The Elizabethan World Picture

Reference to a medieval background:   

The Tudors inherited a medieval system of beliefs based on a general conception of order

DIVINE WILL

governs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNIVERSAL ORDER:

1. The chain of being (vertical, hierarchy)
  • Angels
  • Man (existence, life, feelings and understanding)
  • The animal class
  • The vegetative class
  • The inanimate class(the elements, liquids, metals)

2. A series of corresponding planes (horizontal)
  • The divine
  • The angelic
  • The universe (macrocosm)
  • The body politic
  • Man (microcosm)
  • Lower creation

3. A cosmic dance (the created universe is in a state of music)

Correspondences

 

Within hierarchies there were "correspondences": created beings whose status within the hierarchy were equivalent one to the other. Consider, for example, those at the head of each category:

The angels

God

The universe

Sun

Society

King

The family

Husband

The human body

The head

Animals

Lion

Plants

Oak

Minerals

Gold

The list of such correspondences could be extended almost indefinitely.

CORRESPONDENCE: Also the body politic (the State) had to be subject to a single head.

The Queen became a symbol of stability and unity.

CORRESPONDENCE between disorder in the heavens and civil discord in the State.

ELIZABETHAN OBSESSION: fear of chaos (cosmic anarchy before creation) and mutability.

NEW DISCOVERIES undermining this system of beliefs:

Nicolaus Copernicus : a new model of the Solar System, the Sun at the centre.

Paracelsus:   rejection of traditional lore and insistence on the value of observation and experimentation in medicine.Overturning the contemporary view of illness as an imbalance of the four humours, he sought an external agency as the source of disease. He scandalized some academics by lecturing in German rather than Latin and by his savage attacks on the Classical medical texts – he burned the works of Galen and Avicenna in public.

 

Sense of DOUBT and AMBIGUITY (contrast of old and new beliefs)

 

Renaissance opinion about the INDIVIDUAL: Idea of self-development through action. Pragmatic outlook.

 

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