This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
English history is traditionally divided along dynastic lines and the divide between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period is usually dated to 1485. As Sellar and Yeatman observed ‘The reign of Henry VII marks the end of the Middle Ages’. Yet scholars of English literature, drama and culture have long been used to looking past political events and dynastic change to chart longer-term developments. This module introduces students to the years 1400-1600 as a cohesive period in English history that saw a transformation in political, literary, intellectual and religious culture. Moreover, in European terms the years from 1400 to 1600 witnessed the rise to cultural hegemony of the studia humanitatis, the discovery of the New World, and the religious upheavals of the European Reformation. This module looks at the major political events of these years – the Lancastrian Revolution, the Wars of the Roses, the Henrician Reformation, the Mid-Tudor Crisis, and the problems of female monarchy during the reign of Elizabeth I – in the context of longer term developments in the cultural, intellectual and social history of England. Students will be introduced to literary texts including both poetry and drama, material culture, and the built environment, alongside more traditional historical sources (such as chronicles, administrative records and correspondence) as sources for the historian of pre-modern England.
Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (2003)
David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 (2010)
James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, volume 2 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002)
Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (ed.), A Companion to Tudor Britain (2004)
Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430-1530 (2007)
Penry Williams, The Later Tudors 1547-1603 (1995)
David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (2012)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
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