England’s Worldly King: The Foreign, the Global, and the Rise of Cultural Cosmopolitanism at the Court of Henry VIII

Abstract

It is the premise of this study that in the Tudor period there developed a new sense ofbeing/feeling ‘cosmopolitan’ – i.e. a citizen of the world - that was distinct from the original, political, meaning of this term and was instead defined by cross cultural engagement, international trade, and interest in the peoples and places of the early modern world. This sense of cosmopolitanism would be explicitly articulated in Elizabeth I’s reign but has its origins earlier, in the court and culture of her father Henry VIII. This cultural cosmopolitanism was not just a-political but actually came to prominence within the decidedly anti-cosmopolitan political arrangement of the sovereign nation state. This dissertation charts the development of this identity through an exploration into the material culture of Henry VIII’s court and argues that it grew out from his rapacious desire to be seen as a worldly king in a newly globalized world. This subsequently led to a new appetite for, and place of, the foreign and the global at his court; manifested principally in his consumption of foreign things, goods, and global knowledge, andin his positive relationships with ‘strangers.’ These cultural interests happened to come to maturity in a period when, politically, England was turning away from internationalism and developing a growing sense of national identity and sovereignty that would culminate in Henry’s reformation in 1533. This dissertation argues that this coincidence of a multicultural court with a renewed sense of national politics enabled a culturally specific, and patriotic, form of cosmopolitanism to take root in England.