Italian pride and English prejudice : the reception of otherness in the Renaissance

Abstract

The weltanschauung which dominated the Elizabethan world was one largely inherited from the Middle Ages: a still essentially ordered universe in a theocentric world, its cosy equilibrium as yet unassailed by new theories nor too severely eroded by the ongoing secularisation. At the time, England was only just emerging as a nation, a bigger political entity than the small, predominantly despotic city-states of Italy from which it was to draw literary and cultural inspiration. The increasing self-consciousness of this nascent nation and the English character endued with a sense of pride in Poly Albion has been attributed to being the fruit of the twin impulses of Renaissance and Reformation as England came out of her isolation and began to have more contact with the Continent.