Utter Antiquity

Historians know a great deal about how English thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the "documentable" past, but relatively little about how they perceived times stretching back beyond history. Arthur B. Ferguson shows in this elegant essay that prehistory had great meaning in Renaissance England. Commentators of various sorts - from poets to antiquaries - looked to the most distant past for the vanishing point that would perfect their historical perspective, complete their picture of universal history, and orient them in an age of increasing change. In this pursuit they…