Moderns
Meanwhile the moderns were hard at work. If the history of England could not be perfectly represented as narrative, then perhaps it could be reconstructed as a body of antiquities. In that case, there was a model already in place: William Camden's famous Britannia. It remained only to see whether that familiar work could be brought up to date as a collaborative new enterprise in scholarship. "We have the best stock of true remains of antiquity of any nation perhaps in Europe," wrote William Nicolson in 1694, "and yet our histories hitherto have been most lazily written."1 Once again it was the publishers who led the way. Apparently the idea had already been bruited in 1690-91, perhaps encouraged by a new life of Camden by Thomas Smith, but it was the young printer Abel Swalle who seriously undertook the task a couple of years later. "Swalle is here with big words about the Britannia in English," wrote a skeptical Edward Bernard from Oxford, "promising great and accurate maps of each county: but it would be more for the honor of Mr. Cambden and the use of Scholars, to have that immortal worke represented again in the Latine and with his additions."2 But this was to treat the Britannia as a
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