ABSTRACT
The idea of a book on the ‘Elizabethan World’ may seem to give an undueimportance to England in the second half of the sixteenth century. Certainly, other volumes in this series have a better claim to use the all-encompassing term ‘world’. Even Andrew Pettegree’s The Reformation World or Beat Kümin’s The European World, 1500-1800 incorporate an entire continent, not to mention its overseas empires. England from 1558 until 1603, however, was just a kingdom, within a relatively small archipelago off Continental Europe; it had no permanent colonies, was limited in its military manpower and consequently exercised far less power and influence on the Continent than either Valois France or Habsburg Spain. So why the ‘Elizabethan World’?
