Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance

摘要

For Sir Walter Ralegh writing, like military service, court office, governance in the West Country and exploration in the New World, was a form of action intended to enhance his rank, political influence and personal wealth. During the reign of Elizabeth I his literary self-promotion took diverse forms; courtly poetry, voluntary political and military advice, commissioned propaganda in the service of the state, and attempts to raise support for his dreams of empire in Guiana. During his long years of imprisonment in the Tower of London, under James Ⅰ, Ralegh turned to writing advice treatises and a universal History of the World as the only means of political agency available to him. In this erudite and illuminating study Nicholas Popper situates Ralegh's decision to produce the History within the context of a European culture of governance which evolved from the fifteenth through the sixteenth century and which stressed the importance of learned, historically-based advice to the sovereign. That counsel was to be grounded on a transformative methodology which moved history out of the realm of rhetoric.