Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth presides over the watershed age Tawney describes, when the religious revolution arrived on a world already heaving with the vastest economic crisis since Rome's fall. Her settlement kept ecclesiastical authority contested and canon law partially discredited, leaving moral questions about usury, enclosure, and the poor without a single arbiter. She matters to the early arc because the unresolved tensions of her reign are precisely the conditions in which new theories of religion and economic life took root.