The Sixteenth Century: Characteristics of Early Modern England

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The Sixteenth Century Characteristics of Early
Modern England
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Early Modern V. Renaissance Which Term
Should you Use?

• First, the term Renaissance is commonly
  applied to the historical period which follows
  the Middle Ages, but when the Middle Ages ended
  and when the Renaissance began has been a source
  of much debate. A long accepted view was that the
  Renaissance began in the latter half of the 14th
  c. and that it continued throughout the 15th and
  16th c. and perhaps even later (Dictionary of
  Literary Terms and Literary Theory 739).

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• There is little dispute that the ideas from the
  Italian Renaissance moved from the continent to
  the UK. A great example of the culture exchange
  and development is the history of the English
  sonnet.
• The flowering and changes in art, music, science,
  government, literature, drama, religion,
  geography, world view, architecture,
  communication, transportation, and population
  cannot be denied, regardless of what its called.
  In the end, both words are acceptable. Just the
  second term helps us see how ideas of the 15th,
  16th, and early 17th centuries inform
  contemporary issues.

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Events that Shaped Early Modern England
(1476-1603)

• 1476 William Caxton prints an edition of The
  Canterbury Tales on the first printing press in
  England.
• 1485 Accession of Henry VII inaugurates Tudor
  Dynasty
• 1492 Columbus lands in the Caribbean on his
  first voyage
• 1509 Accession of Henry VIII
• 1515 Sir Thomas More begins writing Utopia
• 1517 Martin Luthers Wittenberg Theses
  beginning of the Reformation
• 1534 Henry VIII declares himself head of the
  English church
• 1558 Accession of Elizabeth I
• 1585-7 Colony of settlers disappears at Roanoke
• 1603 Death of Elizabeth I and accession of James
  I

5
Cultural Issues that Shaped Early Modern England
(1476-1603)

• Renaissance Humanism
• The Reformation
• The New World and European Expansion
• Beginning of the Scientific Revolution
• Rise of Nations

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Renaissance Humanism

• what is a man/If his chief good and market of
  his time/Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no
  more./Sure he that made us with such large
  discourse,/Looking before and after, gave us
  not/That capability of godlike reason/To fust in
  us unusd (Hamlet IV.31-7).

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Some Characteristics of Renaissance Humanism

• Humanism stressed the revival of classic learning
  that often came at the expense of medieval
  worldview and scholarship. For example
  Renaissaince Humanists stressed the power
  individual choice over man that the medievel
  world view defined as a only a subject of God's
  will.
• In this way Humanists, like Thomas More,
  understood identity as something that could and
  should be fashioned. In this sense they were
  very much like us, thinking that identity is not
  born by made-nurture over nature.
• In their more extreme forms, humanistic attitudes
  regarded man as the crown of creation.
• In England and elsewhere, Humanism was bound up
  with the struggles over the purposes of education
  and curriculum reform. During the Renaissance,
  emphasis shifted from training students
  exclusively to work in the Catholic Church to
  training students to be priests, lawyers, and
  public servants.

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Humanism and Language

• Leading scholars of the Renaissance period were
  called Humanists because they were students of
  humanist literature the literature of the Greek
  and Latin poets, dramatists, philosophers,
  historians and rhetoricians.
• A newly revived interest in Latin and Greek
  texts, along with Hebrew, also gave rise to
  Humanists writing in their own vernacular, modern
  langauges.
• Remember that the court langauge, the language of
  the nobility in England, was French well into the
  14th century. While works like Thomas Mores
  Utopia and Thomas Bacons Essays were written in
  Latin, the authors of the Elizabethean theater
  and court poets wrote in English. Such authors
  combatted the assumption that the English
  language had almost no pretige abroad, and there
  were those at home who doubted that it could
  serve as a suitable medium for serious, elevated
  or elgant discourse (Norton 485).

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The Printing Press

• Humanists, like Thomas More, could not have
  spread their ideas as widely or quite possibly
  may not have conceived of their ideas at all
  without the invention of the printing press.
• The goldsmith Johann Gutenberg first assembled
  the systems involved in Germany in 1440. Printing
  methods based on Gutenberg's printing press
  spread rapidly throughout Europe replacing most
  block printing and making it the progenitor of
  modern movable type printing.
• William Caxton brought the press to England in
  1476-the impact of the press on rhetoric and
  writing is so great that it is difficult to
  overestimate.

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The Reformation

• My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not
  say a literal God, a God that wouldst be
  understood literally and according to the plain
  sense of all that thou sayest. But thou art also
  (Lord, I intend to thy glory, and let no profane
  misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou
  art a figurative, a metaphorical God too (John
  Donne).

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Life Before the Reformation

• Like the Renaissance itself, The Reformation of
  the Catholic Church into several Protestant sects
  in the 16th c. may seem like it happened in just
  one or two generations, but the stirring of
  discontent with in the Catholic dominated Middle
  Ages had long been felt.

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• Catholic practice and history is too vast to
  summarize here, but before Henry VIII in England
  there existed, A vast system of confession,
  pardons, penance, absolution, indulgences, sacred
  relics, and ceremonies that gave the unmarried
  male clerical hierarchy great power over their
  largely illiterate flocks. The Bible, the
  liturgy, and most of the theological discussions
  were in Latin, which few lay people could
  understand however, religious doctrine and
  spirituality were mediated to them by the
  priests, by beautiful church art and music, and
  by the liturgical ceremonies of daily
  life-festivals, holy days, baptisms, marriages,
  exorcisms, and funerals (Norton 490).

13
Martin Luther and Some Key Dissenting Concerns

• Though by no means the first person to express
  dissenting concerns, Martin Luthers challenges
  to the Catholic Church in 1517 turned into a
  revolt very quickly.
• Luther stressed the importance of parishioners
  reading the Bible for themselves in their
  vernacular languages instead of having faith
  mediated to them by priests.
• Luther charged that the pope and his hierarchy
  were the servants of Satan and that the Church
  had degenerated into a corrupt, worldly
  conspiracy designed to bilk the credulous and
  subvert secular authority (Norton 491).
• He stressed that people could be saved through
  faith in God alone and not through good works or
  indulgences.

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The Reformation in England

• In England the Reformation began less with
  popular dissent than with political desire. The
  popular narrative is Henry VIII wanted a
  legitimate son to succeed him and his wife
  Catherine of Aragon, aunt to Ferdinand I, failed
  to give him one. Pope Clement VII also failed to
  give Henry the divorce he wanted.
• In 1533 Henry had his marriage to Catherine of
  Aragon declared invalid on the pretence that the
  marriage was never consummated and he married
  Anne Boleyn.
• 1534 Henry issued The Act of Succession which
  required an oath of loyalty from all male
  subjects who wished to inherit property.
• In 1534 Henry also seized all lands and property
  held by the Catholic church.

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The New World and European Expansion

• on that branch which is called Caora are a
  nation of people, whose heads appear not above
  their shoulders, which though it may be a mere
  fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is
  true, because every child in the provinces affirm
  the same they are called Ewaipanoma they are
  reported to have their eyes in their shoulders,
  and their mouths in the middle of their breasts,
  that a long train of hair growth backward
  between their shoulders (Sir Walter Raleigh) .

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England in Ireland

• The medieval English presence in Ireland was
  deeply shaken by Black Death, which arrived in
  Ireland in 1348.
• From the late 15th century English rule was once
  again expanded in Ireland following the Black
  Death, first through the efforts of the Earls of
  Kildare and Ormond then through the activities of
  the Tudor State under Henry VIII, Mary, and
  Elizabeth.

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• England saw the complete conquest of Ireland by
  1603 and the final collapse of the Gaelic social
  and political superstructure at the end of the
  17th century as a result of English and Scottish
  Protestant colonization in the Plantations of
  Ireland, the disastrous Wars of the Three
  Kingdoms, and the Williamite War in Ireland.

18
England in the Americas

• England rejected Christopher Columbuss requests
  to fund his voyage to the New World, Preferring
  to concentrate on their settlement of Ireland.
• In 1586 and again in 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh
  attempted to establish permanent settlements on
  Roanoke Island. 4 years later, in 1591, all
  colonists had disappeared. The only clue to their
  fate was the word "CROATOAN" and letters "CRO"
  carved into separate tree trunks, suggesting the
  possibility that they were either massacred,
  absorbed, or taken away by Croatoans or perhaps
  another native tribe.

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• England's first permanent overseas settlement was
  founded in 1607 in Jamestown, led by Captain John
  Smith and managed by the Virginia Company, an
  offshoot of which established a colony on
  Bermuda, which had been discovered in 1609.
• Plymouth was founded in 1620.

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The Beginning of the Scientific Revolution

• Like every other aspect of the Renaissance or
  early modern period, the beginning of the
  Scientific Revolution is a challenge to pin down.
  Though many historians date the Scientific
  Revolution to the publication of On the
  Revolution of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolas
  Copernicus in 1543, they also suggest science was
  in a state of constant development till the 19th
  century.

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Some Significant Inventions and Discoveries that
Shaped the Renaissance

• On The Revolution of Heavenly Spheres (1543)
  challenged Church approved earth centered model
  of the universe (geocentric), with the
  sun-centered model of the universe
  (heliocentric).
• In Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon introduced
  his Scientific Method that combined empirical
  investigation with carefully limited and tested
  generalizations that could be repeated with the
  same results over and over. In a direct challenge
  to Aristotle, he believed this to be the best
  method to investigate nature.

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• In 1628 William Harvey published An Anatomical
  Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in
  Animals, where, based on scientific methodology,
  he argued for the idea that blood was pumped
  around the body by the heart before retuning to
  the heart and being re-circulated.
• Based only on uncertain descriptions of the
  telescope, invented in the Netherlands in 1608,
  Galileo, in that same year, made a telescope with
  about 3x magnification, and later made others
  with up to about 32x magnification. He published
  his initial telescopic astronomical observations
  in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled
  Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger).

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Rise of Nations out of Feudal City-States

• For in whatever parts of the land the sheep
  yield the softest and most expensive wool, there
  the nobility and gentry, yes, and even some
  abbots though other wise holy men, are not
  content with the old rents that the land yielded
  to their predecessors. Living in idleness and
  luxury, without doing any good to society, no
  longer satisfies them they have to do positive
  evil, For they leave no land free for the plow.
  They enclose every acre for pasture they destroy
  houses and abolish towns, keeping only the
  churches for sheep barns (More 12).

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Characteristics of the English Nation-State

• Markets in early modern England expanded
  significantly, international trade flourished,
  and cities throughout the realm experienced a
  rapid surge in size and importance. Londons
  population in particular soared, from 60,000 in
  1520, to 120,000 in 1550, to 375,000 a century
  later, making it the largest and fastest-growing
  city in Europe.
• Elizabeth also engaged in other enterprises that
  combined aggressive nationalism with the pursuit
  of profit in other words imperialism and empire
  building.
• Like most nations, when England was struggling
  into nationhood and to define itself, citizens
  often defined Englishness as what is was not.
  Englishness was not
• Catholics, although they all had been until
  recently
• Elizabethan England had a lot of foreign artisans
  from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and above all France
  and the Netherlands living mostly in London.
  During the 16th c. there were several riots and
  bloody demonstrations protesting foreign artisans
  who were accused of taking English jobs away from
  English people.
• England, and again esp. London had a small
  population of Jews. During the Middle Ages the
  Jewish community was continually persecuted,
  massacred, and excommunicated in European
  countries.

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Sir Thomas More and Utopia

• He likes to be dressed simple, and does not wear
  silk, or purple or gold chains, except when it is
  not allowable to dispense with them. He cares
  marvelously little for those formalitiesas he
  does not exact these ceremonies form others, so
  he is not scrupulous in observing them himself,
  though he understand how to use them if he thinks
  proper to do so but he holds it to be effeminate
  and unworthy of a man to waste much of his time
  on such trifles(Erasmus 127).

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Characteristics/Background Sir Thomas More

• Sir/Saint Thomas More was an English lawyer,
  author, and statesman. During his lifetime he
  earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar
  and occupied many public offices, including that
  of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. He very
  much embodies and champoined ideas like
  Renaissance Humanism and rational investigation
  of the natural world.

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• More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to
  an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political
  system he described in a book published in 1516.
• He is chiefly remembered for his principled
  refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be
  the supreme head of the Church of England, a
  decision which ended his political career and led
  to his execution as a traitor.
• In 1935 Pope Pius XI canonized St Thomas More in
  the Roman Catholic Church More was declared
  Patron Saint of politicians and statesmen by Pope
  John Paul II in 1980.

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Summary

• Characteristics of Early Modern English period
• Early Modern Vs. Renaissance
• Humanism and Language
• English Reformations
• Key figures in the History