Elizabethan Society

The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) marked a golden age in English history. There was a musical and literary renaissance, most famously and enduringly in the form of the plays of Shakespeare (2014 marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth), and it was a period of international expansion and naval triumph over the Spanish. It was also a period of internal peace following the violent upheaval of the Protestant reformation. Wilson skilfully interweaves the personal histories of a representative selection of twenty or so figures – including Nicholas Bacon, the Statesman; Bess of Hardwick, the Landowner; Thomas Gresham, ‘the Financier’; John Caius, ‘the Doctor’; John Norreys, ‘the Soldier’; and Nicholas Jennings, ‘the Professional Criminal’ – with the major themes of the period to create a vivid and compelling account of life in England in the late sixteenth century. This is emphatically not yet another book about what everyday life was like during the Elizabethan Age. There are already plenty of studies about what the Elizabethans wore, what they ate, what houses they lived in, and so on. This is a book about Elizabethan society – people, rather than things. How did the