Periodization is something that historians do, but so do ordinary people when thinking about their own lives. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, people debated how many stages there were in a human life. They increasingly accepted the notion that there were seven, at least for men, corresponding to the seven known planets (the planets out to Saturn plus the moon). Discussions of what were called the “ages of man” abounded.4 They were depicted in manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, wall paintings, and cathedral floors so that people who could not read were also familiar with them. Sometimes these showed women as well, though the female life-cycle was more often conceptualized and portrayed as a three-stage one: childhood to age twelve, adulthood peaking at age twenty-five, and old age beginning at forty, often described as virgin/wife/widow.5 For us today, life stages are more personal and idiosyncratic. We decide – again usually after the fact – which changes mark dramatic breaks, and which years of our lives form an intelligible grouping. We decide that an event experienced when we are forty marks a “mid-life crisis,” or perhaps that something experienced when we are thirty or fifty or even sixty does. We may use period labels for ourselves given by others – “I’m a boomer,” “I’m a millennial,” “I’m middle-aged” – but also dispute these. Periodization is always an interpretive act.
Whether personal or historical, certain period labels contain clear value judgments, which leaves them more open to dispute than others. “Renaissance” is among these. Vasari clearly understood the rebirth of classical culture he saw happening around him as something important, and something good. Historians and others since then have disputed both of these judgments. They have pointed out that the cultural and intellectual changes that were at the heart of the Renaissance affected only a tiny group, mostly relatively wealthy, well-educated men who lived in cities. More than forty years ago the historian Joan Kelly posed the question, “Did women have a Renaissance?” to which her answer was no.6 There were far more continuities than change for most people, male and female, and many social groups saw decline rather than advance. In addition, because the Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement rather than strictly a time period, it fit somewhat awkwardly into the ancient/medieval/modern scheme. Yes, it was understood to be one development that had led to the modern world, but the Renaissance in Italy overlapped the later medieval period, and the Renaissance in northern Europe the beginning of the modern period. The dividing line between medieval and modern was increasingly set at about 1500, with the Renaissance viewed as a bridge period, or limited only to cultural history.
Creating “early modern”
Among those who had doubts about the significance of the Renaissance was the medieval historian Lynn Thorndike. In his A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he explicitly rejected the idea that the “so-called Italian Renaissance” (his terminology) by itself had brought anything new.7 He introduced a new, and what he saw as a broader and better term: “early modern.” In the 1940s, several articles used the term to discuss economic issues related to early English colonization and the English Civil War, two topics that had never fit very well under the rubric “Renaissance.” By the 1950s, “early modern” was being used more widely in economic history, especially in surveys, but it was not well known beyond this. J.H. Elliott reports that when he and H.G. Koenigsberger proposed a series to Cambridge University Press in the early 1960s with the title “Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History,” it was turned down because no one knew what “early modern” meant, though by 1966 CUP had agreed, and the series was launched.8 Increasing numbers of social and political historians picked up the term in the 1970s and 1980s. At this point, using it in scholarly writing generally signaled an interest in theory derived from the social sciences, and particularly what is often called the Annales “school,” a group of French historians associated with the journal Annales, which had begun publication in 1929 but became especially influential after World War II. (For more on Annales, see Chapter 1.)
In the 1990s, the term spread more widely in scholarly research, publishing, and learned societies. Several other presses also began book series with “early modern” in their titles, and journals adopted it as well. The Sixteenth Century Journal added the subtitle “The Journal of Early Modern Studies” to its title; scholars in Canada started an online journal Early Modern Literary Studies; historians at the University of Minnesota launched the Journal of Early Modern History: Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts; and the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies changed its name to the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In terms of scholarly organizations, scholars of German history and literature in the United States started the group Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (The Interdisciplinary Early Modern), cultural studies scholars formed the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (which later set up the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies), and scholars of women and gender formed the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (which also later began publishing a journal, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal). Some historians of areas other than Europe also began to use “early modern,” often viewing increased global interactions and connections as the defining characteristics of the era.
Each of these journals and organizations defines the period slightly differently: The Sixteenth Century Journal as roughly 1450 to 1660, Early Modern Literary Studies as 1500 to 1700, Early Modern Women as 1400 to 1700, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies as roughly 1550 to 1850, and the Journal of Early Modern History as even longer, roughly 1300 to 1800. The varying definitions of the period reflect the perspectives and aims of scholars and editors, but also reconceptualizations of the field. In the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, the break between medieval and modern was seen as 1500, with Columbus and Luther the most important figures. In most recent research and teaching materials, it has moved backward at least to 1450, to take into account the invention of printing with movable metal type, the effective use of gunpowder weaponry, the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, and the earliest European voyages down the African coast. In a few cases it has moved still further backward, fully encompassing the Renaissance in Europe and the end of the Mongol Empire in Asia. Thus in this longer periodization the Renaissance is once again seen as part of the modern era and not a bridge period.
Map 1: Europe in 1450
The end of the early modern era tends to vary by discipline. In literature, especially in the English literature that dominates the field, it is generally set at around 1700. In history, it is almost always 1789 or 1800. The former date, that of the French Revolution, privileges the political history of western Europe, though there were other significant changes in the decade: Edmund Cartwright invented the steam-powered loom and opened the first cloth-making factory using his new machines, and the first fleet of convicts set sail from Britain to Australia, carrying about a thousand people. Thus the 1780s saw new processes in industrialization and colonization, two developments that are markers in most literature of the break between “early modern” and what we might call “truly modern.” In his influential The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, for example, Christopher Bayly begins with that decade.9 But 1800 works just as well to mark this break, and is widely used.