This book, first published as two volumes of the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2005, is an excellent, if somewhat uneven, collection of essays treating the topic indicated by the title. Arthur Ferguson (whose work is sharply criticized in this volume) asserted in 1979 that the history of history in the early modern period “has been well and truly written,” and while this volume demonstrates that in fact an enormous amount of good work has been done in this area since the 1960s, these essays also make it clear that some revision is in order, that there are still gaps in our knowledge, and that, as F. J. Levy argues here, the history of early modern British historiography would benefit from “a new synthesis” (407). This clutch of essays does not—it could not—constitute such a synthesis, but the variety and range of the work collected here give the reader a rich view of this area of inquiry.

The limits of the volume are indicated by a few of the authors themselves. Paulina Kewes calls for a “wide-ranging study of the uses of history over the longue durée,” but acknowledges that this collection cannot provide such a “comprehensive overview” (12). And Ian Archer, discussing “Discourses of History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart London,” admits that his investigation “is in large part an exercise in illuminating the boundaries of our ignorance” (204). Still, the book covers a great deal of ground: history plays, church history, secret history, views of the past, fiction and history, and popular phenomena such as acts of commemoration undertaken by guilds or local governments as well as early modern political histories and historiographical studies written from a wide range of political or theological perspectives. The collection, especially in Kewes's introductory essay and in David Womersley's discussion of “the teleology of technique,” also participates in the ongoing (and, by this time, fairly widely accepted) critique of the argument that “important” historical writing from this period is best understood as the product of a “historical revolution.” In addition, Kewes presents the volume as making a particular contribution to the relatively neglected historiography of the late seventeenth century; in that vein, there are essays by David Cressy, Martin Dzelzainis, Andrew Starkie, and others that focus on such discrete issues as the influence of Tacitism during the Restoration, church histories by Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier, and “The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism” (307). A number of these and other essays in the book, it must be said, make the hardly startling point that historians often “subordinated both narrative and analysis to immediate political concerns” (254).

The collection is a mix of close studies of particular issues and essays that provide the reader with a broader view. The latter pieces—by Kewes, D. R. Woolf, Blair Worden, and Levy, among others—will probably be of more use to readers who are relative newcomers to this area, while the more narrowly focused studies will be of greater interest to scholars already familiar with the field. Some essays, like Woolf's discussion of “critical transformations in historical thinking in early modern” (33) reveal both the author's deep knowledge of scholarship in this area and his own well-established expertise. Other essays, such as Eve Tavor Bannet's discussion of secret history, are necessarily more exploratory than authoritative, both because the history of secret history is still underdeveloped (pace Michael McKeon in his most recent book) and because Bannet herself is relatively new to this area. The same might be said of Karen O’Brien's essay, “History and the Novel,” but in that case the relatively broad strokes used by the author are more problematic because of the extensive literature on the topic she treats. O’Brien's essay manages to discuss Defoe and history, for example, without mentioning either Journal of the Plague Year or Memoirs of a Cavalier, and she moves, in two pages, from Voltaire to Maria Edgeworth to George Eliot and then back to Eliza Haywood and Frances Burney in a way that makes the reader wish she had more effectively limited her scope and thereby sharpened her insights.

O’Brien's essay, however, treats an area that needed to be addressed in this collection. With respect to other possible topics, one finds at least two surprising omissions. First, there is almost nothing in the volume about history writing by women during this period, except for a few mentions of Catharine Macaulay. Thus, there is no discussion, to name only the most obvious example, of Lucy Hutchinson and other female writers of memoirs or biographies from the period of the Civil Wars and the Restoration. This is regrettable for a volume issued at this moment in the history of writing about culture and society that focuses on the uses or “circulation” of the past. Also, some readers may regret that the book does not contain a more concerted look at popular historiography, such as, for example, the cheap and widely available histories of Nathaniel Crouch published in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Still, no book can do everything that readers might want it to do, and this book does many things, and it mostly does them very well. The essays are, despite a few lapses, well written, and the volume is expertly edited. While there is no bibliography, there is an extensive index, particularly important in a collection like this. Overall, the volume embodies exacting standards of scholarship, and the various essays are linked to one another by consistent references to other essays in the collection by individual authors. Levy's afterword, in calling for a new overview, does suggest that some readers will find the volume more focused on the trees than on the forest, but this is a rich collection from which both specialists and generalists will benefit.