Gowin's "Of History and Romance"

“For, trust well, it is an impossibility that any scholar will speak well of women, unless it would be of the lives of holy saints; but never of any other woman. Who painted the Lion, tell me? By God, if women had written histories, as scholars have in their chapels, they would have written about men more evil than all the sons of Adam could redress.”—The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer in the Wife of Bath’s Tale wrote the above quote; I believe the idea expressed by Chaucer parallels Godwin’s message in “Of History and Romance.”  Both Chaucer and Godwin are questioning the authenticity of history.  It seems that both writers understand that history is by in large based on the perspective of the historian.  This is the Wife of Bath’s point: she believes that women are presented badly in history because men have written history.  Godwin’s interest in perspective and its relation to history are quite relevant to Godwin’s radicalism.  Godwin’s political philosophy stood in opposition to thinkers like Edmund Burke who valued the past and hoped to maintain its principles.  Godwin would argue that men who put their faith in the past are ignorant because the truth of the past is not represented accurately in history. He would say we ought not to believe that history has always worked perfectly because those who recorded history as such were those creating history.  Godwin opposes the Conservative view of the English.  He states that, in fact:

“It is the history of negotiations and tricks, it is the history of revenues and debts, it is the history of corruption and political profligacy, but it is not the history of genuine independent man.”

Godwin offers Romanticism as an answer to the problems of “history.”  He declares:

‘The man of taste and discrimination, who has properly weighed these causes, will be apt to exclaim, "Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance."’