IN the final two decades of the twentieth century the study of early modern English culture was revitalised in two ways: by new methodologies; and by the revision, employing a largely traditional methodology, of conventional thinking about Elizabethan and Stuart England. Broadly speaking – we will consider some exceptions later – it was literary critics who could claim credit for new theoretical approaches, while historians worked within a more conventional methodological framework to challenge a Whig view of the early modern period. There has been surprisingly little contact between the two disciplines.

The beginning of a new century is an appropriate time to consider the future direction of historical scholarship, and at the same time to ask what historians and literary critics can learn from each other. But as any historicist would argue, in order to evaluate the present we need to understand the history of our own disciplines. ‘To judge rightly of the present,’ wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘we must oppose it to the past.’ We will begin this Introduction with a survey of historicism in literary and historical studies.

It is a widely held view among early modern literary scholars that New Historicism and Cultural Materialism represent a significant advance on earlier forms of historicism which were, it is claimed, naive and theoretically unsophisticated. ‘What now seems the central problem of historicist interpretation,’ writes Hugh Grady in a recent book on Shakespeare,‘ – how to deal adequately with the otherness of the past, given the unavoidability of perceiving it through our own epistemological ‘‘lenses’’ – was barely recognized by the earlier historicists.’ In view of the long history of debate among historians and literary critics on precisely this question, Grady’s assertion is a a puzzling one.

Historicism is a confusing term because it has been used by different writers to mean diametrically opposite views of history. For Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and his eighteenth-century predecessors such as Herder and Winkelmann, the historian should not allow his own assumptions, attitudes and beliefs to enter into his judgment of the past: every epoch, each cultural moment, is unique and must be interpreted in terms of its own values. By the middle of the nineteenth century the term Historismus had come to be used to describe this approach to history.