German antiquity in Renaissance myth

the long version

Myth and written history share a narrative structure, and have thus been easily knitted into a common fabric. The chronicles or histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries often included as a matter of course what are now called myths: stories of national origins that readers expected to find in history. By the Renaissance, scholars began to condemn such practices, but from a modern vantage point they merely exchanged old mythic errors for newer models. This volume examines how these substitutions, re-visions, and re-makings occurred for several 'myths' that were accepted, for a time, as history.