Clarendon Edition of David Hume's History of England

Our international team of editors is working to produce the first critical edition of David Hume’s The History of England from The Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688. The edition is contracted with Oxford University Press for inclusion in the Clarendon Hume Edition Series. 

The History was an influential bestseller during Hume’s lifetime and remained essential reading on English history into the nineteenth century. It is one of Hume’s major works and also one of the most significant works of eighteenth-century literature considered more generally.

This is a challenging work to edit. It began with two volumes of history on the reigns of the Stuart monarchs, first published in 1754 and 1757. In 1759, Hume added two volumes on the Tudors, and in 1762 he completed the work with two further volumes on English history from 55 BCE to 1485. The first complete edition of the History was published in 1763 and seven further new editions were issued before the publication of the last authorial edition of 1778. In the process the title of the book changed from The History of Great Britain to The History of England. Hume was a compulsive editor of his own work and made thousands of changes to the text between 1754 and his death in 1776. As part of this project, we are developing new computational methods that will provide a much more accurate means of tracking variations across editions than has been possible until now.