- Before class, spend a few minutes reviewing the Breaking News timeline. This interactive timeline will introduce you to figures and events in the news during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Taking notes as you read about the different monarchs and religious groups may help you keep the important names and dates straight.
Once you’ve viewed the Breaking News introductory film, explore the Flash timeline below.
Restoration Reading Exercise
- Though new playwrights like Dryden and Congreve captivated new theater audiences after the Restoration and great poems like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Pope’s Rape of the Lock appeared in print over the next half century, the period’s most unexpected literary achievement was the rise of a new reading audience for prose. After the Restoration, the educated elite were joined by middle class readers and women who poured over a growing number of prose titles, including travel narratives and romances, political pamphlets and tracts, works of scientific or philosophical speculation, and–by far the best selling of the period–sermons and religious works. Popular prose titles appearing in the period reflect many of the new interests and tensions of the seventeenth century:
- – John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
– Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
– Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
– Isaac Newton, Principia (1687) or Optics (1704)
– John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
– John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696)
– Jeremy Collier, Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698)
Spend 10-15 minutes researching one of these titles. You might begin with the Encyclopedia Britannica to put your author and work in context but may use any other sites or resources from the web. *Make sure to keep web addresses for sources providing unique information to cite at the end of your summary.
Encyclopedia Britannica Online
After you can answer the basic journalistic questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why?), write a short 1-2 paragraph introduction to the author and work that summarizes its main thesis or purpose. Then speculate on the title’s importance to the period or connection to events from the timeline.
Bring your summary to class to conclude our discussion of the Restoration period.