Course Description

This course explores the political, religious, intellectual, cultural and social histories of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, from the reign of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, until the death of his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1603. We will focus on several interrelated themes across a century of dramatic change: The nature of royal authority and state power; the shifting forms of rebellion, protest and resistance; the fraying of traditional social bonds under the pressure of climate change, population growth and spiraling rates of poverty, vagrancy and crime; the revolution in ideas and beliefs fueled by the invention of print; the extension of English colonial authority over Ireland, and the explorations of English adventurers in the Americas; and, above all, the tortured processes—political, social, cultural and psychological—of religious reformation that, after many twists and turns, left the Britannic Isles forever divided. We will meet kings and peasants, farmers and fanatics, merchants and rebels, martyrs and witches, bards and preachers, poets and painters, playwrights and explorers. And we will learn to understand the evidence they have left us of a new world coming violently into being.