The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730

by Daniel R. Woolf

This title investigates the changing historical culture in England between the beginning of the 16th century and the early 18th century. Based on a wide variety of manuscript and printed sources from local and central repositories, it focuses on the social framework within which historical knowledge was generated, modified, and preserved, rather than on historiography or historical method. Woolf begins his study by examining the ways in which early modern people acclimatized themselves to accelerating changes in their physical, social, religious, and economic environments. A developing, if uneasy, accommodation to change went hand in hand with shifting attitudes to the acceptability of novelty and innovation. The family was the central social unit throughout most of this time, and Woolf examines views of ancestry and heredity with a particular emphasis on the circulation of genealogical knowledge and its status relative to other forms of knowledge about the past.

Genres: 16th Century, History

440 pages, Hardcover

First published June 12, 2003

About the author

Daniel Robert Woolf is an Anglo-Canadian historian. He is the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, a position to which he was appointed in January 2009 and took up as of 1 September 2009. He was previously Professor, Department of History and Classics, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts until April 2009. He was reappointed to a second term (to 2019) early in 2013.

Credit: Wikipedia