Do you consider the Tudors medieval?

[bryceQ]

I've never thought of them in this period, I always consider them the early modern period (well Henry VII perhaps the last medieval monarch) but I hear people describe them as medieval?

It doesn't really matter, I'm just curious to other opinions.

Oh@NumberFortyNorhamGardens RJ Unstead was the first historian I read, deep ❤️!

I’d guess there’s a pressure to put a date on it in schools for reasons to do with text books or programmes of study. And sometimes that gets focused on or remembered even though the periods are obviously more fluid

I’m definitely not an expert but I think I’m inclined to agree about Elizabeth being beginning of early modern.

Have been enjoying this discussion though.

This isn’t right in my mind… Henry VIII engaged in humanist thought and knew Erasmus, and Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace which is a renaissance building. I would class the Tudor dynasty as English Renaissance

(I can't sleep.)

But equally, Edward IV knew John Tiptoft, who was a Humanist scholar, and who brought a large collection of Italian humanist texts to England in the fifteenth century.

FFS I can’t sleep either and just deleted a whole post
Anyway… I wouldn’t say that Wolsey’s/Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace is a Renaissance building - compare it to the Palazzo Farnese in Rome or the Palazzo del Te outside Mantua, or any other Italian palace built in the early 1500s. It is really a Gothic building (very lavish, beautiful brickwork etc) with Renaissance ornament. The gatehouse is a great eg of this - pretty much traditional design like an Oxbridge college or similar, but with the bang up to date da Maiano terracotta roundels stuck on the front, while the elevation that looks more “Renaiassancy” was built by William and Mary so late 17th c (hope the pics work).
Getting into my stride, a building like Longleat does tick the Renaissance palace boxes for me (Elizabethan so my theory’s holding up). I think Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace may have teetered on the edge but as it’s lost we only know it from drawings so it’s hard to tell!
Can you tell I love debating this kind of thing…

I don’t think anyone on the thread thinks things change in a single year? But it’s quite common to think in terms of reigns, cos those are linked to “human units” ie a lifespan. The history “everyone knows” is always going to be simplistic.

(off topic, it was a shock to me when I discovered Henry and K of A had been married 20 odd years before Anne Boleyn - something about the divorced beheaded died rhyme makes all the wives sound roughly equivalent.)

When do other European countries consider the start of the early modern period to start?

I would assume the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was pretty seismic and think that's what I was taught in Higher History in Scotland as the 'official' start rather thansome in fighting between aristocratic families in England.

@Arthistorymedievalorearlymodern
”So the Renaissance begins in Italy in the late 13th/early 14th century (Giotto anyone?), while in England/Spain etc, the Middle Ages continue for a couple of centuries longer.”
That is what I was taught. It was a gradual transition that spread to Northern Europe much later after starting in Italy/Southern Europe. Italy got much of it from the Middle East in the first place through its trade connections meaning that Arab science, medicine, mathematics and architectural engineering were able to spread to Europe. The art was completely Italian home grown apart from their revival of classical Roman/Greek sculpture.

Henry VIII toyed with humanist thought, but he was medieval in his views on absolute monarchy along with usurping the role of the head of the church himself. The English split from Rome wasn’t a Reformation. It was making Henry VIII pope in his own country. It’s why he beheaded the scholars who were budding humanists who had brought Renaissance ideas back from Italy, people like Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey.

Bloody May wasn’t really an anomaly. Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I/ V also burned heretics at the stake. The difference was who was considered a heretic. In fact burning people alive at the stake for heresy, a medieval practice started in 1022, was not formally outlawed in England until 1676 under Charles II, although Charles the I had suspended its use prior to the War of Three Kingdoms and Cromwell’s Protectorate.

Sarah and Quack did referencing the Black Death and the Peasant revolts as significant events that heralded the start of the early modern period. The Black Death was in the 1340s, and she was referring to the Peasant revolts directly after.

Yes it was by then as most were either tenant farmers paying rent and they owned and sold 100% of the crops they grew. They were a yeomanry class by then. In addition, the rise of the merchant and crafts guilds were a form of unionising for the urban “peasant”. University education had expanded beyond the clergy to include the aristocracy and wealthy in addition to numerous colleges set up in the Universities for poor scholars from the peasantry- usually children of household servants of the rich, like bailiffs or stewards.

Far more change from 1400 to 1600 than from 1100 to 1400.

Did Elizabeth burn heretics?
She executed a few Catholics because of Treason, sometimes strong suspicion of it. Mostly they were agents of the Pope or Spain trying to stir up a revolution.
Mostly Elisabeth did not bother English Roman Catholics who were living a quiet life. "She did not wish to look into a mans conscience". (I think she said)

She burned 9.
Nothing compared to Bloody Mary, but even for Elizabeth I some forms of Protestantism were too extreme.

Sorry a few of those were hanged for heresy, not burned.

Edward Wightman, who was burned at Lichfield in April 1612, the last to be executed by burning for heresy under reign of James I/V.

But for Elizabeth, ( or maybe really Cecil and Walsiingham) the motivating principle was the security and independence of the English State. If a person’s religious affiliation or principle inclined them to the overthrow of the monarchy, and the transformation of the organs of Government, either by transmontane loyalties or the extreme ‘ levelling ‘ of some Protestant sect, the practitioners were being removed as political expediency. This wasn’t the case with the brief Roman Catholic restoration, where people were being executed for the wrong interpretations of the Faith.

Interestingly, I think ( though it’s not my period of interest) that similar faith ‘extremes’ were suppressed under the Commonwealth, with no monarch involved.

Not in these cases.
Matthew Hamont: Early in 1579 he was cited before Edmund Freke on a charge of denying Christ. The articles exhibited against him represented him as a coarse kind of deist, holding the Gospel to be a fable, Christ a sinner, and the Holy Ghost a nonentity. William Burtonstated of his beliefs:[3]
I haue knovven some Arrian heretiques, whose life hath beene most strict amongest men, whose tongues haue beene tyred with scripture upon scripture, their knees euen hardned in prayer, and their faces wedded to sadnesse, and their mouthes full of praises to God, while in the meane time they haue stowtly denied the diuinitie of the Sonne of God, and haue not sticked to teare out of the Bible all such places as made against them; such were Hamond, Lewes, and Cole, heretikes of wretched memorie, lately executed and cut off in Norwich.[3]

Of similar beliefs, were John Lewes, also mentioned above, who was burned at Norwich on 18 September 1583; Peter Cole, a tanner of Ipswich, met the same fate at Norwich in 1587.

Francis Kett: in 1588 Edmund Scambler, the Bishop of Norwich, brought charges of heresy against him. Kett's views, if the charges against him were accurate, seem to have approximated to Arianism: he believed Jesus was not God but a good man who had suffered "only as Jesus already, and shall suffer hereafter as Christ" (that is, that having returned to earth Jesus would "suffer againe for the sinnes of the world" and eventually become divine). Kett also had millenarian beliefs, claiming that "Christ is now in his human nature gathering a church in Erthe in Judea"; and that "this year of our Lord 1588 divers Jews shall be sent to divers countries to publish the new covenant". Another account reports that he also believed in psychopannychism or soul sleep, that the soul lapses into a state of unawareness between death and resurrection on the Day of Judgment. The puritan minister William Burton reported with horror Kett's denial of Christ's divinity, that "Christ is not God, but a good man as others be"; but he also observed that however "monstrous" Kett's beliefs he gave every appearance of being a good man, continually praising God, praying and reading the Bible.

@MercanDede just out of interest, what is your agenda?The vast majority of posters here have, in different ways, said that the Tudors are not 'medieval', however defined. But you do not seem inclined to believe them.

They have pointed to changes in religious observation and church landholding and governance, to massive changes in the economic and legal relationship between 'peasants' and landowners and the concomitant growth of a free and often prosperous 'yeoman' class of country-dwellers, to the move of populations to towns and all the changes in living conditions, economic activity and legal institutions that involved, to the change from 'church' Latin to the English language in all kinds of written documents, from church and legal records to printed literature. Epecially in Protestant countries, that led to the mass publication of the key Christian text: the Bible, and to a real shift in the way that religion was understood and observed by all groups in society.

They have mentioned the growing awareness of so-called 'Renaissance' ideas (although Chaucer was aware of early Italian Renaissance writers in the late 14th cent, and was writing in English). The fall of Constantinople in 1483 was indeed a massive shock to the medieval pan-European sense of a unified western 'Christendom'.

What has NOT so far been mentioned so far is that fact that from the late 15th cent all through the 16th cent the whole of Europe receievd another massive challenge to its view of the world, through voyages of exploration. Many of these were led by English mariners. They literally changed the whole world-picture (the first worldatlases and globes based on carefully collected data were produced) ; they had rather the same impact as the first flights into space/ first man on the moon had in the 1960s and 1970s.

Of course, there was no clean break; some people were upset or challenged or scared of new ideas, or had vested interests threatened ; also, quite apart from anything else, without modern communications it could take some time for new ideas to spread widely. But that often happened really quite quickly.

Re witchcraft - that did indeed receive much greater attention in the very late 16th and especially the 17th cents than in earlier medieval times. In connection with that, think that it's interesting to note that some historians characterise the medieval and early modern (including Tudor) times TOGETHER as the 'pre-scientific' age; that is to say, that people living then relied on magical reasoning and inductive arguments based on beliefs and abstract principles rather than on "modern" scientific arguments based on rigorous and repeatable observations and deductions from carefully collected evidence.

Sorry for all the typos - am trying to cook prepare supper at the same time.

I would definitely have called them that, although I (thankfully) had to stop history at 14 as they couldn't timetable it at GCSE

Everyone disagrees - isn't that the point? Even within a country, I bet people would have had vastly different experiences. I'm not sure how many Jewish residents of, say, Marseilles were fussed about one aristocratic dynasty of heathens encroaching on another aristocratic dynasty of heathens, when Constantinople fell.

Ooh! This was fascinating.

No, I didn't. And I was referring to the Peasants' Revolt (singular revolt) of 1381, some forty years later.

I would say early modern too.