Humanism and elizabethan era?

Question: Humanism and elizabethan era!?

how did humanism affect renaissance britain!? what changes did take place!?

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Much the same way as it affected the rest of Europe!. There was a change of emphasis in artistic and academic life, away from the narrowly religious to a broader, human-centred view!. Look at Elizabethan art (Hilliard, for instance); there is a new realism in the detail as well as the focus of the whole picture!. Listen to some Elizabethan madrigals; a new expressive flexibility enters music as much as the visual arts!.

Philosophy was affected too!. You only have to read Gabriel Harvey's letters to see that the debate between Platonists (the new wave) and Aristotelians in the universities, especially Cambridge, is raging; on the other hand science is beginning to take a more truly Aristotelian (as oposed to mediaeval/scholastic) approach with hands-on research into everything they could imagine - astronomy, the preserving power of cold, geography!.!.!.!.

There was a political dimension!. Ancient Greek political writings were seen to have relevance; Machiavelli, the arch-realist and embittered ex-idealist was much read and quoted!. We heard more about the duty of kings towards their subjects - only a little later, Hobbes pointed out that the sovereign is there for the benefit of the subject, not vice-versa - and rather less about the divine right of kings, culminating of course, at length, in the English civil war!.

Much of this of course came via Italy but some was down to religious curiosity and the Reformation, some to Dutch thinking (e!.g!. Erasmus) and some to native thinking - there is no exact Italian antecedent for the Elizabethan theatre, Hilliard, Tallis or Byrd!.

In general, old habits of mind were shaken up and the way opened for a new accession of knowledge and, in the end, political freedom!.Www@QuestionHome@Com