Michael Schoenfeldt
Andrew Escobedo develops here the highly original argument that English nationhood issued not from the emerging conviction of a shared national culture but rather from a profound experience of historical alienation from a distant past. Alert to the mythmaking that bolsters the search for national origins in a necessarily misty past, Escobedo brilliantly analyzes the various collective fictions produced under the rubric of history that helped engender England's burgeoning sense of national consciousness.
John Watkins
Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England is an important contribution to the study of Renaissance historiography and to current scholarship on several of the most significant early modern English writers. The book examines Michel de Certeau's insight that the act of historical recovery paradoxically entails a simultaneous act of historical distancing. Andrew Escobedo applies de Certeau's concept to an English context, leading to rich and original readings of the texts that helped to forge the consciousness of the English nation.
Patrick Cheney
Andrew Escobedo's critical narrative about 'the ontology of early national consciousness' is lucid, learned, embedded in recent scholarship, and above all humane and original. He maps his narrative across a wide-ranging grid: for each of three historical modes—antiquarian, apocalyptic, fictional—he creates a 'diachronic' narrative linking two of his title authors: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton. The book constitutes a profound meditation on the English Renaissance project of plucking a new national identity out of a distinct historical trauma: under pressure from an absent national origin and an ever-looming apocalyptic imminence, these authors help forge the nation not as an ideological site for conformity or resistance but as an innovative community that prepares for the Enlightenment model of historical progress.
