In this thoughtful and engaging book, Joseph M. Levine reveals how Renaissance humanists and their neoclassical progeny transformed the ways that the English practices history and viewed the past. Between 1500 and 1800, many of the methods of modern historiography were first introduced into England, where they developed under the influence of classical philology and the study of antiquities. English scholars gradually differentiated past from present and successfully detected and recovered the ancient Roman, Saxon, Celtic, and Norman cultures. A first attempt was also made to distinguish historical fact from fiction, and such legends as the Trojan origins of Britain and the Donation of Constantine were rejected.

Levine sets the scene for these developments with an examination of the historical outlook of William Caxton at the end of the Middle Ages; he concludes with an essay on Edward Gibbon, whose work three centuries later, he argues, summarizes the whole achievement of early modern historiography. Along the way, Levine investigates such topics as the transformation the antiquarian enterprise into modern archaeology, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, the Gothic revival, and the influence of humanism on Francis Bacon and the new philosophy.