Module Description

This module will provide an overview of central aspects of the social, cultural and political history of Britain between 1500 and c.1714. The period has been seen by historians as marking an important stage in the transition to modernity and key historiographical debates will be reappraised. The module will explore changing patterns of belief, social and economic structures and political involvement set against the backdrop of the Reformation and the political and ideological struggles that resulted in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. The impact of religious changes, secularization, constitutional change and state building will be considered, as will changes in thinking about gender and the social order. Political history topics covered by the module may typically include court politics and faction under the Tudors, the Reformation, the impact of the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder plot, the causes and impact of the civil war and constitutional and religious policies of the later Stuarts. Other thematic studies may include the family, sex and marriage, education and literacy, witchcraft, crime and poverty. Where appropriate, participants will be encouraged to test historical arguments against primary source materials.

Introductory reading

B. Coward, The Stuart Age: England, 1603-1714 (London: Longman, 2003)
J. Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1988)
J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History (London: Arnold, 1997)
D. L. Smith, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1707: the Double Crown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)
J. Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics & Society in Britain, 1603-1714  (Harlow: Longman, 2006)
K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971)
P. Williams, The Later Tudors: England, 1547-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
K. Wrightson, English Society,1580-1680 (London: Routledge, 2002)