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Article: Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This composite work contains six closely related essays, which, with extraordinary erudition, explore the shifting currents of thought in Renaissance England regarding the conceptualization of the prehistoric era. Beginning with a pro-paedeutic delineation of euhemerism, which he assumes to have been the most fundamental of the relevant concepts in the late Middle Ages, Arthur B. Ferguson proceeds to analyze the various mutations that formulation underwent during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. He considers how English scholars and thinkers transferred their attention from the gods and heroes of antiquity to the mythic age itself, apprehended as the initial ...