The Correspondence of William Camden (1551-1623) and Thomas Savile (d. 1593): The Limits of Collaboration in the Making of Camden’s Britannia

This article provides a fresh account of the origins of William Camden’s antiquarian masterpiece, Britannia, by reconstructing the formation of the book through its surviving draft materials and reassessing the role of collaboration in its pre-publication development. It focusses on the evidence of Camden’s initial drafting (1578-1580) and his subsequent epistolary exchanges with the young Oxford scholar and historian of mathematics, Thomas Savile (d. 1593) in the early 1580s. What kind of work was Britannia when it was first drafted, and to what extent did it develop collaboratively through discussions with Savile? The article offers the first analysis of British Library Cotton MS Titus F VII-VIII, Camden’s earliest draft of Britannia. This remarkable document is a vanishingly rare survival of a draft of a major Latin work of British scholarship from the sixteenth century, and offers unparalleled insight into Camden’s scholarly methodologies and antiquarian self-conception during this formative period. The draft is brought into dialogue with the surviving Savile-Camden correspondence, comprehensively analysed here for the first time. The article also identifies Thomas Savile as the author of an anonymous treatise in the British Library on the origins of the Brigantes, written for Camden in response to the publication of George Buchanan’s controversial Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582). The article evaluates the impact of Savile’s arguments about ancient British geography on the development of Camden’s Britannia. Its ultimate assessment is that Savile’s contribution to Britannia was more limited than has been assumed, and that Camden’s antiquarian scholarship privileges the autonomy of his own individual critical judgment. These findings prompt a concluding reconsideration of the nature, extent and significance of collaboration to Camden’s antiquarian practice and in late-humanist scholarship more widely.