HY 382 Early Modern Britain
England was transformed during the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, England saw the Reformation, the beginnings of the British Empire, the educational revolution, the rise of humanism, the growth of the state, the last feudal rebellions, and the explosion of urbanization; then, divided by a civil war that pitted monarch against Parliament, seventeenth-century England saw the foundation of institutions and ideas that shape our world to this day. We will study some of the most compelling figures of British history: the insatiable Henry VIII and his brilliant daughter, Elizabeth I; the driven Oliver Cromwell and the ‘merry monarch’ Charles II; writers like Shakespeare, Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn; explorers Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake; thinkers such as Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke; But we will also look at larger social and cultural forces that shaped early modern England, including the rise of literacy, a sharpening economic stratification, new understandings of magic and witchcraft, gender roles, the growth of the common law system, and the politics of migration.