Should Giants be Denied Credit? Or, An Examination of Seventeenth-century Historiographies Using Word Embedding Models
Giants were a serious problem for early modern British historians. For example, in a chapter titled “Whether it be likely that there were ever any Gyaunts inhabiting in this Isle or not” from his “Historical Description of the Island of Britain,” William Harrison offers a lengthy meditation on the historical plausibility of giants, arguing against the idea that the presence of fables in a nation’s historical record should irredeemably discredit that nation’s history. Harrison writes that to “some mens eares,”…