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Click on the links below to jump directly that section of the Overview. To view other features in this module, choose an item from the list on your left. For instance, to access information about an author, choose "Early Modern Authors" on your left, then click on the highlighted author's name.
We see the past through lenses that show us something of the world we are living in. How we mark periods in history depends less on an objective evaluation of evidence than on our sense of its relation to our own present. The centuries between 1500 and 1700 have been termed the "Renaissance" and, more recently, "the early modern period." What do these two names mean and what do they tell us about our understanding of this single and continuous stretch of time? However we describe these centuries, they encompassed events that changed profoundly the way people lived and thought. In 1500, the English church was part of a united Western Christendom led by the Pope, and people around the country prayed according to a common liturgy. It was understood that the earth was the center of the universe; that the human body was a balance of the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water; and that nature, read like a book, could reveal a moral order. English men and women had a deep respect for law, which they assumed would protect them from tyranny as well as anarchy. These beliefs had been challenged in the preceding century and a half by the natural calamities of plague and famine, by the political upheaval of the Rising of 1381, and more generally by the growth of towns, trade, and a degree of social mobility. Yet for most people in 1500 the old beliefs held fast, as did the traditional way of life that sustained them. And outside the growing merchant class, a person's place tended to be fixed at birth; the majority of folk lived in country villages, worked the land, and traded in regional markets. By the end of the seventeenth century, much of this way of life had vanished. England had broken away from Roman religious authority; in addition to the Church of England and the Presbyterian churches of Scotland, Protestantism had created a variety of sects: Anabaptists, Puritans, and Quakers. Worship was conducted in English, not in the Latin that had been used for centuries. Catholics, suspected of subversive intentions, were barely tolerated. A natural philosophy based on experimental methods had begun to reshape the disciplines of physics, medicine, and biology; such ancient authorities as Aristotle, Galen, and Pliny were no longer unquestioned. Sketched in principle by Sir Francis Bacon in his treatise on scientific inquiry, Novum Organum (literally, "the new instrument"), published in 1620, a systematic investigation of nature had not begun before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. But the world view it would help to confirm was already evident early in the seventeenth century: the work of the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei on gravitational force had demonstrated that the most elementary laws of nature were mathematical; the German astronomer Johannes Kepler had confirmed that the universe was heliocentric; and in England, William Harvey had established that the body was energized not by the eccentric flow of "humors" but by a circulation of blood to and from the heart. Scientists would consolidate their status as intellectuals by forming the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in 1660—a foundation that was vigorously supported by the new Stuart king, Charles II. Political life had taken a new direction as well. A civil war, interrupting the peace of over a century, had created a new kind of monarchy. The war had been fought over social and economic issues but also over a matter of principle: England was to be governed by a monarch whose authority and power were not absolute but limited by law and the actions of Parliament, a legislative assembly representing his subjects. The cities, enjoying a prosperity created by international commerce, became crowded even as they expanded with new streets, marketplaces, and buildings for private as well as public use. Country folk flocked to these burgeoning urban centers. Succumbing to diseases spread by filth and overcrowding, they often died younger than did their rural relatives. But England was becoming a nation of city dwellers, and everyone knew of "citizens" who had gained wealth and station in these exciting, if also terrifying, cities.
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