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The tumultuous character of the age has been described as a "renaissance"—literally a "rebirth." Nineteenth-century historians attributed the intellectual and social energy that initiated the reform of the medieval world to a revival of interest in the classical past. By 1400, Italian scholars had begun to reread the works of Greek and Roman authors—Plato and Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace—and to look with fresh eyes at the physical monuments of the ancient world that were still so prominent in their landscapes. Their movement traveled north and west to France, the Low Countries, Germany, the Iberian peninsula, and eventually England. What was "reborn" as a result was a sense of the meanings to be discovered in the here and now, in the social, political and economic everyday world. Writing about the intellectual vitality of the age, the French humanist François Rabelais had his amiable giant Gargantua confess that his own education had been "darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance." Gargantua knows, however, that his son will be taught differently: Good literature has been restored unto its former light and dignity, and with such amendment and increase of knowledge, that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-school boys...I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time. These comically overstated remarks nevertheless convey the spirit of the Renaissance: learning was no longer only to be devoted to securing salvation, but should address the conditions of ordinary life as well. The pre-Christian cultures of the ancient Mediterranean had introduced Europeans to philosophies that valued human society and its future generations; studying classical texts afresh, thinkers began to attend in new ways to the world around them. The writers and scholars responsible for the rebirth of a secular culture have been known as "humanists," because they read "humane" as well as "sacred" letters; and their intellectual and artistic practices have been termed "humanism." The humanists cultivated certain habits of thought that became widely adopted by early modern thinkers of all kinds: skill in using language analytically, attentiveness to public and political affairs as well as private and moral ones, and an acute appreciation for differences between peoples, regions, and times. It was, after all, the humanists who began to realize that the classical past required understanding; they recognized the past as unfamiliar, neither Christian nor European, and they knew, therefore, that it had to be studied, interpreted, and, in a sense, reborn. At the same time, changes were occurring for which there were no precedents. During these years, the modern world was born as much as an older world was reborn, and for this reason the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have also been called the "early modern period." Its modernity was registered in many ways. Instruments for measuring time and space provided a knowledge of physical nature, a mapping of land, sea, and even the sky that began to permit global travel. Means had to be designed to compute the wealth that was being created by manufacture and trade, and new methods were employed by a people keen to exploit all kinds of resources, including the labor of individuals. Money was used in new and complex ways, its flow managed through such innovations as double-entry bookkeeping and letters of exchange that registered debt and credit in interregional markets. The capital that accumulated as a result of these kinds of transactions fueled merchant banks, joint-stock companies, and—notably in England—trading companies that sponsored colonies abroad. In England especially, wealth was increasingly based on money, not land, and the change encouraged a social mobility that reflected but also exploited the old hierarchy. Riches could and did make it possible for an artisan's son to purchase a coat of arms and become a gentleman, as William Shakespeare did. More important, moneyed wealth supported the artistic and scholarly institutions that allowed the stepson of a bricklayer to go to the best school in London, to profit from the business of the theater, and to compose literary works of sufficient brilliance to make him poet laureate, as Ben Jonson did. "Ambition is like choler," warned Francis Bacon; it makes men "active, earnest, full of alacrity and stirring." But if ambition "be stopped and cannot have his way, it becommeth adust, and thereby maligne and venomous." Early modern society was certainly both active and stirring; but the very energy that gave it momentum could also lead to hardship, distress, and personal tragedy. Urban life flourished in conditions that were increasingly hospitable to commerce; rural existence became precarious as small farms failed. During the fifteenth century the nobility had begun to enlarge their estates by the incorporation or "enclosing" of what had formerly been public or common land. They sought to profit from a new activity: sheep farming. Thousands of men and women who had worked the land on modest estates lost their livelihoods as a result. Many came to the cities, particularly London; others traveled through the country, looking for odd work, begging, and thieving. The situation got worse when Henry VIII broke England's tie to the Catholic Church, for Henry added to the property of the very rich by giving them the land he had confiscated from the church. On the other hand, the great centers of commerce—Bristol, Norwich, and London—sustained not only trade but also many kinds of manufacture. One of the most important was printing. The invention of movable type in 1436 by a German printer, Johann Gutenberg, revolutionized the dissemination of texts. A single illuminated manuscript took years to produce and provided what was often a unique version of a text, an item that might cost as much as a small farm; a printing press could quickly produce multiple copies of identical versions of a text for as little as a few shillings. Both the mentality of the "Renaissance" and the more comprehensive culture of the early modern period are illustrated by the history of the most frequently disseminated and contested text of these centuries: the Bible. It was the work of humanists to establish what that text was (after centuries of corrupted versions) and then to translate it into the vernacular languages. Desiderius Erasmus provided accurate Hebrew and Greek texts and translated them into Latin. Printed English translations begin with William Tyndale's New Testament, introduced to England in the 1520s. Later versions included the Geneva Bible with its Calvinist commentary; the Bishops' Bible, repudiating much of that commentary; and the King James Bible, or "Authorized Version," a work by forty-seven translators that was published in 1611. Protestant doctrine emphasized the importance of reading Scripture as a means to spiritual enlightenment, and the preface to the King James Bible insists that for this purpose a translation is as good as the original: "No cause why the word translated should be denied to be the word." But the importance of the Bible went beyond its status as the basis for religious belief. People from various walks of life, not only humanists, found the Bible a source of inspiration for social reform, a means to link together religious conviction and political practice. Drawing on the Bible to justify their ideas of government, writers as different as the radical Bishop of Winchester, John Ponet, and the scholarly King James VI of Scotland, eventually James I of England, presented arguments for distinctive kinds of monarchy. Ponet insisted that a monarch was obliged to obey the law of the land and thus to adhere to a "constitution"; James thought that a monarch should respect only divine law and be considered "absolute." Other writers, inspired by their own understanding of God's word, forged new concepts of the state, the subject, and sovereignty that would continue to shape political philosophy to the American War of Independence. The Bible and the attitudes it prompted were also factors in the establishment of an English church. The English people had been forced to break formally and definitively from the Catholic Church because their king, Henry VIII, wished to be independent of the papacy and its government in Rome. His reasons were many and complex. Certainly responsive to the demand for changes in church government, doctrine, and liturgy, Henry was motivated by personal and political interests as well. In love with a lady of the court, Anne Boleyn, he was persuaded that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his older brother, Prince Arthur, violated divine law. Catherine, mother of the girl who would become Mary I, had failed to give Henry a son, and he saw in his frustrated hopes for the dynastic stability that would come from having a male heir a sign that God was displeased with his marriage. He sought a divorce from the Pope and was refused. In 1533, however, his pliable Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, defying the Pope out of loyalty to his king, pronounced Henry's marriage to Catherine invalid. The following year, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy; besides making the monarch of England head of an English church, it made Henry immediately free from the Pope's jurisdiction. English clergy who had promoted the idea of a reformation began to institute the changes they had envisaged. But the socially destabilizing effects of the English reformation, far from abating, grew more profound as time went on. Huge numbers of the faithful would suffer, Protestants as well as Catholics. The creation of an English church not only separated England from most of the continent, it disturbed the religious peace that had prevailed for centuries. The story is a grim one: Catholics in the north of England unsuccessfully resisted Henry's imposition of Protestantism in their Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536; Protestants were in turn persecuted by Mary I throughout her reign; Catholics were suppressed by Elizabeth I; and sectarians of various denominations were required to adhere to Anglican forms of worship and obey episcopal power under the Stuarts. The prodigiously revolutionary changes in early modern England were vividly reflected in its profuse and varied literature. Topics and issues that for centuries had been considered by relatively small numbers of literate people were now registered in general debate. New and evolving conditions of religious, intellectual, and political life provided writers with a vast subject matter, and their work shed light on the world that they saw unfolding before them. They showed its potential for prosperous development through all kinds of human activity; they represented its long and varied history as proof of providential direction; and they praised its myriad forms as the expression of a divine and beneficent artificer. As late twentieth-century readers, we come to the literature of this period with our own perspectives on what is modern and what we understand as postmodern. Many features of early modern culture are again in transition today: the printed book, which once superseded the manuscript, is now being challenged by computer-generated hypertext; the nation-state, which once eclipsed the feudal domain and divided "Christendom," is now qualified by an international economy; and the belief in human progress, which was once applauded as an advance over the medieval faith in divine providence, is now subject to criticism, in large part because of such kinds of injustice and inequity as slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of wage labor—all factors in the growth of early modern England and of other states in Europe. As modern and postmodern readers, we have a special affinity with our early modern counterparts. Like them, we study change.
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