Renaissance

The English Renaissance

•Flowering of literary, artistic and intellectual development.

•Began in Italy XIV Century

•Inspired by arts and scholarship of ancient Greece & Rome.

•The humanists believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life.

Characteristics:New interest in the human being’s place on Earth. (afterlife)

Universities introduced a new curriculum called humanities: history, geography, poetry, modern languages.

Invention of printing to movable type.

Greek and Latin was used by scholars. Writers began to write in the vernacular (local language in England).

Renaissance came to

England the final two

Decades of the XV

Century.

Practical consequences:

Exploration:

Crusades opened routes to Asia.

Italian merchants monopolized trade over the new routes (sea & land).

Portugal & Spain seek all sea routes (compass & advances in astronomy).

English reached Newfoundland (claims for NA).

The Protest Reformation

The Roman Catholic Church had the universal authority, questioned later because of indulgent sense caused by payments in order to get remissions of punishment for sins, considered as a corruption for the people.


• Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch thinker (1466-1536) created a edition of New Testament that raised controversial as per Church interpretations.

• He focused on Morality and Religion, and split the Roman Catholic Church.


• Martin Luther, a German monk (1483-1535) introduced a new Christian denomination known as a Protestantism.

• Protestants themselves were divided into Lutherans and Calvinism (John Calvin of Geneva) who brought establishment of Puritan and Presbyterian sects.

England under The Tudors

• Ruled England from 1485 to 1603. This was the period of stability and economic expansion.

• Investors were forming trading companies with some rich places like India.

• London had grown into a metropolis of more than 180,000.00 people.

Henry VII and Henry VIII

• Henry VII restored the law and order. He rebuilt the a nation tired of Civil Wars.

• Rebuilt the nation’s treasure

• He died in 1509.

Henry VII


• Practiced the Catholicism. He even wrote a book against Luther titled “Defender of the Faith”

• Under Act of Supremacy (1534) the king assumed the full control of the Church.

• He dissolved the powerful monasteries selling some lands.

• Married 6 times, died in 1547.

Henry VIII

Edward VI and Mary I

Edward VI: king at 9 died at 15

English replace Latin in church ritual

Anglican prayer book required in public worship

England becoming a Protestant nation.

Catholicism came back when Mary I took the throne

Mary I reign for 5 years

Elizabeth IReceived a renaissance education

Great patron of the arts

Ended the religious turmoil

Monarch supremacy to the church

Quarrels between Spain and England

Privateers: Francis Drake

English Channel War against Spain

StuartsElizabeth named Scotland’s King James I as her successor.

Extension of Elizabeth’s age. Great supporter of the arts.

Power struggle between king and parliament over taxes and foreign wars “divine right of kings”.

Puritans (radical protestants) migrated to America.

Elizabethan PoetryDuring the reign of Elizabeth I the most important developments came in poetry, perfecting sonnets and experimenting with other poetic forms.

Sonnet cycle: the most popular; series of sonnets that fit loosely together to tell a story.

Philip Sidney - Astrophel and Stella Edmund Spenser - The Faerie QueeneChristopher Marlowe - The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. Sir Walter Raleigh - The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.William Shakespeare - He changed the pattern and rhyme of the sonnets, Shakespearean sonnet (or English sonnet).

Elizabethan DramaIt also bloomed along with poetry.

Playwrights away from religious subjects and became complex and sophisticated. Tragedies, comedies, rich language and vivid images.

C. Marlowe was the first dramatist with plays like “Tamburlaine the Great” and “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus”.

Shakespeare began as an actor, but later became a writer. 37 plays, 9 tragedies, several comedies.

Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose

Prose was not as important as poetry and drama and was preferably written in Latin.

Francis Bacon, a high government official under James I, considered the leading prose writer.

54 scholars worked for 3 years on the most monumental achievement of Renaissance: the English translation of the Bible, commissioned by James I.

Nothing has ever been comparable to Shakespeare or the bible translation.

Education

Renaissance