This MA elective module is intended for students of the MA in History and the MA in the History of the Family. It seeks to combine the cultural and political history of England during a period of ground-breaking change. Innovations in religious beliefs and practices, as well as fundamental discrepancies between the codes and assumptions of court and country, were responsible for over a century of political upheaval. These conflicts will be analysed by using a variety of literary, visual and printed sources. The focus will primarily be on English History, with reference being made to developments in Scotland and Ireland where relevant. Themes to be covered will include religion, the Crown's relations with Parliament, the court, patronage of architecture, literature and painting, as well as international affairs. In the first few weeks of the semester, the module will be taught thematically, with a greater emphasis on chronological development following later, and once key issues have been covered.

The accession of Elizabeth I 1558; Puritan responses to the Anglican church settlement; gender and family at the Elizabethan Court; the Union of the Crowns; Cecil, Carr and Buckingham - the minister favourite in Jacobean government; royal marriage policy under the Stuarts; Van Dyke, Inigo Jones and the public face of the Monarchy; art collecting by the English and Scottish aristocracy; the Laudian reform movement; Parliament, Civil War and the Commonwealth sale, 1649; Quakers, Baptists and Fifth Monacrchy Men; the Cromwellian Protectorate and Stuart Restoration; the Cavalier Parliament and the persecution of dissenters; mistresses and bastards at the court of Charles II; Wren, Hawksmoor and the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire; the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its repercussions in Scotland and Ireland; John Locke and the origins of constitutional government; foreign war and the rage of faction in the reign of Queen Anne.

To understand how English government functioned and evolved during a prolonged time of crisis in the relations between ruler and subjects. To chart the evolution of mainland Britain from a collection of minor states on the periphery of Europe to the great power that, as a unitary state, they had become by the early eighteenth century. To examine the role of the elites in these developments, and assess how their religious, cultural and political outlooks changed over the course of the 150-year period of study. To analyse and comprehend the effects of patronage on the development of painting, literature and architecture in England and Scotland between 1560 and 1714

You will have provided a source critique that will show your ability to analyse a piece of text or other artefact in the context of the circumstances that gave rise to its production. You will have a sense of literary professionalism as manifest in the confident use of bibliographical and referencing conventions

N/A

By the end of the module, you will have a broad grasp of the key themes and debates in the political, cultural and artistic history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland. You will have been introduced to classic and state-of-the-art scholarship in the area of Tudor and Stuart history. Your progress in this respect will have been measured through a series of graduated reading exercises.