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Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance
by Jonathan Gibson

Popper, Nicholas. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2012. xvi + 350 pp. ISBN: 978-0226675008. $58.00 cloth.

The copy of Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World in the chained library at Wimborne Minster in Dorset has a hole burnt through 104 of its pages: legend claims that, in his youth, the Augustan satirist Matthew Prior (who grew up in Wimborne) fell asleep while reading and knocked over a candle. With a few honorable exceptions, modern scholars have tended to be little more attentive to Ralegh’s magnum opus than Prior. Indeed, the History has a claim to be the greatest unread work of the early modern period, lying unloved on the shores of English literature like a beached whale whilst its author’s poems and Discovery of Guiana still feature on student reading lists. The History is neglected in part because of its length (more than 800 pages in its early editions) but also because of the density with which its first books, on the intricacies of Old Testament history and theology, address the work of now obscure writers from the trans-denominational intellectual universe of early modern European historiography (the sea in which the whale swam). Ralegh discusses authorities such as the hugely influential Dominican forger of ancient histories, Annius of Viterbo; Benedicto Pererius, the Jesuit author of the greatest Renaissance commentary on Genesis; the Lutheran theologian David Chytraeus; and the court physician Johannes Goropius Becanus, who argued that Adam had spoken Antwerpian Flemish. In Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance, Nicholas Popper shines a brilliant searchlight on this network of text and argument. Following him as he painstakingly traces Ralegh’s navigation of these exotic waters is both fascinating and rewarding. This is, in short, a formidably learned book that has a claim on the attention of anyone interested in early modern European thought.

Popper’s most detailed analysis of the History is contained in his four central chapters. These proceed in a sequence intended to earmark stages of in the History’s production: from a study of sources (Chapter 2) to an analysis of Ralegh’s method of reading sources (Chapter 3) to a look at the way in which Ralegh constructs arguments (Chapter 4) to an argument about the History’s political agenda (Chapter 5). In practice, however, these four chapters all proceed in a very similar way, scrupulously unpacking the relationships in selected passages of the History between Ralegh’s statements, the sources to which he was reacting and the broader debates surrounding the source material.

Chapter 2, “Sources: From Scripture to the Stars in Early Modern Chronology,” highlights Ralegh’s approach to the integration of biblical chronology with the chronologies of other ancient texts, a controversial topic in Renaissance historiography. The path Popper charts through this labyrinth is elegantly dovetailed with a masterly reading of Ralegh’s critique of Aristotelian eternalism (the idea that the world must have always have existed) as a reply to the accusations of atheism made about him in 1594 and 1603. As throughout the book, Popper is convincing in teasing out Ralegh’s methodological affiliations. He shows that, although coordinating dates in the History using Joseph Scaliger’s “Julian era,” Ralegh’s approach to chronology is in practice closer to that of the Lutheran cleric Johann Funck, who gave more credence than Scaliger to the importance of scriptural chronology.

In Chapter 3 (“Reading: Antiquarian Methods and Geographical Learning”), Popper approaches the subject of Ralegh’s reading methods and note-taking techniques by means of the first sustained analysis of a geographical notebook compiled by Ralegh in about 1607, seven years before the publication of the History. This manuscript, now British Library Additional MS 57555, first described by Walter Oakeshott in 1952, is probably best known for the library list and poem (“Now we have present made”) it contains.[1] Popper correlates the notebook’s maps and alphabetical textual entries with the texts from which they come (works by Ortelius, David Chytraeus, Heinrich Bünting and others), closely tracking the adjustments, errors and omissions in Ralegh’s “decontextualised extracts” (152). In a vivid case history, he follows the way in which Ralegh used such fragments to put together his argument about the location of the Garden of Eden. Disappointingly, the links Popper finds between the notebook and Ralegh’s magnum opus are oblique: clearly, this manuscript was compiled before the materials for the History proper were assembled. It is surely safe to assume that a network of co-ordinated notebooks almost as voluminous as the History itself must have once existed: unfortunately, the attempt to reconstruct what such a system would have looked like is outside Popper’s remit.

The title of Chapter 4—“Narration: Providence and Human Movement”—is slightly deceptive. Popper’s topic here is not narrative technique or structure, but Ralegh’s approach to early modern scholarship on the movement of ancient peoples and on Ralegh’s integration of this scholarship with his own experience as a traveler and explorer. Popper focuses much of this chapter on Ralegh’s discussion of the various different arguments about the resting-place of Noah’s ark. Ralegh’s suggestion that the Ararat of the Bible was located “in the Paraponisus Mountains at the intersection of the ancient regions of Sogdiana, Bactria, and Paraponisus” (194) deviated from received opinion and is, Popper claims, Ralegh’s “most sophisticated construction of a world historical narrative” (189). (Popper calls this section of the chapter “How Ralegh Made History.”)

The rich and erudite descriptions of Ralegh’s scholarly practice in chapters 2-5 are yoked to a brilliant if (to my taste) rather too sweeping thesis about early modern intellectual culture tout court. Popper builds on the work of scholars such as Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Ann Moss and Ann Blair on the intensive use of commonplacing and other types of note-taking practices in the period—what has been called “the notebook culture” of the Renaissance.[2] While many earlier treatments of these practices have seen them as subordinate to humanist and, later, Neostoic aims—a sort of rhetorical support system—Popper argues that activity such as Ralegh’s note-gathering in Additional MS 57555 should be seen as an important step in intellectual history in its own right. The medium (or, more accurately perhaps, the “reading technology”) becomes the message.

The argument is that the intensive and pragmatic accumulation of many “slivers of evidence” (76) by authors such as Ralegh “cleaved history from rhetoric” (4) at the same time as it provided information crucial in early modern statecraft: historians and politicians “considered histories useful more for their ability to trace causation than for their value as theaters of virtue and vice” (75). The aspirations of this method were conservative, geared to demonstrate the workings of divine providence and to forward state power. However, the sheer volume of material and contradictory arguments—the “bewildering array of historical visions” (75)—it threw up proved in the end, Popper argues, profoundly disruptive, weakening established epistemological authority, and paving the way for empiricism and the Enlightenment. This, Popper claims—and not the development of a “historical consciousness” (5-6)—is the sixteenth century’s core contribution to the development of the discipline of history.[3]

Ideally, I would have liked Popper to have worked harder to make the case for this argument. He enthusiastically mulches together discrete intellectual projects on the basis of their cognate methodologies—Matthew Parker’s collecting of Old English manuscripts (60-1), Burghley’s interest in the royal archives (62-3), Ortelius’s construction of geographical reference books (127-8), the production of heraldic manuscripts (63-4), Ramist arts of travel or artes apodemicae (65-6), Baconian science (165), Francis Beale’s recommendations for secretarial practice (239), among others—where I would have preferred to have had a clearer sense of their different agendas. There is ultimately too little on the methodology of earlier historians to prove the case for radical change. The description of history, meanwhile, as “the preeminent discipline of early modern Europe” —a move made possible only by the squashing-together of “antiquarian, empirical, inductive, and experiential methods of making knowledge” (11)—will surely raise eyebrows. Was it the very voluminousness of The History of the World—its combination of many different areas of human activity in a single huge tome—that prompted Popper’s wider thesis? If so, it’s ironic that he makes so little of the book’s generic uniqueness. Ralegh was, Popper says, not, in European terms, exceptional in his scholarly practice: he was “part of the rank and file” (7) of later-sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century historians. Yet to write such a vast work in this field in English was unprecedented, and seems to require more explanation than this book has space for.

Linked to Popper’s claim that the History was written within “a culture of learned counsel that inextricably linked historical knowledge and political action” (209) is a stimulating argument about Ralegh’s intentions for his book. In Chapters 1 (“Context: Ralegh and Historical Culture”) and 5 (“Presentation: Political Practice and the Past”), Popper suggests that Ralegh wrote The History of the World for James I, as a kind of job application for the post of intellectual royal advisor: “Ralegh hoped that the History’s displays of prudence and erudition would convince the King to install him at the center of a reconfigured regime, synthesizing the roles of [Henry] Howard [Earl of Northampton] and [Isaac] Casaubon” (17). In 1614, Popper thinks, Ralegh felt that government setbacks might mean James would be receptive to the anti-Spanish worldview of the man in the Tower (209-10), and to the expertise in systematic information-management showcased in the History. The deaths of both Casaubon and Northampton in 1614, Popper suggests, pressured Ralegh into publishing The History unfinished (27, note 36).  

Building on the work of other scholars, such as John Racin,[4] Popper offers a wealth of evidence to show that there is little in the History—written as it was within a culture in which “experience gained through analysis of the past was the most suitable expertise for advising Kings” (69)—transparently intended to be antagonistic to James, while nevertheless leaving enough wriggle room for covert critique of the Jacobean court. He also writes interestingly about tensions between the events narrated in the history and its quasi-absolutist political theory (219). Popper’s target here is Ralegh’s more radical readers (most famously, Christopher Hill).[5] Chapter 6 (“Reception: The Aftermath of The History of the World”), the book’s coda, undermines another part of Hill’s argument, showing through a scrupulous census of copies of the History that many of Ralegh’s early readers did not view the book as politically subversive. To claim that the History was put together in the first instance for James, however, Popper has to dismiss Ralegh’s own claim that he had begun the work for Prince Henry and that the death of the prince in 1612 had been a major setback. Here Popper is less convincing, tending to treat his case as already proven and failing to adequately explain the absence of any dedication—let alone one to the King—in the History. For his arguments against a “Henrician” influence on Ralegh’s prose writings, he is indebted to Anna Beer, whose view of the History’s ideological agenda and audience is diametrically opposed to his own.[6]

This important book—physically beautiful as well as erudite and ambitious—is not a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in The History of the World. Given the immense length and complexity of the History, how could it be? Much of the important information provided in Racin’s earlier monograph (itself in large part a critique of Pierre Lefranc’s analysis)[7] and in Beer’s book on Ralegh is not repeated here, and there are many topics unplumbed by Popper, not least the rhythms and imagery of Ralegh’s prose and the physical features of the geographical notebook. More obviously, Popper does not provide the reader with much about Ralegh’s use of such standard classical historical sources as Livy and Polybius in the later sections of the History. Many late twentieth-century treatments of The History of the World, including those by Racin and Beer, make a distinction between “providentialist” early, Old Testament parts of Ralegh’s book and the greater emphasis on secondary causes in the later sections on classical history. From the off, Popper highlights the centrality to the tradition in which Ralegh is working of the integration of scriptural and classical chronologies, so perhaps he feels that there is no need to address this difference between his own approach and that of earlier critics overtly. This is a pity, I think.[8] A telling passage in Chapter 4 suggests that Popper thinks that Ralegh is aware of the background workings of providence even in sections of the History where it is not mentioned. Popper calculates that Alexander the Great’s eastern expedition came close to the location Ralegh had settled on as the resting-place of Noah’s ark. He argues rather tendentiously that, without mentioning the ark itself in his narration of Alexander’s travels, Ralegh was nevertheless aware of Alexander’s near-miss when writing about his misdemeanours: “Ralegh surely saw Alexander’s mistreatment of his counselors as being expressed in moral terms by his swerving from the Ark … As the Israelites had been subject to more tortuous wandering in the desert for contravening God’s will, so had Alexander been denied knowledge of the Ark” (206).

I’m not sure about this: if the proximity of the ark was in Ralegh’s head when he wrote about Alexander, surely he would have brought it openly into his text. Other  readers will have other quibbles, most probably as dependent on Popper’s scholarship as mine are. But churlishness of any kind is inappropriate here: a note of awe is much the most fitting way to conclude a review of this remarkable book. 

Jonathan Gibson
The Open University 



[1] Walter Oakeshott, “An Unknown Raleigh MS,” The Times (29 November 1952), 7.

[2] Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 131-47 (131).

[3] In company with one of his major influences, Anthony Grafton, and other late twentieth-century historians of history, Popper is here arguing against the tradition represented by F. Smith Fussner’s The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (New York: Columbia UP, 1962).

[4] John Racin, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian: An Analysis of The History of the World (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974).

[5] Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997).

[6] Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and his Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking to the People (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Chapter 2. Beer argues that the History was conceived with a print public in mind, and highlights passages in it that are critical of individual princes.

[7] Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh écrivain: l’œvre et les idées (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968).

[8] The characterisation of The History of the World’s providentialism as “anachronistic” for its time, meanwhile, has effectively been answered in Alexandra Walsham’s Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001).

Comments

  • Gorgeousggeorge 10 months, 1 week ago

    As I know, the American historian Nicholas Popper has researched and written about economic history, particularly focusing on the late Renaissance. Walter Ralegh's "History of the World" is a renowned historical work from that era. And I also know that the late Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and cultural advancement. However, it's important to note that during this period, women like Harriet Tubman faced immense challenges (reminding you that she was an African American abolitionist and political activist who played a significant role in helping enslaved people escape to freedom). So I have recently checked some free papers on https://samploon.com/free-essays/harriet-tubman/ and I want to point out that while the late Renaissance was marked by progress, it also perpetuated social hierarchies, including slavery and systemic oppression. It is just crucial to remember that the experiences of individuals like Harriet Tubman reflect the complex realities of their time and remind us of the ongoing pursuit of justice and equality.

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44.3.61

Cite as:

Jonathan Gibson, "Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance," Spenser Review 44.3.61 (Winter 2015). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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