Session 1: Early and Medieval Britain: From Roman Britain to the Coming of the Tudors
Session 2: Britain in the Renaissance
Session 3: Britain in the Ages of the Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
Session 4: Empire and After: Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Britain in the Renaissance
Few periods in history and culture are as full
or exciting as that of Britain between 1485 (the end of the destructive
internal strife of the War of the Roses) and 1688 (the year of the
“Glorious” or “Bloodless” Revolution, which expelled James II and confirmed
Britain’s course as a Protestant state ruled by Parliament and a limited
monarchy).
If these two centuries saw the origins of a state that was to become one of the world’s most powerful, the birth was by no means smooth. Early modern Britain experienced chronic instability and explosive and exhilarating change. Henry VIII’s declaration of an independent Church of England in the 1530s is only the most striking event in a series of bitterly contested Reformations and Counter-Reformations that lasted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all parts of the British Isles. By the end of the period, the universal western Church of the Middle Ages had broken not just into Roman Catholic and Protestant, but Protestantism itself had fragmented into different sects, often violently at odds with each other.
Henry VIII’s motives were at least as much political and financial as religious, and the period’s tensions and competitions had profound effects on culture and society, as well as politics high and low. Some of these effects were destructive, as in the many coup d’états, rebellions, and wars within and between the countries that made up the British Isles.
At the same time, however, this very instability ushers in a period of breathtaking cultural development. This is the period of Shakespeare and the great drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean London and of the birth of a self-conscious, modern national literature in the works of poets such as Spenser and Milton. In the visual arts, Britain engages in a tense and painful national debate about the relative values of indigenous art, a foreign-inspired Renaissance, and between the competing styles of the gothic and the classical. The result is some of the most interesting and beautiful buildings and objects ever produced in England. And the great beauties of medieval music develop in the period, with a wonderful flowering in the works of William Byrd and his contemporaries.