The Early Renaissance

1485 1625

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Renaissance -- Rebirth

•Literary, artistic, and intellectual development

•Began in Italy in the 14th century (the 1300s)

•Overall thirst for knowledge

•A look to the golden ages of Greece & Rome for inspiration, probably brought about by the Crusades

Changes in the Renaissance

RELIGION

EDUCATION

LITERACY

Emphasis on Afterlife

Reserved for clergy

Emphasis on humans’ place on Earth

•Humanities: history, geography, modern languages

•More widespreadInvention of printing press

•More books

•Stabilization of language

•Handwritten manuscripts

•Books rare and expensive

Medieval England

Renaissance England

Characteristics of the Renaissance

•Exploration--a natural offshoot of the thirst for knowledge•Protestant Reformation

•reduced emphasis on Catholic doctrine in literature•arose from a growing sense of nationalism and discontent with the authority of Rome

Martin Luther

The Tudor Dynasty

(Began in 1485 and lasted until 1603)•Henry VII: inherited an England

divided by Civil War (the War of the Roses)

•Rebuilt the nation’s treasury

•Established law and order

•Restored prestige to the monarchy

Henry VIII: •Broke with the Catholic church in an attempt to shed wives by annulment, which the Pope had refused to grant him (Act of Supremacy, 1534)•Established the Church of England (the Anglican church)

Edward VI:

•Henry VIII’s son by his third wife (Jane Seymour)

•Became King at age 9 and was dead at age 15

•Church services in Anglican Church conducted in English rather than in Latin

•Book of Common Prayer originated

Mary I (Bloody Mary):

•Henry VIII’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon (who was from Spain)

•Catholic (as was her husband/ cousin, Philip II from Spain)

•Restored the authority of the Pope

•Ordered the execution of over 200 Protestants

•Reign lasted over 5 years

Elizabeth I:

Henry VIII’s daughter by Anne Boleyn

•Well-educated and well-read

•Courtiers included the best writers of the English Renaissance (Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, etc.)

•Reestablished monarch’s rule over the Church of England

•Defeat of the Spanish Armada established England as a great sea power

The Stuart Dynasty 1603

(17th Century)

•James VI of Scotland became James I of England

•Also known as the Jacobean era

Trends in

Renaissance

Literature•Early Influences

•Thomas More: Utopia (in Latin; prose)

•Sir Thomas Wyatt: introduced the sonnet form to England

•Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey: introduced blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)

•Poetry

•More lyric than narrative (which had been popular in the Middle Ages)

•Sonnet sequence cycle (used by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare)

•Sir Edmund Spenser: wrote The Faerie Queen, an epic as well as a two-level allegory

•Christopher Marlowe: used pastoral verse, which plays on the beauty of rural life

•Sir Walter Raleigh: known as an overall “Renaissance man”

•Drama

•Turned from religious to secular subjects

•Tragedies & comedies are reintroduced

•Usually in verse; poets and playwrights were often the same people

•Prose

•Not the most popular genre

•Still often in Latin

•Raleigh & Sir Frances Bacon were writing at this time

•King James Version of the Bible

•English translation of the Bible

•Commissioned by King James (1611)

•Took 54 scholars three years to complete the translation from the original Old Testament (in Hebrew) and the New Testament (in Greek)