Culture Under Mary I and Philip

Abstract

The literary culture of England and its court under Philip and Mary I labour under the weight of two major fault lines in our understanding of the Tudor period. Firstly, it suffers from the persistent sense of Marian England as a ‘barren interlude’, to use the Froudian phrase, twinning Mary’s reproductive problems with the political history of her reign; a kingdom dominated by foreign interlopers, a Habsburg satellite or papal fife alienated from its true indigenous roots as an ‘ancient empire’. This is compounded by the notion that humanism was the preserve of evangelicals, a counterpart of the anti-Catholic bias implicit in the historiography. Viewing English Catholicism in this period as a sterile anachronism rather than a creative and vibrant source of new thinking has been thoroughly contested by revisionist perspectives on the Reformation.¹ Secondly, it lies at the heart of what C.S.Lewis dubbed the ‘drab age’; a literary wasteland lacking the political interest of the Henrician period and the sophisticated vernacular forms that had emerged by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign.² The notion that ‘between 1547 and 1580… English literature “retreated” or “lapsed” into a pre-Henrician or premodern medieval state’ has rightly been contested.³ What is notable, however, is that despite this shift in paradigm, the reign of Philip and Mary has not been ‘polished’. This chapter seeks to offer a more balanced assessment of the cultural achievements of the period and counter the difficulties presented by the Anglo-Spanish moment, foregrounding developments in translation and Neo-Latin studies, transnational and religious histories, and vernacular print culture. Moving away from parochial, insular, national constructions of English culture, it suggests some of the ways in which the literary history of the period needs to be seen as part of broader developments in European vernacular culture. Closer contact, brought about by the marriage with a metropolitan, multilingual intellectual culture stretching across the high prestige, dynamic cultures of Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries, was a key driver of new forms of writing and cultural achievement in England.