Woolf 2000

Woolf, D. R. Reading History in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

opens by pointing out the (somewhat arbitrary) importance of the printed book to the discipline of history —>

“As readers, we now take it for granted that history is to be found principally in books. Yet that is a matter of practice, and has not always been the case. There is, in fact, no law, natural or otherwise, that necessitates the placing of historical discourse into a hard or paperbound codex. Nor does it take place there exclusively, for all our stress on the book. Historical knowledge can be acquired in other forms also” (1)

surprising, then, that there’s little “about the history of the history book ‘’as’’ book” (1)

two streams leading to this: history of the book and historiography

in historiography, “we have evaluated past historians and historical scholars … almost entirely according to the standards practiced by our discipline in its post-Rankean, modern shape” (3)”

“the present text is less concerned with the sense of the past than with ‘history proper,’ but ‘’not’’ with historical texts as such: my goal, quite simply, is to combine historiography with the history f books, readers, and libraries.” (5)