HI3401 The Elizabethans and their World: Social Change and Cultural Development in England, 1550 - 1610

A fragile monarchy on an off-shore island became one of the greatest powers in international relations, and one of the furthest cultural backwaters of Europe became the seat of the last flowering of the Renaissance. Such massive changes came accompanied by equally great and complex problems. Economic development widened social divisions and sharpened social conflict. Religious Reformation affirmed national unity but provoked widespread dissent, and England's emergence as a principal defender of Protestantism forced it into increasing conflict with the other great European power of the sixteenth century, Hapsburg Spain. It was in this context that the extraordinary intellectual and literary flowering of the later sixteenth century took place. This module aims to set the Elizabethan Renaissance amidst these broader social, political and ideological developments, and to examine its principal achievements in poetry, prose and drama in relation to the massive body of political commentaries, social polemics, religious exhortations, histories, and stories, engravings, maps and emblem books through which the Elizabethans as a whole attempted to comprehend and control their changing world.