EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE
commerce and exploration; discovery of America 1492, colonization; Italian writers, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch; Italian art and architecture, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo; Florentine humanist Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486); art patron and statesman Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492); Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Praise of Folly (1509); Nicolo Machiavelli's Il Principe (1513, The Prince); Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516); Martin Luther (1483-1546), Wittenberg Theses (1517), beginnings of the Reformation; Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528, Book of the Courtier)
PRINTING
William Caxton, introduction of the printing press into England c. 1474, increased literacy
HENRY VII (r. 1485-1509)
from House of Lancaster; defeated Richard III at Bosworth field (1485); end of War of the Roses; married Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York; beginning of Tudor dynasty; father of Henry VIII
HENRY VIII (r. 1509-1547)
married his brother Arthur's widow, Katharine of Aragon, mother of Mary I; chief minister Thomas Wolsey; joined Charles V in war against France (1522); conflicts with Pope Clement VII over his desire to divorce Katharine and marry Anne Boleyn (1527); Henry declares himself head of the Church of England (1534), adoption of anti-ecclesiastical policies, papal powers given to king, dissolution of monasteries, break with Rome, Authorized Bible in English (1537); marriage to Anne Boleyn, one daughter, Elizabeth I; Anne convicted of adultery and beheaded in 1536; Wales incorporated to England (1536); marriage to Jane Seymour (d. 1537 in childbirth), mother of Edward VI; married Anne of Cleves (1540) then Catherine Howard who was also beheaded (1542), and then Catherine Parr (1543); war with Scotland (1542)
EDWARD VI (r. 1547-1553)
crowned at age 9, Regency of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset; liberalization of treason and heresy laws; Somerset's sympathy toward peasants; move toward Protestantism; Somerset overthrown by John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, Dudley persuaded Edward to pass crown to Lady Jane Grey (Dudley's daughter-in-law); succession conflicts, victory of Mary I
MARY I (r. 1553-1558)
Catholic allegiance; married Philip of Spain (1554), Spanish alliance, reestablishment of papal authority; persecution of Protestants, "Bloody Mary"; loss of Calais to France (1558), unpopularity of queen
ELIZABETH I (1533-1603, r. 1558-1603)
Elizabethan Age, time of economic, commercial, colonial, industrial and cultural advancement for England; piratical raids against Spanish ships and possessions (e.g. Sir Francis Drake); defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588); reestablishment of Anglican Church and return to Protestantism, measures against Catholics; ministers William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; imprisonment and execution of Mary Queen of Scots
JAMES I (b. 1566, king of Scotland as James VI r. 1567 to 1625, king of England r. 1603-1625)
Son of Mary Queen of Scots; Stuart dynasty;Presbyterian Protestant; Jacobean Age
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)
humanist scholar; friend of Erasmus; Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, Utopia
(1516), in Latin prose, account of imaginary society based on reason, features
a traveler, Raphael Hythloday, who discovers land of "Utopia" which
is characterized by communistic life, education for all, and religious freedom;
More executed for refusing to sign oath of allegiance supporting Henry VIII
in his conflict against the Pope and the Catholic Church
John Skelton (c. 1460-1529)
poet, rhetorician, translator; poet laureate at Oxford and Cambridge; tutor
to the young Henry VIII; The Bowge of Court (1498), satire of court life;
took religious orders, rector of church at Diss, Norfolk; return to court, king's
orator (1512); satires and attacks against Cardinal Wolsey (Speak, Parrot,
Why Come Ye not to Court? (1521-22), satires against ecclesiastics (Colin
Clout); The Garland of Laurel (1523, included "To Mistress Margaret
Hussey"); jagged skeltonic poetic line (2-5 beats)
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
courtier and diplomat, served Henry VIII, ambassador to Spain and to Charles
V, missions to France and Italy; translations of Italian poets (Petrarch, Sannazaro);
twice imprisoned (1536, 1541); praise of quiet, retired life; critique of court
life; sonnets and ballets; introduced and adapted the sonnet form into English;
97 poems attributed to him in Tottel's Miscellany (1557); "They
Flee from Me," "My Lute, Awake," "Mine Own John Poins"
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
brought up with Henry VIII's illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond;
proud, adventurous courtier and soldier; in disgrace under Jane Seymour, in
favor under his cousin Catherine Howard; eventually charged with treason and
beheaded; continued and developed sonnet into English form (three quatrains
and a couplet): abab cdcd efef gg; first English poet to use blank
verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in partial translation of Virgil's Aeneid;
40 poems attributed to him in Tottel's Miscellany (1557); "Epitaph
on Sir Thomas Wyatt" (1542), "Prisoned in Windsor ..."
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), allegorical verse romance in Spenserian stanza (8 lines of 10 syllables plus 1 line of twelve syllables rhyming ababbcbcc); Amoretti, series of 88 sonnets, record of Spenser's wooing of Elizabeth Boyle; Epithalamion (1595), hymn celebrating Spenser's marriage to Elizabeth Boyle (1594)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Astrophil and Stella (1582,
published 1591/98), sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, likely written
for Penelope (Devereux) Rich; Arcadia (two versions 1581, 1583-84,
published 1590/93), prose romance including some poems; complex story
of intrigue, disguises, love affairs, and near tragedies in pastoral setting;
written as entertainment for his younger sister, the Countess of Pembroke; The
Defence of Poesie (1579, published 1595), essay in defense of
poetry, imagination, and literary creation as vehicles of both teaching and
entertainment
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Tamburlaine (first staging 1587, first edition 1590), Dr. Faustus (1592-93)