Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe and its Social Dimension: A Synthesis

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.

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Book Review: Climate variability in sixteenth-century Europe and its social dimension

The Holocene ◽

10.1177/095968360001000415 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 538-539

Author(s):

Mark New

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Climate Variability ◽

Social Dimension

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Maxims of Foreign Policy

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300044508 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 62-79

Author(s):

W.J. Boot

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

Foreign Relations ◽

East Asian ◽

Modern Period ◽

Cultural Sphere ◽

Japanese Identity

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

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