The Elizabethan World Picture

A reader wrote in recently:

As a companion to the biography of Robert Southwell, another little book nicely rounds out the philosophical underpinnings of that period, called The Elizabethan World Picture, by EMW Tillyard. In it, Tillyard uses examples from all the great Elizabethan writers to explore medieval (and of course classical) concepts of How The World Is. It would be a nice study in conjunction with Boethius, and demonstrates the continuity of thought, and developments too, from the classical to medieval to renaissance worlds. And as an ellipsis at the end of the sentence, the rupture since that time…