Professor Baker recounts and analyses the relations of the English Renaissance historians to other writers of their time and to the historians of later ages. Supported and enlivened with a wealth of quotation from the historians themselves, their critics and their colleagues, The Race of Time illuminates the problems of historiography in an age when academic freedom was always subservient to the national interest, to the sensitivity of rulers, to the prevalence of legends, and to the envy of contemporaries.