Galatia on the James: Scriptural Migrations, the Origins of Peoples, and English Explorations in Early Modern Europe

When early modern British scholars reflected on the significance of contemporary explorations, they invoked a variety of precedents from the ancient world.  Though modern historians have tended to emphasize how such men derived legal and political lessons from classical histories of Rome, this paper shows that studies of the “origins of peoples” by sixteenth century Continental historians such as Ubbo Emmius and Wolfgang Lazius shaped how figures like Walter Ralegh and William Strachey perceived their own efforts to found colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown.  Ralegh and Strachey’s adaptation of such accounts, this paper argues, placed modern explorations within a biblical framework, casting their efforts to found settlements in the New World as reviving a dynamic mode of human migration propounded by Scripture.

Emmius and Lazius were participants in a community of early modern scholars who mined classical histories, archaeological evidence, and medieval chronicles for evidence concerning the “origins of peoples.”  Their studies furnished illustrious genealogies to dynastic patrons by ascribing to their kingdoms antiquity to rival that of the Greeks and Romans.  They achieved this by concocting narratives which linked modern populations to the murky account of postdiluvian human migrations hinted at by Scripture. 

Examining Ralegh’s and Strachey’s library lists, notebooks, and own historical writings reveal that they each consulted a broad range of these histories as they sought to assess the English program to establish communities in the New World.  Ralegh and Strachey, however, downplayed such works’ genealogical functions and reworked the accounts of ancient heroes establishing towns in a hostile wilderness to ascribe sacred significance to their colonial enterprises.  From such evidence, we can see how their own understandings of the English expansion project reflected a historical culture in which its faltering migrations and precarious fortresses enacted a providential plan and were imbued with sacred import.