Samuel Daniel’s The Collection of the Historie of England (1612-18) in the Contexts of Early-Stuart Historical and Political Cultures

Knowles, Jordan Peter Preston (2023) Samuel Daniel’s The Collection of the Historie of England (1612-18) in the Contexts of Early-Stuart Historical and Political Cultures. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis examines The Collection of the Historie of England (1612-18), the last major work of the poet and historian Samuel Daniel (1562/3-1619). Long acknowledged as one of the major narrative histories to be written in early seventeenth-century England, this thesis is the first full-length historiographical study of the work. To investigate the work’s place within the historical and political cultures of its day, it asks four questions: 1) How was narrative history written in the early seventeenth century, and why? 2) What were its political implications? 3) What were the dominant concerns that shaped Daniel’s conception of the English state? And 4) How is his history of the English state shaped by the successive lives of the kings of England?

Tracing the genesis of Daniel’s history from an early MS draft, to the two editions in which it was printed and expanded, and finally to the little-studied unpublished draft of his Appendix to the work, the thesis situates the Collection amidst a variety of historical forms that influenced and informed his practice, ranging from medieval and Elizabethan chronicles, contemporary narrative histories, antiquarian scholarship, and ecclesiastical history. In doing so, it argues against prevailing critical assessments that stress the formal disparateness of these historical practices in early-Stuart England. Daniel’s Collection, it proposes, emerged within a complex nexus of intellectual cultures, encompassing patronage contexts and the intellectual circles he inhabited, each of which shaped the political concerns that Daniel brought to the work. On this basis, Daniel’s legal thought and his position on sovereignty are reconsidered. The thesis thus advances our understanding both of Daniel’s mature historical thought, and of the wider participation of narrative history in the historical and political cultures of early Stuart England.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	09 Oct 2024 10:43
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 10:43
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96969
DOI:

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