THE SIXTEENTH CENTURYThe sixteenth century in England was the age of the Tudor sovereigns:

three generations of Tudors ruled England between 1485 and 1603 (Henry VII – Henry VIII – Elizabeth I)

WARWICK CASTLE

Feudal order decline

After the Wars of the Roses England needed stability and order: they were both found in Henry VII’s internal policy.

The barons, reduced, impoverished and divided by the dynastic wars, could not effectively oppose the power of the Crown: the feudal order declined and a new order was established on the nation with a much stronger central authority.

Henry VII confiscated the lands of the barons who had been killed during the Wars of the Roses and allied with new economical forces: urban middle classes and the gentry.

The introduction of firearms made both armoured knights and bowmen obsolete.

THE WARS OF THE ROSESA dynastic strife that had raged for more than thirty years

between the two houses of York and Lancaster.

Lancastrians Yorkists John of Gaunt Edmund of Langley

(Edward III’s third son) (Edward III’s fourth son) Duke of Lancaster Duke of York

HENRY VII – 1485 1509

He made the monarchy supreme.

He allied with new emerging forces: the urban middle classes and the country gentry.

He avoided war because too expensive; he summoned parliament only six times and only to pass law against nobility.

He made England’s trading position stronger by means of dynastic marriages (which will have important historical consequences):

with Spain: his eldest son, Arthur, married Catherine of Aragon;

with Scotland: one of his daughters married James IV Stuart.

London grew into a metropolitan market.

The growth of trade

Henry VII made commercial treaties with European countries.

England, which had always been a sheep-raising country, was now manufacturing and exporting significant amount of good cloth:

textile manufacturing improved by the introduction of the loom (a family-run activity), and at the same time lands were enclosed to permit grazing on a larger scale.

He wanted a merchant fleet.

The discovery of new lands.

The circumnavigation of the globe.

The English were not pioneers in the exploration of the Western hemisphere, but those explorations affected their place in the world: the discovery of America shifted the centre of interest towards the West, and in the next century English sailors would become great colonizers and merchant adventurers.

Maritime power had began.

Copernican theory and the achievements of Galileo Galilei.The old order of ideas was seriously weakened.The Elizabethans were obsessed with the fear of chaos, which meant the cosmic anarchy before creation.Elizabethan culture was fascinated by the occult (following Theophrast Paracelsus):magic meant control of the natural world by enchanting or taming it like an animal.The witch hunt was still carried on.

Copernicus' epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published just before his death in 1543, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy His heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, stimulated further scientific investigations, often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.

Literacy increased during the fifteenth century: many more people could read than in Geoffrey Chaucer’s time (an estimated 60% of the population by 1530).New schools were founded.Printing, which was introduced by William Caxton around 1467, made books cheaper, more plentiful, and provided more opportunities to read and more incentive to learn.Anyway, Caxton’s printed versions were still medieval in content (long prose romancestranslated from the French, collections of moral sayings or works as Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur).

HUMANISMAn intellectual movement that involved the rebirth of letters and arts, prompted by the recovery and study of classical texts and the development of new aesthetic rules based on those classical models.The attitude towards Italy was dual: from one hand, Italy was the cradle of culture, with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio; but from the other, it was the land of papal Rome; moreover, a misunderstanding of Machiavelli’s The Prince, convinced the Elizabethans that he was a master of cunning and praised immoral methods to serve political purposes. The dignity and potential of the individual was emphasized as well as the worth of life in this world (before going into the other!).Humanism was a fundamental intellectual current in the Renaissance: its first major exponents were Sir Thomas More and his friend Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who spent some time in England.

But: it was not until Henry VII’s reign had brought some political stability to England that the Renaissance seeds could take root there; and it was not until the accession of Henry VIII that it began to flower.

HENRY VIII

When he succeeded his father, Henry VIII was only eighteen.

He was a typical Renaissance prince: he had a magnificent court, he liked music and dancing, he was a poet and an athlet; yet he was cruel and executed those who displeased him.

EDUCATION (of the prince or the courtier or the nobleman) was a prime concern of the English humanists; it still followed the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) but with a new enphasis on rhetoric and classical texts.The purpose was to train the young nobleman to speak and write a good Latin, which was still the language of diplomacy, of the professions and of the higher learning.The grammar was Latin grammar, and the rhetoric was a rigorous study of the stylistic devices used by classical authors. Nonetheless, the classics were also studied for their moral, social and political values and philosophical truth Still, English Humanism was highly Christian; later authors reacted against the more pagan Humanism coming from Italy.

THE REFORMATIONTo those who supported it, it was a return to pure Christianity, cleansing the Church of all the corruption and idolatrythat had accumulated over the centuries; to the Roman Catholic church it was damnable heresy.For medieval people, the Roman Catholic church had been a universal, infallible, omnicompetent guidefrom cradle to grave.But now only the Scriptures (not the church or tradition) have authority in matters of religion; only God’s grace and personal faith (not good deeds or religious practices) can effect a Christian’s salvation;and only the enlightened private conscience (not priests or hierarchies) can determine what an individual must believe and do.

The ReformationIn England, the Reformation did not begin with ideological controversy. The split with the church of Rome was caused by a man who considered himself a Catholic champion against Luther: Henry VIII had received from Pope Leo X the title “Defensor Fidei” for having written a book against Luther. Henry’s motives were dynastic, not religious: he needed a legitimate son and his queen, Catherine of Aragon, could not give him one.

With the ACT OF SUPREMACY (1534) he declared himself “Supreme Head of Church”.He had the monasteries dissolved and seizedtheir wealth:the confiscated lands went directly to the King or to members of the middleclasses.

ELIZABETHAN AESTHETICSArt and NatureArtificial had a good meaning for the Elizabethans. The improvement of something naturally beautiful – by device, by arrangement, by human ingenuity, by art – extended to all aspects of life: intricacy of design and elaborate patterns were especially valued (think of the Elizabethan garden).The poet is seen as a maker, whose activity reflects that of the Divine Creator: the poet does not imitate the real, fallen nature we see, but he imitates an ideal nature (Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy) Poetry has a didactic role: it teaches by delighting and move us to be virtuous.Therefore: the delight in “abundance” of words, poetic figures, ornaments; the close relation of poetry and rhetoric; the concern with level of style (high, middle and low) and the idea of “decorum”, that is the suiting of subject to genre and style.Allegory still remains as a means to teach moral truths as well as to suggest the mysterious analogies and symbolic relationships that permeate and order God’s universe.

Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) was Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from November 17, 1558, until her death.

Sometimes referred to as The Virgin Queen (since she never married), Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I was the fifth and final monarch of the Tudor dynasty, having succeeded her half-sister, Mary I.

She steadied England during a period of political and religious turmoil and set her nation's course to become the leading Protestant world of her time.

Hatfield House

Elizabeth believed that she ruled by God's grace, and remained as she put it “married to England” rather than to any man.

Like her father Henry VIII, she believed in a destiny for her country and she saw herself as the very personification of that divine, providential purpose. That purpose was perceived as the task of establishing a harmonious realm, ruled by laws derived from Biblical ethics, that would glorify God in its order, industriousness, and sobriety (Calvinism was influencing English theology).

More than anything, Elizabeth wanted to unite her country, and she used the Church of England as a tool, attempting to make it as inclusive as possible, trying to keep in its fold those with Roman tendencies (although Catholicism was outlawed) and Puritans, thus steering a middle course.

THE ACT OF SUPREMACYIt was this act that gave Elizabeth ultimate control of the Church of England. In the reign of her father and brother, the monarch had been "Head of the Church in England", but under Elizabeth, this was modified to "Supreme Governor of the Church in England".  The change may have been made to appease Catholics who could not accept the monarch as "Head of the Church", seeing the church as the Pope's domain, or it may have been made because

Elizabeth was a woman. THE ACT OF UNIFORMITY

This was the crux of the Elizabethan Church, establishing a set form of worship. The Prayer books of Edward VI were fused into one, and were to be used in every church in the land. Church

attendance on Sundays and holy days was made compulsory.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE and national identity.

Moreover the question of whether to write in Latin or in English became a very serious issue:

“I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.” (by Richard Mulcaster, Spenser’s teacher)

Humanist reverence for the classics and English pride (and sense of national identity) in the vernacular language gave rise to many translations: Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses; but also contemporary writers: Castiglione’s “The Courtier”, Ariosto’s “Orlando Mad”, Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered”.

Elizabeth's reign is referred to as the Elizabethan era or the Golden Age. Playwrights William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson all flourished during this period. Francis Bacon laid out his philosophical and political views; and English colonization of North America took place under Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. This was a period of English disengagement from Europe and of turning towards overseas commerce, exploration, settlement and colonial conquest.

With the defeat of the Spanish Armada the reign of Elizabeth reached its peak of glory and national unity. (1588)

MACROCOSM and MICROCOSM

Among typical symbolic relationships

are those suggested by the pervasive

macrocosm-microcosm analogy, according to which everything in the

vast universe may be found, replicated in little, in the human body; and also those suggested by the

image of the Great Chain of Being, according to which all orders of being, from speck of dust to highest angel, are ranged hierarchically in their

divinely ordered stations.

JAMES I

He became King of Scots as James VI on 24 July 1567, when he was just thirteen months old,

succeeding his mother Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth died in the early hours of 24 March 1603, and James was proclaimed king in London later the same day, as James I, King of England and Ireland The Stuart dinasty had begun.