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What is Early Modern History?
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks 2021
The right of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4056-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4057-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wiesner, Merry E., 1952- author.
Title: What is early modern history? / Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks.
Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: What is history? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A pivotal introduction to early modern history’s approaches and methods”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027011 (print) | LCCN 2020027012 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509540563 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509540570 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509540587 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: History, Modern--16th century--Historiography. | History, Modern--17th century--Historiography. | History, Modern--18th century--Historiography. | History, Modern--16th century. | History, Modern--17th century. | History, Modern--18th century.
Classification: LCC D206 .W54 2021 (print) | LCC D206 (ebook) | DDC 909/.5072--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027011
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027012
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Introduction
In the twentieth century, historians invented the term “early modern” to refine an intellectual model of time first devised many centuries earlier. During the 1330s, the Italian scholar Petrarch had looked back longingly to classical antiquity, describing ancient Greece and Rome as a period of light, followed by a long period of darkness. He understood himself to be still living in darkness, but anticipated a better future: “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age.”1 By a century later, scholars in the thriving cities of northern Italy understood themselves to be in the bright and better era Petrarch predicted, one in which the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome were being revived. Starting with the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People (1442), they began to divide European history into three parts, with one break at the end of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century, and the second somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.2 In the sixteenth century, this new era and the cultural shift that underlay it were given the label we use today – the Renaissance, derived from the French word for “rebirth.” That word was first used by the art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) to describe the art of “rare men of genius” such as his contemporary Michelangelo. Through their works, Vasari judged, the glory of the classical past had been reborn after centuries of darkness. Over time, the word “Renaissance” was broadened to include aspects of life other than art, although because the new attitude had a slow diffusion out of Italy, the Renaissance happened at different times in different parts of Europe.
Writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries increasingly used the word “middle” – middle season, middle centuries, middle age – to describe the period between the fall of ancient Rome and their own era. Following Bruni, they divided European history into three parts: ancient (to the end of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century); medieval, a word that comes from medium aevum, Latin for middle age (from the fifth century to the fifteenth); and what they usually called “new” (novum in Latin, from the fifteenth century forward). This three-part division became extremely influential, and is still in use today to organize course offerings, library and bookstore holdings, museums, and even how people think of themselves. On introducing themselves at a conference, scholars often say, “I’m a medievalist” or “I’m an ancient historian.”
The word “modern” comes from the Latin modernus, a word invented in the sixth century ce to describe the new Christian age in contrast to pagan antiquity (antiquus). “Modern” was generally juxtaposed with “ancient” into the eighteenth century, but at the end of that century “modern” was increasingly used for things judged to be radically new, and became oriented toward the future rather than contrasted to the past.3 What the humanists had called the “new” period of history became the “modern,” with its origins not only in the Renaissance, but also in the first voyage of Columbus (1492), and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (1517). These three developments – and others, depending on who was writing – were understood to usher in the modern world, or at least to begin the process of ushering it in.
Dividing history into units of time is called “periodization.” This rather clunky word is at the heart of what historians do to make meaning of the past. They decide – and discuss, debate, and argue over – which events and developments should be brought together to form some sort of coherent whole,