Article: Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England.

In this series of essays Ferguson attempts to recover the historical consciousness of the period by examining a number of interrelated topics in six brief chapters. The first two consider English medieval and Renaissance forms of euhemerism - interpreting myths as traditional accounts of historical people and events. The next discusses the gradual realization that mythmaking was characteristic of a period in civilization. From here he turns to the "cave myth," the idea that the earliest humans lived primitively in caves and forests, only gradually developing civilization. The next chapter concerns another secular myth, that of the origins of Britain, and the assault on this ...

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