Uncovering history in the drafts of William Camden’s Annales rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha
Name
erl-article-10.1163-24055069-20262010.pdf
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Size
3.81 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Rutkowska, Helena
Date published
June 25, 2026
Abstract
William Camden’s , the first major history of Elizabeth I’s reign, has often been hailed as a milestone in English historical writing. Printed in two volumes in Latin in 1615 and 1625 at the behest of King James I, its English translations are still widely read as a source for the political history of the reign of Elizabeth I. However, little attention is paid to Camden’s original Latin texts, and there has been virtually no scholarship on the original drafts of the history, which survive in the Cotton Manuscripts in the British Library. These original drafts demonstrate the complicated processes through which Camden wrote and revised his great history. In 2023, these drafts were digitised, and specialist photographic techniques made it possible to read text which had hitherto been covered by pasted-down additions to the manuscripts, enabling a more detailed reconstruction of successive drafts of the text. From analysis of this groundbreaking new evidence, this article reveals more about Camden’s historiographical practices. The first section examines Camden’s struggles to adhere to structuring his history in an annalistic format, informed by classical models of historical writing. The second section explores the manner in which Camden changed the scope of his history over time, revising his text to include Scottish events. The final section demonstrates that Camden sometimes altered and even censored his own narrative in response to political pressures, namely the wishes and attitudes of King James VI and I.
Journal title
Erudition and the Republic of Letters
Publisher
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
ISSN
2405-5050
eISSN
2405-5069
Official URL