English 245  with Dr. Gary Gutchess
Tompkins-Cortland Community College

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Lessons

1. Classical Britain

2. Beowulf 1

3. Beowulf 2

4. Middle Ages

5. Romance

6. Sir Gawain

7. Malory

8. Chaucer's Miller

9. Wife of Bath

10. Religious Protest

11. Biblical Drama

12. Play of Mankind

13. Early Modern Period

14. Thomas More

15. Philip Sidney

16. Print Culture

17. Walter Raleigh

18. Twelfth Night 1

19. Twelfth Night  2

20. Civil War

21. An Age of Irreverence

22. Aphra Behn

23. Reading Papers

24. Gulliver

25. Rape of the Lock

26. School for Scandal

27. New God

28. Revolution

Final Exam

     **  13. EARLY MODERN PERIOD  **

Books and the breakdown of church and state!

NOTES AND COMMENTARY
These notes are freely adapted by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al., Teaching British Literature (New York: Longman, 2003).

The Early Modern Period
What happened after the Middle Ages has gone by a variety of names. When I was young, it was known as "the reformation," usually with a formidable capital R. This was an Anglican (Church of England) label but also a broadly Protestant one, denoting our forefathers' decision to switch from more or less one western Christian church to many. To ardent secularists, however, the period after the Middle Ages has been and probably always will be known as "the Renaissance," the "rebirth" of classical learning and science that had been suppressed since antiquity by religious zealots.

Many scholars today, however, have abandoned these controversial terms in favor of "early modern." This name has the advantage of looking forward, properly accenting all of the relevance of that distant era to our own time, but eventually I suspect that "early modern" will pass away, together with the related terms "modern" and "post-modern." People living in the future will think of themselves as modern, and we will seem to them ridiculously unmodern.

The years in question are roughly coterminous with the 16th and 17th centuries. Political historians generally describe this age  as "the Tudor-Stuart period," the time of the Tudor dynasty and Stuart dynasty,  from the accession of Henry VII in 1485, following the Battle of Bosworth Field which ended the long period of civil conflict known as the War of the Roses. The Tudor line, which greatly strengthened the crown, died of natural causes with the virgin queen Elizabeth I in 1603, and the related Stuart line that followed similarly ran out of heirs with spinster Queen Anne in 1714. Beyond Anne, whose reign saw the pinnacle of Greco-Roman neoclassicism in the arts, came the Hanoverian Georges and brand new Gothic influences on British literature. (In our textbook, however, the early modern period ends rather arbitrarily at 1660.)

The Tudor-Stuart period is largely about its powerful monarchs. They were so unlike one another as to cause discontinuities throughout the era, even in literary matters. For example, Shakespeare's career divides clearly in two: an early Elizabethan phase, devoted to comedies and history plays that were favorites of Elizabeth (represented in our anthology by Twelfth Night), followed by a much more somber and satiric Jacobean phase of tragedies, dark comedies and tragi-comedies (represented in our anthology by The Tempest). 

The rich variety of literary output from this period, the explosion of books and pamphlets and handbills of every description, is primarily due to the mechanical printing press. This technology allowed the emergence of free speech, as print was beyond the ability of government and church censors to control successfully. That is why there is so much early modern literature to talk about, why it is so varied in form and subject matter, and why so much of it is politically, socially, religiously or otherwise revolutionary. Our course now enters the Age of Books!

Finally, if the forgoing descriptions of the period are not enough, add the most important label: Age of Discovery. After 1492 Britain was no longer a backwater on the outer fringe of Europe, the place farthest from Greece, Rome, and the riches of the east. Even though the founder of the Tudor dynasty turned down a voyage proposal from Columbus, British explorations by John Cabot and others were under way before 1500. Britain did not need to be first to the new world in order to realize its strategic geographical advantage for world conquest and global trade. In early modern Britain lie the seeds of the Anglo-American empire of the next 500 years!

Government and Self-Government
The questioning of authority is a recurring early modern theme. The government of the state, the church, the classroom, and even the family came under scrutiny, and elaborate justifications were argued to support a range of views. Authority was not only questioned but permanently altered. Protest led to a church set aside, and a king beheaded. How should society be re-organized? There were plenty of competing ideas and social experiments. Perhaps another name for the period would be the Age of Disagreement.

As this section of the anthology suggests, there were plenty of advocates for an absolute and authoritarian government. King James attempted to prove that the king was above the law. Tyndale thought that absolute government was justified by the Bible, and those who disagreed are damned; Elyot saw that absolute rule corresponded to the order of nature, as illustrated by the bee, the quintessential social animal. Others more pragmatic like Hobbes feared that to depart from the rule of an autocratic central government invited lawless chaos. All of these main stream views reject the aristocratic feudal state which had culminated in the self-destructive Wars of the Roses. There was to be no more Morte Darthur with a weak king overpowered by his greedy barons.

Others, like John Ponet and Thomas Smith, shared belief in a rule of law, but saw merit only in a government that caused the governed to prosper, and feared the concentration of power in the hands of one person. Ponet, who spent much of his adult life in hiding from religious persecution by Queen Mary, and parliamentarian Smith are likely to strike readers today as the most modern of these early moderns. They are forerunners of the founders of the US Constitution with its limited and divided government. Ponet’s insistence on property rights and the well being of citizens anticipates the comprehensive view of the “rights of man” which emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries, and "human rights" in the 20th.

The theoretical state was paralleled by the theoretical  household. A common view of domestic relations, illustrated by Vives, made women subservient: as Robert Cleaver noted, the household is a “little commonwealth” in which the husband is “cheef” and his wife a “fellowhelper” (A Godly Form of Household Government, 1598). The flaw in projecting this gender bias into politics came to light when Henry VIII produced no male heirs who survived to adulthood. Elyot, paying attention to the possibility that England might be governed by a woman in his lifetime, claimed that history supplied many exceptional examples to the general rule of female subservience. By necessity power came to rest with queens Lady Jane, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1.

The monarchy's consolidation of power came at the expense not only of the aristocrats but also of the church. A large body of early modern literature debates reformation of the religious establishment. Theorists tended to focus either on the right to dissent, sometimes with bloody consequences (e.g., Foxe); or on the duty to conform (e.g., Hooker). Ironically, Foxe's book of protestant martyrs is modeled on Catholic saint's lives, while Hooker is called upon to make the untraditional argument that the king ought to be head of the church.

The Stuarts ultimately were forced to share more and more of political power with the commons, represented by Parliament.  Wide-spread education, if not mass education, was enabled by the printing press. In book culture, the instructor was no longer a philosopher tutoring princes one-on-one, but an educator responsible for the intellectual development of multitudes. Education was the key to creating a self-governed citizenry.

Castiglione contended that one can and should study to become an office holder. This idea seems obvious to us, but it was a novelty in the Tudor period. (There were no civil service exams in medieval Britain!) The practical comments of Ascham and Mulcaster on corporal punishment, “quick study,” and close-mindedness may strike today’s students as especially relevant to their own experiences in the public school classroom. Discussion of what Mulcaster understood by prejudice can lead to an appreciation of how suspect rote memorization had become in this period of inquiry, questioning and debate. It is with the early moderns that ancient skepticism is reborn in such remarkable Brits as Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne.

Above, the happy family of Henry VIII who broke ties with Rome and strengthened the navy.

Left: Jimmy Stuart, James VI of Scotland and James I of England, successor to Elizabeth I. His view that the king is above the law rubbed many of his subjects the wrong way. His son Charles I would be beheaded by an act of Parliament.

Left: Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651) had a skeptical view of human nature, but advocated an authoritarian central government to keep the peace.

Left: scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Smith argued that the law was king, and the law was made by parliament. The king had veto power but was otherwise servant of the law.

Left: cover page to the famous misogynist treatise by protestant John Knox against female rulers (especially Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart)

How remarkable is it that advances in the conception and rights of women have coincided with the rule of Queens of England? Modern women's suffrage began in the reign of Victoria; women's lib and feminism have arisen under Elizabeth II.

Left: Raphael's painting of Baldasare Castiglione (1478-1529), product of Renaissance humanism, authored  the definitive European how-to book on courtiership.

Left: Han's Holbein's The Ambassadors, from the National Portrait Gallery, London, contains a mystery. Do you see it?

The Battle of Bosworth Field from the Richard III Society

Early Modern England Sourcebook from www.EnglishHistory.org

Luminarium: 16th Century Rennaissance English Literature

Uniting the Kingdoms 1066-1603 from the UK National Archive

Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully  complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. If he adopts it in his list, extra course credit will be awarded.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON

The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at  SUNY Learning Network.  See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal.

Journal

Write for an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize the readings or evaluate them. Some journaling ideas you may wish to choose for today include:

How is the social order noted by Caesar (priests-warriors-commons) and practiced in the Middle Ages (church-king and nobles-commons) altered in these early modern readings?

Which selection in today's readings strikes you as being the most true? Which seems most false? Why?

Are any of the readings in this lesson helpful in analyzing the contemporary debate between civil rights and national security?

If the printing press is largely responsible for the transformation of manuscript society to the Age of Books, how will the recent development of electronic text transform the world beyond that Age?

 Copyright 2008 by Gary Homer Gutchess.