Imprisoned in the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Walter Ralegh spent seven years producing this massive work. Created with the aid of a library of more than five hundred books that he was allowed to keep in his quarters, this incredible work of English vernacular would become a best seller. It covers the course of human history from Genesis to the conquest of Macedon by Rome. Raleigh intended to write more volumes relating the rise and fall of the great empires, but his release in 1615, his expedition to Guiana, and his execution in 1618, prevented the accomplishment of his plan.

According to author Edmund Gosse, "This huge composition is one of the principal glories of seventeenth-century literature, and takes a very prominent place in the history of English prose”.

“The success of Raleigh’s History, which apart from numerous abridgements, ran through ten editions between 1614 and 1687, can perhaps be explained by the very fact that it is not a work of history in the academic sense but a political tract of immediate applicability. Its author was listened to, not so mucnh because he was a scholar (which he certainly was by contemporary standards of scholarship), as because he embodied all the glories of the reign of Elizabeth I, which at the time of the publication had already begun to be transfigured into a golden age.” (PMM 177).

(PMM 177, the first edition).