Tudor England: Politics, Gender, and Religion. An Introductory Workshop in Doing History

Sixteenth-century England experienced radical shifts in intellectual life, profound religious upheavals, and the first successful experiment in English history of a woman ruler. These developments, part of the broader European movements of Renaissance and Reformation, continue to shape our lives. To sharpen what is distinctive about England’s legacies, we will ask the following questions: How was the Renaissance humanist movement that began in Italy transformed by those debating how Tudor religion and society ought to be reformed? How did Luther’s insights and heroism shape the Reformation on the continent? Did Lutheranism take hold in England? The Bible in English: Since 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, shouldn’t we give credit to the scholar and reformer in Henry VIII’s reign—William Tyndale—who really deserves credit for the most influential book in the English language? In all these momentous changes, how important were the desires and deeds of individual Tudors: Henry VIII, his six wives, his three children—Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth? During the second part of the semester, Queen Elizabeth’s reign will be the focus. Of special import will be her decision, outrageous to contemporaries, to be known as The Virgin Queen. A question: Could it be that she was successful politically precisely because she turned what was deemed her greatest liability—her sex—into her greatest asset? Distinguished biographies and famous plays and films will be resources. Much of our reading will be in primary sources by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Luther, William Tyndale, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth. In a series of workshop sessions, we will try our hands at doing biography and history, as we help each other reconstruct out of primary sources a profound crisis confronting the young Elizabeth. Many of her advisors and many in her House of Commons and in her House of Lords were arrayed against her. Feeling deserted by those she thought supported her, she stood alone against hundreds of the most powerful men in the kingdom throughout a crisis in which that age’s anxieties about politics, gender, and religion overlapped.