Transcript THE AUGUSTAN AGE - Liceo Classico Dettori

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Charles II, Charles I’s son , had spent his exile in
France , and he had French tastes. However he was
clever enough to avoid his father’s inf lexibility.
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The Court was devouted to pleasure, fashion and
gossip replacing religious debate.
• The King supported the revival of drama and music.
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The landowners, both nobles and gentry, resumed
their leadership of society and the newly elected
Parliament punished the Puritans, excluding them
from public office.
 It was a period of dichotomy in society; dignity
coexisted with excess, purity with immorality,
simplicity with ornamentation, self-respect alongside
obsession with appearance.
 Although Charles II was able not to quarrel with
Parliament, Parliament was still concerned to avoid
Roman Catholicism and despotism.
 The discovery of unsuccessful “Popish Plots” favouring
Charles’s openly Catholic brother, James, led to the
emergence of two factions in Parliament . One was
nicknamed “Tory” and consisted of the supporters of
the King and his legitimate successors, the church of
England and the landed gentry. The other was
nicknamed “Whig” and consisted of both nobles and
merchants, who did not want absolute power in the
monarchy, and preferred religious toleration of
protestant dissenters.
 Charles II died without any legitimate heir , so his
brother James II succeeded him on the throne.
 At first he was supported by the Tories, until he began
to place Catholics in positions of authority in the army
and university.
 James was a widower and his heirs were his two
Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, who were
married to the rulers of Holland and Denmark.
 James had remarried the Catholic Mary of Modena ,
and in 1688 he became the father of a Catholic son and
heir.
 The Whigs and even the Tories were alarmed; another
civil war could happen.
 Parliament and William of Orange, Mary’s husband,
negotiated secretely and James, his wife and baby son
were forced to escape to France.
 On 28th January William and Mary became joint
monarchs at the request of Parliament.
 A revolution had taken place ; the monarch had
been chosen by Parliament, not by divine right.
This revolution had been without any fighting – it
was known as the “Bloodless” or “Glorious
Revolution” .
 With the Bill of Rights the parliament alone had
the right to raise taxes, pass laws and control an
army.
 With the Act of Settlement of 1701, Parliament
also decided on the succession – if William and
Mary died childless , Anne was to follow and
James’s son was excluded.
 The first half of the 17th century in Europe had
represented a critical stage in the replacement of one
world view with another.
 Scholasticism had produced a durable structure of
thought based on ancient observations, on
assumptions and above all, on logic. It had provided a
convincing and satisfying theory of the nature of the
universe as ordered, teleological, that is, designed to
fulfil a particular purpose, and geocentric.
 From the middle of the century onwards , a major
current of thought, called “Natural philosophy”, had
started exploring the universe to explain its mysteries.
 England had a singular position in this field since the
new rationalistic spirit and science were not seen as a
challenge to religion, as in Europe, but rather as a
means to a better understanding of the order and
harmony of a God-created universe.
 Science supported politics as it showed a God who was
not an arbitrary monarch, but bound by his own
wonderful laws.
 All the great scientists of the period were, in fact, men
of faith and science at the same time.
 The universe , now heliocentric, was no longer seen as
organic and theological , but as mechanical and
matter-based.
 This change was achieved by a new method of
inquiring into nature, based not on accepted
authorities but on the mathematical –physical
experimental method.
 The reign of Charles’s II saw a powerful surge of
scientific achievement. The King granted a charter to a
group of scientists to found the Royal Society on 22
April 1662. The Philosophical basis of the Royal
Society differed from previous philosophies such as
Scholasticism, which established scientific truth
based on deductive logic, concordance with divine
providence and the citation of such ancient authorities
as Aristotle. The society’s aim was to overcome the
mysteries of all the works of nature and to apply that
knowledge for the benefit of human life.
 The first members were men of different talents and
interests, but all united by the common bond of classical
education as much as by their interest in the new
enquiries. One of the efforts made by the Royal Society
was the removal of language barriers within the Sciences so
as to create an Empire of Learning , a sort of imaginary
network of shared knowledge across the globe. The Royal
society encouraged the free circulation of information and
the spread of communication . Among the current
activities of the Royal Society are funding scientific
research , publishing , providing science advice , including
education, and increase public interest in science.
 The rational tendencies of the Restoration were to be
seen both in the works of the rationalist philosophers
John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and in the studies of
Isaac Newton .
 Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), insisted that the prime and
fundamental source of human knowledge of the world
outside was individual experience , gained through the
senses and not innate. Experience and reason could
not be separated .
 Hobbes defended absolute monarchy in Leviathan in
the belief that private individual selfishness had to be
controlled by public force .
 Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687) put science in the top ranks of
learning.