The English Renaissance.

Catalog description

The English Renaissance is justly celebrated as a high watermark of literary achievement: Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe and Jonson all wrote remarkable work that expanded the horizons of the English literary tradition. But the English Renaissance is not just the story of the Elizabethans, who worked in a time of relative political stability, but also of early writers, like Wyatt, Surrey and More, who wrote amid unprecedented religious and social change and, in some cases, bitter religious persecution. The sixteenth century also saw the production of two monumental works for the history of the Protestant faith: William Tyndale's English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer largely written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. This course offers an overview of Renaissance literature that covers the entire sixteenth century, focusing mainly on the Elizabethans, but reading them against the background of religious and intellectual reform and counter-reform that defined the early decades of the sixteenth century.