Explore the idea of change--from small adjustments in perspective to political revolutions--in the seventeenth century. We will take up literary experiments such as Edmund Spenser's terrifying vision of cosmic mutability in The Faerie Queene, John Donne's awareness of his vulnerable body as he endures the various stages of an illness, and Margaret Cavendish's embrace of science fiction to imagine new configurations of social life. Topics might include the Reformation and its aftermath; the scientific revolution; the English civil wars; the experience of religious conversion; shifting ideas of race and ethnicity; transatlantic travel and colonial expansion; the idea of "progress" and resistance to it; the agency of women in literary culture and political struggle; changing norms around sexual behavior and identity; and the unstable idea of literature itself. Authors may include Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Galileo, Marvell, Hooke, Cavendish, Behn, and Milton.