. References to the Historiae by Camden, Selden and others are evidence of the community of scholarship that continued to exist between England and her Catholic neighbours. Edmund Bolton mentions 'Dr White of Basingstoke in his Latin histories' in the company of Leland, Price, Llwyd, Caius, Stow and Holinshed (Hypercritica (?1618), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. by J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-9), I, 87).
35. Chronicon regum Anglorum (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1679), p. 97.
36. The History of the Anglo-Saxons (London: for T. Cedell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), p. 372. Turner knew the 1513 Sigebert and quotes from the passege on Riothimus (p. 168, n. 59).
37. '"A certain Very Ancient Book": Traces of an Arthurian Source in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History', Speculum, 56 (1981), 301-23.
38. 'Arthur, Origins of Legend', in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. by Norris J. Lacey et al., (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1991), p. 20.