HIST 251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts

This course is intended to provide an up-to-date introduction to the development of English society between the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. Particular issues addressed in the lectures will include: the changing social structure; households; local communities; gender roles; economic development; urbanization; religious change from the Reformation to the Act of Toleration; the Tudor and Stuart monarchies; rebellion, popular protest and civil war; witchcraft; education, literacy and print culture; crime and the law; poverty and social welfare; the changing structures and dynamics of political participation and the emergence of parliamentary government.

About Professor Keith E. Wrightson

Keith E. Wrightson is Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and has taught at the Universities of St Andrews (1975-84), Cambridge (1984-99) and Yale (since 1999). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1996) and of the Royal Historical Society (1986), and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. His publications include English Society, 1580-1680 (1982); Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000); Poverty & Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525-1700 (with David Levine, 1979); The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (with David Levine, 1991), and many essays on the social, economic, and cultural history of early modern England.

Sessions:

Lecture 1 General Introduction
Lecture 2 "The Tree of Commonwealth": The Social Order in the Sixteenth Century
Lecture 3 Households: Structures, Priorities, Strategies, Roles
Lecture 4 Communities: Key Institutions and Relationships
Lecture 5 "Countries" and Nation: Social and Economic Networks and the Urban System
Lecture 6 The Structures of Power
Lecture 7 Late Medieval Religion and Its Critics
Lecture 8 Reformation and Division, 1530-1558
Lecture 9 "Commodity" and "Commonwealth": Economic and Social Problems, 1520-1560
Lecture 10 The Elizabethan Confessional State: Conformity, Papists and Puritans
Lecture 11 The Elizabethan "Monarchical Republic": Political Participation
Lecture 12 Economic Expansion, 1560-1640
Lecture 13 A Polarizing Society, 1560-1640
Lecture 14 Witchcraft and Magic
Lecture 15 Crime and the Law
Lecture 16 Popular Protest
Lecture 17 Education and Literacy
Lecture 18 Street Wars of Religion: Puritans and Arminians
Lecture 19 Crown and Political Nation, 1604-1640
Lecture 20 Constitutional Revolution and Civil War, 1640-1646
Lecture 21 Regicide and Republic, 1647-1660
Lecture 22 An Unsettled Settlement: The Restoration Era, 1660-1688
Lecture 23 England, Britain, and the World: Economic Development, 1660-1720
Lecture 24 Refashioning the State, 1688-1714
Lecture 25 Concluding Discussion and Advice on Examination