In the Europe-centered Renaissance period, England had been greatly influenced by it, from 16^th century to early 17^th . The renaissance did not only brought nationhood to Britain, but also its literature. The English Renaissance, which had begun as an opening up to new European learning and to new European styles, ended as a restrictive puritanical assertion of national independence from European norms of government and aesthetics. The English Reformation, which had begun as an assertion of English nationhood under a monarch who saw himself as head, protector, and arbiter of a national Church, ended as a challenge to the idea of monarchy itself. In England the principles on which the Renaissance and the Reformation were based, and by means of which both developed, were, as its literature serves to demonstrate, inextricably intertwined.