William Camden--educator, historian, poet, and herald--was a major influence in each of the four areas of his personal and professional life. Best known for his topographical work, the Britannia (1586), and for the Annales rerum Anglicarum ... regnante Elizabetha (1615; translated as the History of Elizabeth, 1625), his place in the intellectual currents of his own and later generations is not confined to individual works, but extends to the fertile and changing relationship between poets and historians from the late sixteenth century to the Restoration. His view of the past and the scholarly methodologies he used to represent and interpret it were recognized by contemporaries for their originality in England. The characteristics associated with modern historiography were emerging in Italy and France in the sixteenth century and found full and mature expression in Camden's work. Widely known and esteemed throughout the European intellectual community, Camden exerted a shaping force on the individuals...