SOURCE: An introduction to The History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh, edited by C. A. Patrides, 1614. Reprint by Temple University Press, 1971, pp. 1–39.

In the essay below, Patrides analyzes the Christian historiographical method that informs Raleigh's The History of the World.

The History of the World has been termed 'the first serious attempt in England, and one of the first in modern Europe, at a history the scope of which should be universal in both time and space' [by Newman T. Reed, in Northwestern University Summaries of Dissertations II, 1934]. In fact, however, its general framework is not in the least original; it belongs to the tradition of Christian historiography which reaches its terminal point some fifty years later in Paradise Lost. Ralegh's prose work and Milton's poem are the two greatest formulations in English of the mode of thinking which over the centuries interpreted history as a...