Britain And Europe In The Seve :: essays research papers

J.R. Jones, a Professor of side of meat History in the School of slope Studies at the University of East Anglia, England, in Britain and Europe in the Seventeenth Century, has written a very informative and interesting book.Britain and Europe in the Seventeenth Century is a relatively short book that deals with the feign that Britain had on European affairs at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The thesis is basically summed up in the title of the book. To expand on the thesis, Dr. Jones emphasizes the close mutualness of Britain and Europe in the seventeenth century, and shows that events at home cannot be fully understood unless they are related to developments and forces abroad. In cultural and intellectual, as well as political and economical matters, the effect on Britain of foreign fixs is for most of this period greater than that of Britain on Europe one of the main questions that Dr. Jones considered when writing this book was why this relation was later reversed .In looking at this period as a whole there is a clear contrast between Britain&8217s isolation and unimportance in European affairs at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and Britain&8217s full involvement as a major influence after 1688. This involves intellectual and political matters. European intellectual developments during the first part of the century did not significantly affect the main part of English life, and English influences on Europe were negligible. The only groups interested in developments in Europe were minorities who were dissatisfied with the established order in Britain. For most of these &8220Puritans the Calvinist churches of Europe provided the type which they hoped to establish in England. During James I&8217s reign they were inspired by Dutch divines and encouraged in their opposition to royal policies. In economic and intellectual matters Scotland was basically a colony of Holland. But the partly formed Calvinist international, to which English P uritans and Scottish Presbyterians belonged, together with German, Czech, Swiss, Magyar, French, and Dutch churches, did not survive the 1620&8217s. It was tattered in the early disastrous phases of the Thirty Years War, and by the submission of the Huguenots when Louis XIII insisted on the elimination of foreign pastors, so that by the time English Puritanism temporarily triumphed during the English Revolution it held few European connections of any importance, and was dependent of its own intellectual resources. The connections which bound Catholicism with Europe were more durable.