the 16th century, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica the 16th century e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY At the beginning of the 16th century, the English language had almost no prestige abroad, and there were those at home who doubted that it could serve as a suitable medium for serious, elevated, or elegant discourse. It is no accident that one of the first works in this selection of sixteenth-century literature, Thomas More's Utopia , was not written in English. This work quickly became famous throughout Europe, but it was not translated into English until the 1550s. Though in 1600 England still remained somewhat peripheral to the Continent, English had been fashioned into an immensely powerful expressive medium, one whose cadences in the works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or the translators of the Bible continue after more than four countries to thrill readers. The court and the city the development of the English language in the sixteenth century is linked at least indirectly to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. The social and economic struggle after the War of the Roses was resolved by the establishment of the Tudor dynasty that ruled England from 1485 to 1603. The family name derives from Owen Tudor, an ambitious Welshman who himself had no claim to the throne but who married Catherine of Valois. Their grandson became the first Tudor Monarch. England's barons, impoverished and divide by the dynastic wars, could not effectively oppose to the new power of the Crown, and the leader of the Church also supported the royal power. The court was a center of culture as well as power: culture and power were not, in any case, easily separable in Tudor England. Tudor Courtiers were torn between the need to protect themselves and the equally pressing need to display themselves. Sixteenth-century poets had much to learn from courtiers; indeed many of the best poets in the period, S.T Wyatt, S.P Sydney and others were courtiers. If court culture fostered performances for a small coterie audience, other forces in Tudor England pulled toward more public sphere. Markets expanded significantly, international trade flourished, and cities surge in size and importance. London's population in particular soared, making it the largest and fastest-growing city not only in England but in all of Europe. About a decade before Henry VII won his throne, the art of printing from movable metal type had been introduced into England. Literacy seems to have increased during the 15th century and still more during the 16th, when protestantism encouraged a direct encounter with the Bible. Printing made books cheaper and more plentiful, providing more opportunity to read an more incentive to learn. Indeed the great innovations of the Tudor era ¬¬¬¬¬intellectual, governamental and religious ̶ were all presented at the time as attempts to restore lost links with ancient traditions. Renaissance Humanism During the 15th century a few English clerics and government officials had journeyed to Italy and had seen something of extraordinary cultural and intellectual movement flourishing in the city-states there. That movement, generally known as the Renaissance, involved the rebirth of letters and arts stimulated by the recovery of texts and artifacts from classical antiquity. It also unleashed new ideas and new social, political and economic forces that gradually displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle Ages. In England, Humanism was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform. The purpose was to train the sons of the nobility and gentry to speak and write Latin, the language of diplomacy, of the profession. They chiefly learned modern languages, religion, music and so on, but they very seldom received the first grounding in ancient languages and classical literature so central to Renaissance culture. Humanists committed to classical learning were faced with the questions of whether to write their own works in Latin or in English. This impulse gave rise to many distinguished translations like the Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The reformation Officially at least England in the early 16th century had a single religion, Catholicism, whose acknowledge head was the pope in Rome. For its faithful adherents the Roman Catholic Church was the central institution in their lives, a universal infallible guide to human existence. They were instructed by its teachings, corrected by its discipline, sustained by its sacraments, and comforted by its promises. Nevertheless, in the 16th century a heretical disputation was developed by Martin Luther, an Augustinian Monk. When he rose up against the ancient church, he did so in the name of private conscience enlightened by a personal reading of the Scriptures. Luther Charged the pope and his hierarchy were the servants of Satan and that the church had degenerated into a corrupt, worldly conspiracy designed to bilk the credulous and subvert secular authority. In England, however, the Reformation began less with popular discontent and theological disputation than with dynastic politics and royal greed. Henry had once been a sincere Roman Catholic and had even authored a book strongly criticizing Luther, but he later found it expedient and profitable to break with the Papacy. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, bore him only a single child that survived infancy,Mary. Henry strongly wanted a male heir, and many of his subjects might have agreed, if only because they wanted to avoid another dynastic conflict like the Wars of the Roses. King Henry decided to remove the Church of England from the authority of Rome. In 1534, the Act of Supremacy recognized Henry as "the only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England".Between 1535 and 1540, under Thomas Cromwell, the policy