ISBN10: 0199257787, ISBN13: 9780199257782, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. This book investigates the changing historical culture in England between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the early eighteenth 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 theways 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 wenthand 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.The third part of the book turns to the subject of antiquarianism, investigating the relationship between the many varieties ofantiquarian activitiy which focused on a visible and tangible past, and the emergence of a visual sense of history during the seventeenth century. It is argued that artefacts ranging from fossils tofuneral urns were exchanged in an 'archaeological economy' ...
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