16th century epistemology and natural philosophy
New Science (Astronomy) and magic--the omnipotence of the human; Platonic theology
Astrology--human impotence
Both views can be found in the same writers.

New Geography
Some in More's Utopia; some in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne.

Humanism and Puritanism
Definition of humanist p. 18
One who taught, or learned, or at least strongly favoured Greek and the new kind of Latin; humanism is the critical principles and critical outlook which ordinarily went with these studies.
Humanist contributions and limitations. Pp18-20
Humanists recovered, edited, and expounded a great many ancient texts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Unfortunately, they also turned certain observations by the ancients into arbitrary rules (for example, Aristotle's observations on Greek tragedy became strict standards for play-writing) and even foisted on the Greeks rules that were not theirs at all. They also took credit for a civilized (classical) latin as opposed to the medieval (vulgar) Latin. But except for More's Utopia, no text of classical Latin has any interest to moderns except to teach us about humanism. Law, medicine, and religion continued to read (and sing) Medieval Latin well into the 20th century.

Humanists on style: The Humanists invented the idea of the 'classical' period in a language: the correct or normative period. This led (unfortunately) to aping language of the past instead of developing it to meet changing needs of new talent and new ideas.

Humanists on content: Ironically, while humanists insisted that the medievals had distorted the ancients, medieval poems are much closer to the spirit of the ancient literature than most of the humanistic pieces that ape them. Humanism is not a movement towards freedom and expansion. Racine and Milton are the only poets who thoroughly followed out the humanistic ideal of style and were not destroyed by it. Ultimately, though the Humanists thought and claimed they were reclaiming the Greek, their culture was overwhelmingly Latin. Plato's influence was on philosophy, not on the spirit or form of literature.

Reformation --pre-Calvinist stage
The common people in Henry's age had piety but it wasn't theological. People still believed that every event, every natural fact, every institution is rooted in the supernatural. Every change is unhesitatingly referred to God. Hence, the center of religion did not reside in the places where the important religious leaders on both sides placed it (in theology and philosophy). Changes in ritual were more upsetting to common people than changes in doctrine. A mass in English instead of Latin, a clergy that married--these were resented more than whether the Pope or the King was head of the Church.

The issues were not the same for the 16th C Englishmen that they would be for us. No one claimed for himself or allowed to another the right of believeing as he chose. All parties inherited from the Middle Ages the assumption that Christian man could live only in a theocratic state which had both the right and the duty of enforcing true religion by persecution. Those who were burned as heretics were often eager to burn others on the same charge. Disobedience to civil and religious authority were both sins and crimes. For the ordinary lay person in England, up until the Act of Supremacy (1534) you could be burnt by your mayor or sheriff on the findings of a church court. After that year, you needed the King's permission as well. The common person, baptized into the old religion and dying in the new didn't feel like he had gone through either apostasy or conversion. He had been told from birth that his superiors decided what was proper for him in religion, and he was simply continuing his following of authority. Even martyrs on both sides would have been horrified by the idea of freedom of conscience.

Calvinist stage
When Elizabeth comes to the throne, all the people who had fled to the Continent during Mary's reign also returned. These were deeply influenced by Calvin-- a man Lewis describes as unhesitatingly doctrinaire, ruthless and efficient in putting his doctrine into practice. Calvin's picture of the fully Christian life was less hostile to pleasure and the body than the Catholic picture, but he demanded every person live up to it. Calvinists were young and cocksure--they remind Lewis of 1930's Marxists. Calvin preached predestination to heaven and to hell, and his young followers didn't blink.
Calvin's followers became censorious. Writers like Lyly, Nashe, and Greene would launch into moral diatribes of the most uncompromising ferocity. The gentleness and candour of Shakespeare were an anomaly. While one kind of puritan was the malcontent, others included saints, cranks, anti-clericals, and finally "great friends"–wealthy landowners and even courtiers.

Spencer and Shakespeare as anti-puritan
Elizabeth blamed the troubles in the English Church partly on the noblemen who sided with the Puritains. These nobles' motives in attacking the bishops were questionable, since no one had forgotten how much some nobles had benefitted from the dissolution of the monasteries. Spencer's Kirkrapine in the Faerie Queene may be a condemnation of the puritan as church robber. Spencer links him to the Roman church, implying that the puritan attacks on the Church of England clergy put the puritan into cahoots with the Roman Church. Also, in its early, rigidly logical, intellectual stage, puritanism went very well with humanism.

Political change
Sovereignty and the Divine Right of Kings

Law vs. Custom (the Law of Nature)

In the Middle Ages, the king was, like the knight and the priest, under the law of God. Deaths of bad kings meant nothing. Arthur is spared by Lancelot because he is a most noble king. By the 17th C. the king had Divine Right. Shakespeare's plays mention this exalted position of the king or refer to it implicitly by their condemnation of regicide. It doesn't mean that the sacred authority of the 'Prince' was above that of Parliament or the Common Law, but that government, per se, 'is ultimately and essentially absolute.' Thus every state has the total freedom to make what laws it pleases and it is superior to law because it is the source of law. Moreover, this idea of sovereignty comes down to modern times.

The medievals saw government's role as obedience to customs (laws always-already established) and to Natural Law (the law of just and reasonable behavior written by God on the human heart). We take it for granted that the highest power in the state, whether a despot or a democratically elected body, will be wholly free to create laws and will be incessantly engaged in this.

Machiavelli went furthest in considering the new type of leader that comes out of this new idea. His secret was that the Prince should not be, but seem, virtuous. This idea produces the Machiavellian hero--one who circumvents his victims by cunning and hypocrisy--Kyd's Lorenzo and Shakespeare's Iago.

Humanism produced another change in the hero: the loss of tears. In ancient and medieval literature, as in ancient and medieval life, there is no inhibition about tears. Achilles wept, Aeneas wept, Hrothgar wept, Roland wept, and Lancelot wept. By the time of Shakespeare, a male character almost never weeps without apologizing for it. Milton apologizes for Adam's tears.

Lewis suggests that this was the result of the humanist response to the moral philosophy of the ancients (53). Separating religion from morality, they adopted the ideals of the Stoics.

Besides the stoical man, the hero was Aristotle's Magnanimous man--the man who had and was entitled to have a high opinion of his own worth. Again, Lewis compares Malory's hero from Spenser's and Sidney's who have "the secet assurance of [their] own worthiness. In GGK, the hero "had no companion but his mount over field and plain, and no man to speak his mind with but almighty God" (53). Spencer's hero in the same situation "ever more himself with comfort feeds about his own virtues and praise-worthy deeds."

Why Lewis doesn't speak of the Renaissance
In all his discussion, Lewis doesn't mention the Renaissance. Here he claims that is because it invents itself and that its meaning has been so widened that it can hardly be defined except as "an imaginary entity responsible for everything the speaker likes in the 15th and 16th centuries" (56).

English scholars have linked it with two other processes that they highly approved: the birth of Protestantism and the birth of the physical sciences. Anti-protestant scholars have seen in it the destruction of a humane and Christian culture by kill-joys and capitalists.

Economic Influences on Lit
Strangely, Lewis seems to suggest that economy had little influence on literature. The large economic changes: the middle and upper classes had been getting richer and the peasantry poorer before the Reformation--in fact, before 1500 (56).

The dissolution of the monasteries

While the dissolution of the monasteries created some new landed gentry, those had been created before by speculating in land. While the Potestant Brinkelow (who approved the Dissolution on theological grounds) thought the monks should have been left alone because they were better landlords than their successors, the Catholic More chose an Abbot as an example of bad, sheep-farming landlords who enclose all pastures, throw down houses, and pluck up villages (57).

The medieval poet pictured a garden, usually an enclosed garden, as his pleasant place out of doors. The Elizabethan poet rejoiced in the country. Lewis believes this may be because there were more landed gentry. People actually were able to enjoy the country.

However, Lewis puts a dark side on the rise of the small squires: the "small inheritance" he enjoys probably includes a ruined abbey and the conditions he lives on may have helped to create a new poor whom he gives alms to. His properity depends on rising rents. Hence the increase of what are called tramps: whose punishment was slavery and whom it was criminal to feed or lodge (58-59).

In the middle ages a noble lay person would not be a clerk--although a peasant could be. In Elizabethan times the aristocrat was coming to be educated and the poor began to be excluded from education (60ff).

 

Rhetoric as king 61-63

What was taught in school was largely rhetoric. This was one quintessential tradition from the old Europe. The medievals and the 16th C poets had a tremendously artificial education in terms of rigidly defined structures in writing. Nonetheless their concrete knowledge of a wide variety of other things produced minds quite unlike ours. Forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, brewing, baking, and weaving were mixed with law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology. They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys.

One last important change in this century was the commercial production of texts which Lewis sees as doing much more good than harm. The most frankly commercial type of literature, the drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the rest, incudes much of the greatest work.

16th Century poetry: three marks of the English lyric were modern--
1) they were brief, intense, and personal;
2) they forsook allegory and didactism;
3) they were modelled on courtly European examples, and they became public in print.
Wyatt and Surrey brought meter back from Italy to English poetry: Wyatt through the sonnet. These two and a number of other early 16th C poets created Tottle's Miscellany (1557)--the first surviving printed communication of polite poetry to the great variety of readers.
The other famous collection of early 16th c poems, A Mirroure for Magistrates, bridges the medieval and the modern periods.