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What Elizabethans knew
685.
It’s easier to say what they didn’t know.
They didn’t know about the Earth going round the Sun, they didn’t know what the stars were nor what the Moon was. Magnifying lenses had been around for two centuries but nobody had thought of lining them up and pointing them at the sky.
Most Elizabethans stood on a foundation much more secure than we do: we know that everything up there moves; they knew that the Earth was stable and at the centre of the Universe, a Universe like an onion.
Hell was a physical place deep under the earth. Heaven was a place high up in the sky. There are still religious people who think this way, modern Elizabethans who can’t let go of needing stability beneath them.
Most educated Elizabethans had heard of Ancient Greece and Rome. Most ordinary people had only vague notions about which King followed whom, Henry VII being the first Tudor King, preceded by a lot of squabbling nobles and the history bits in the Bible. Of course they knew that Genesis was a true account of the creation of the world. They knew that Jerusalem was the centre of the world.
What they knew about current events they got from ballads.
Since the Victorians, we’ve patronised and looked down on everybody before the 19th century because back in those days…
