The Context
Pag. 26 ex. 1
This extract covers a period that goes from August 22 to December 31.
It is said that the plague was particularly severe at the end of August.
The plague diminished at the end of December.
The writer was afraid of the plague, he sent his family at Woolwich and a maid at London while he stood at Greenwich with another part of his family and his clerks, indeed.
The writer seems to be disgusted by other people’s behavior, saying that the disease is making them crueler then that are to dogs.

Pag. 27 ex. 1
The fire started on September 2 of 1666, at about ten o’clock in the evening.
The fire spread because of people’s reaction and of the warm weather.
People reacted running away and not trying to put down the fire or even to save their goods, too astonished to do something.
The writer’s emotions are not revealed, except for his opinion on people’s reaction and a final statement about the fire.

Pag. 27 ex. 2
1 adjectives conveying emotions
Astonished, distracted
2 personification
the fire devoured
3 emphatic language
can be found in the list of buildings burned by the fire and in the description of the fire itself
4 exclamations
Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle!
5 similes
like distracted creatures, like the top of a burning oven

Pag. 28 ex. 1
1 In the 16th century, Britain was at an advantage over other European countries in colonizing the New World.
2 The Renaissance gave new strength to the Catholic Church. F
3 The Renaissance looked back to Greek and Roman cultures. T
4 The Reformation was a religious movement against corruption within the Church. T
5 Protestantism and Calvinism are two names for the same doctrine. F
6 The English Puritans, the Scots Presbyterians and the French Huguenots were Calvinist. T
7 The aim of the Counter-Reformation was to spread religious tolerance. F
8 The Jesuits and the Inquisition were against corruption within the Church. F
9 The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation caused religious conflicts in several European countries. T

Pag. 29 ex. 2
The Tudors began to reign with Henry VII. He ended the War of the Roses and provided financial and governmental stability to England. Under Henry VIII the connection between England and the Pope in Rome was ended. The Act of Supremacy made the king head of the Church of England. Catholicism was replaced with Anglicanism, Catholic monasteries and convents were abolished and the clergy’s properties were confiscated by the Crown. Thomas More, a Chancellor of the king who refused to take the oath of supremacy, was put to death. Mary Tudor, one of Henry VIII’s successors, attempted to restore the Catholic religion in the country and persecuted Protestants. Elisabeth I re-established Anglicanism and kept Catholics and Puritans under control. She ruled with great caution and skill for a long period. At home, she passed the ‘Poor Law’ which took care of of deprived people; many of them were peasants impoverished by the enclosure movement. Abroad, Elisabeth made England one of the most powerful nations in Europe and in the world. her fleet defeated the Spanish Armada. Companies for overseas trade were founded in Africa and India.

Pag. 29 ex. 3
At Elisabeth’s death James VI of Scotland became also James I of England. He tried to rule as an absolute monarch causing hostility between Parliament and himself. The king and Parliament were threatened by the Gunpowder Plot, organized by Catholics, which failed. Like his father, Charles I believed in the principle of the divine right of kings. Parliament’s Petition of Rights opposed the king’s attempt to impose taxes without parliamentary consent. Under Charles I English society was divided by many religious differences. A Civil War broke out in 1642 because the Puritan leaders in the House of Commons wanted to limit royal authority. Royalists forces included Catholics, the gentry and the aristocracy. Parliamentary forces included the wealthy middle classes of businessmen and merchants. The Parliamentary army, led by Oliver Cromwell, defeated the Royalists in 1645. The king was executed in 1649. A republic, called Commonwealth, was instituted under Cromwell’s rule, but it collapsed at his death. Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660. During his reign, two catastrophes hit the city, a fire and the plague. The king’s successor, James II, wanted to impose Catholicism on an Anglican nation. For this reason he was deposed in 1688.

Performer Culture and Literature

Pag. 78
1 During the reign of James I, the Parliament was summoned only to ask for money. The king believed in the divine right of kings and that he was the representative of God on Earth.
2 Speaking about religious issues, he barred Catholics from public life and fined them if they refused to attend the Church of England and he approved a new translation of the Bible.
4 The king was interested in witchcraft and the supernatural, publishing a treatise about black magic.
5 The Pilgrim Fathers were extreme Protestants, called Puritans, who flew to the New World to colonise New England, disapproving the Church of England’s rites and bishops.
6 The Gunpowder Plot was a failed plan to blow up the king in the Houses of Parliament made by some radical Catholics.

Pag. 80 ex. 1
1 Guy Fawkes was a member of a group of Catholic plotters who had been fighting in the Low Countries.
2 The group attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. A member of the group rented the house next to the Houses of Parliament and managed to access the room under the House of Lords, Guy Fawkes had to prepare the gunpowder and light the fuse instead.
3 The plot was discovered thanks to a letter by one of the plotters to his brother-in-law, where he warned him not to attend that night’s session of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London and tortured, while an armed insurrection was organized in the Midlands. However, its leader was killed with some of his followers, while the others were brought to the Tower of London and executed with Guy Fawkes.

Pag. 131
An East Anglian gentleman farmer, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) proved a brilliant leader in raising and training cavalry composed of brave soldiers, who were called ‘Ironsides’. They were educated, Puritan men who believed God was fighting on their side. in 1649 Cromwell, now commander-in-chief of the army, crushed a rebellion in Ireland; after which, this country was regarded as an English colony and the Irish as conquered people. The Irish campaign , followed by the submission of Scotland, gave the army full control of the political situation. In 1653 Cromwell was appointed ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’; in the few years of his rule (1654-58), he restored the lost prestige of England. Following a mercantilist policy, he reorganized the navy and, through the Navigation Acts in 1651, he stated that all English imports had to be carried in ships owned by England, thus depriving the Dutch of their control of trade routes. In contrast with his successful foreign policy, Cromwell failed to achieve his goals at home. Although he tried to rule as a constitutional statesman, he had to rely more and more on the army which had brought him to power. Shortly after he died in 1658, the Protectorate collapsed.

Pag. 141
Human rights are the fundamental rights that humans have by the fact of being human, and that are neither created nor can be abrogated by any government.

1 The state must not violate human rights, since they are given by the fact that every individual is human and cannot be restricted by it.
2 These rights derive from the fight against absolutism
3 Some of these rights are: human dignity, freedom of personality, equality before the law and to equal rights, freedom of religion, conscience and opinion, freedom of the press, information and education, association and peaceful assembly, freedom of movement, career and job freedom, freedom from interference with the privacy of one’s home, ownership of property and right of succession, freedom to seek asylum, right to petition and legal rights.

The development of human rights
Magna Carta (1215): some rights against the rule of the king
Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651): in order to live peacefully, humans must give up most of their rights and create moral obligations.
Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690): governments are given their authority by popular consent and should be removed if they act against common good, such as violating the unchanging natural rights of people: life, freedom and property.

Pag. 144
The concept of method probably came from the Greek philosopher Socrates. The Scoratic method was applied in philosophical conversations with pupils to clarify thinking both on ethics and on politics.
Three different approaches to the study of phenomena in nature can be identified. The first is the deductive method, employed in logic, mathematics and geometry, in which the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. The second is the experimental method, applied to physics, chemistry and biology, that is founded on the formulation of hypotheses and their verification through experience. The third is the method of classification, typical of biology, which is based on placing an organism into a group, class or family according to its biochemical, anatomical or physiological characteristics.
The process that we now call the scientific method - which is the study of the physical world by sensory observation and experiment, by mathematical measurement and inductive reasoning - had been established by the activities of men like the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei and the German mathematician Johannes Kepler. The first age of science culminated in England with the work of Isaac Newton, with his demonstration of the laws of gravity and motion by which the planers move in their orderly courses.
The experimental method goes further than that by making a hypothesis, that is, the description of what has been observed. Predictions are tested by experiments or further observation, and finally there is the clarification of the theory concerning the phenomenon. Therefore the experimental method moves from the particular to the universal.

1 The members of the Royal Society challenged the dependence of the old philosophy on written authorities.
2 The typical features of the English character that began to emerge were: materialism, practicality, tolerance, reasonableness and common sense.

The most widely influential change in 17th and 18th century Europe was the so-called ‘scientific revolution’. We usually associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but it was indeed a series of changes in the structure of European though itself. They implied systematic, empirical and sensory verification, the division of human knowledge into separate sciences and the view that the world works like a machine.
There were three sides in the debate concerning the proper scientific method. First there were the Aristotelians, who preferred to analyze the nature of things. They used little mathematics and few experiments but tried to build their system by logical arguments starting from a few basic premises. Their aim was more to explain why things happen than to describe how they happen.
A second school, led by the English philosopher Francis Bacon, favored the inductive method. He argued that the scientist should collect all the data possible through experimentation and observation. Once assembled, they would lead to the correct conclusion.
The mathematical, deductive approach was the third system advocated at the time.
The mechanical universe in all its glory would emerge from Isaac Newton’s work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The fundamental arguments of the book were the following: the universe could be explained completely through the use of mathematics. Therefore, mathematical models were accurate physical descriptions of the universe. The universe operated in a completely rational and predictable way, it was, then, mechanistic. Religion or theology were no longer needed to explain any physical phenomena of the universe; all the planets and otter objects moved according to a physical attraction between them, that is, gravity.
Newton based his view of the universe on the concept of inertia. Every object remains at rest until moved by another object; every object in motion stays in motion until redacted or stopped by another object. Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe would soon be applied to other phenomena as well.
However, the greatest achievements in systematizing an unsystematic science occurred in biology. While Galileo trained his new optical device on the stars and discovered new worlds, another optical device was being used to discover equally immense worlds in drops of water: the microscope.

Galileo: new optical device used on stars
Bacon: favors the inductive method
Newton: mathematical, deductive approach