History and Mythistory in Early Modern Europe

Historians in early modern Europe brought new critical tools to bear on the early pasts of nations, cities and institutions. They exposed venerable documents as forgeries, eliminated non-existent saints from historical records, and drew up new, austere histories and chronologies. But historians in early modern Europe also wove new fantasies about the early past. They defended forgeries as venerable documents, inserted non-existent individuals into the historical records, and drew up new, glorious fantastic histories and chronologies. This paper will examine the interplay between critical and mythical histories through a number of key episodes—for example, the debates over the antiquity of Oxford and Cambridge universities that raged for more than a century. No single clear narrative—whether of progress or of decline, of the honing of critical tools or the burgeoning of the historical imagination—can to justice to the dialectical interplay of these elements that characterized so much historical scholarship in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.