Samuel Daniel's The Collection of the History of England and the Transformations of Seventeenth-Century Historical Culture

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My doctoral thesis will trace the seventeenth-century transformation of the writing of history through a detailed study of the landmark work of English history, The Collection of the History of England (1618), written by the leading poet of the day, Samuel Daniel (1562/3 - 1619). The early seventeenth century saw the emergence of multiple new kinds of history writing in English. The rise of antiquarianism led to the institution of an empirical, topographical method which looked to primary evidence, both textual and material, to scrutinise previously established narratives of the English past, propagated by medieval chroniclers. The writing of narrative history furthermore was dramatically transformed by the emergence of new forms of politic history, drawing on earlier continental models to write works which foregrounded the human (as opposed to providential) causation of political structures and events. Far from being of isolated interest to historians, poets took active interest in history, producing their own works of narrative and topographical history in poetic form. Beginning in the late 16th century as a poet, Daniel wrote in the tradition of such poets as Edmund Spenser, who claimed to be a 'poet historical'. Having partly completed his poetic account of the Wars of the Roses, Daniel turned to prose history, devoting his final years to the Collection, which told the history of Britain from the Roman period down to the death of Edward III. Daniel's work encompasses a strikingly wide variety of the traditions of seventeenth-century history writing, synthesizing politic, antiquarian, and medieval practices. The Collection, furthermore, constituted a departure for him, as he ventured to enter into the specialized domain of history itself, becoming not so much the new 'poet historical' as the first 'historical poet'. Situating Daniel's Collection within these various historical contexts, and encompassing the interdisciplinary fields of historiography, politics, the history of the book, and the history of reading, my research aims to show how the work synthesizes multiple traditions that together provide a unique insight into the purposes of history writing in the seventeenth century.