SOURCE: Taufer, Alison. “The ‘Historie of England’.” In Holinshed's Chronicles, pp. 21-53. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

In the following essay, Taufer surveys both the 1577 and 1587 editions of the Chronicles, demonstrating how the relatively objective tone of Holinshed's edition shifts to a more polemical and strident tone in Abraham Fleming's edition.

Tudor historians tended to evaluate the past in terms of its lessons for the present. Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, which related the history of the War of the Roses, was a warning to those who wished to avoid civil chaos and preserve political stability, while Bale's and Foxe's histories of the English church proved the purity of the English ecclesiastical tradition as well as Rome's ancient and continuing threat to its existence. At the same time, the Tudor dynasty sponsored its own myths of ancient origin through the...