The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society

by A.L. Rowse

Book Overview

Thanks to Shakespeare, Hollywood, and the formidable Elizabeth I herself, Elizabethan England remains a place and time that fascinates us. Modern England still has visible memorials of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299077209
• ISBN13: 9780299077204
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 546 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A most useful history

If someone asked me to recommend a single book to read on Elizabethan England, this might well be the one I'd suggest. When I wanted to know about the workings of local government or the role of churchwardens or how the concerns of city and country people differed or how the religious settlement reverberated at different levels of society or any of a dozen other details of the workings of Elizabethan society, this was the source where I found the information I needed. I enjoy Rowse's writing style too--it is approachable and not stuffy in the least. He was a very opinionated historian (he loathed the Puritans, for example), but he was also quite open about his biases--and this openness, I find, just adds to the enjoyment of reading his work. (He was not, however, terribly sensitive to or sensible about women's issues--his "identification" elsewhere of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets being a prime example--but that doesn't really enter in here, except for the fact that he, like most historians of his generation, doesn't much consider women's contributions to and roles in society.)