| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 238 words from this article are provided below; about 561 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

D. R. Woolf. Reading History in Early Modern England. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 360. $69.95.
Much historiographical research has concentrated on historians themselves, analyzing their approaches, sources, and conceptions of the past. D. R. Woolf aims to "combine historiography with the history of books, readers, and libraries" (p. 5). Instead of exploring the historical texts themselves, he investigates the ways and means by which history reached its early modern audience and what use people made of it. The result is an innovative piece of research that draws on both traditional minor disciplines, such as the history of the book, and modern critical approaches such as audience reception studies.	1
Woolf opens with a chapter on "The Death of the Chronicle," in which he casts doubt on the customary explanation for the decline of this historical genre. Rather than attributing the passing of the chronicle to the rise of humanist historical writing, he offers a rather more complex analysis, arguing that the rise of printing soon led to a usurpation of its varied functions by a range of new genres, such as diaries and biographies, newspapers, history plays, ballads, and almanacs, as well as Renaissance political histories. He also reminds us that the chronicle never really died, becoming a historical source to be edited by the end of the sixteenth century.	. . .

There are about 561 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.