ABSTRACT
Popular culture in Tudor England has been much less studied than learned culture; hence Peter Burke's wide-ranging Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe includes few English examples. The greatest poem of the age, The Faerie Queene, owed as much to medieval allegory as to the epics of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso which it consciously imitated: and most architecture derived more from English Perpendicular than from Italian Renaissance. Education is better recorded after the Reformation, and the apparently larger number of schools has encouraged talk of an 'educational revolution' between about 1560 and 1640. Italian artistic influence repelled, as well as fascinated, because of the close connection of Italy with Catholicism. The domestic arts flourished in the second half of the century amid increasing wealth, gentlefolk being eager purchasers and even themselves creators-embroideries survive at Hardwick and Oxburgh which do seem to have been worked, as tradition has always asserted, by Bess of Hardwick and Mary Queen of Scots.
