Parsing Early Modernity

While one could ask what's in a name, it is clear that those of us in academia feel that there is a great deal, so much so that we are pondering the meaning of the Early Modern in a journal that uses the term in its title. But what exactly are we arguing over, and what (if any) are the stakes? Why has a designation that is, after all, simply a descriptive term, excited such controversy and even angst? On the surface, the debate over what constitutes the Early Modern appears a turf war between those scholars of what used to be known as the Renaissance and those of the ever-expanding "extended eighteenth century." There is frustration on one side of having a title seemingly snatched away and a sense of entitlement on the other in having deserved that same title. As we all try to grasp the brass ring that is the Early Modern, the question becomes not what the Early Modern "really" is but rather at what point does semantics become substance?

More than establishing an easily identifiable field of study, this argument reflects a deep-set concern with how we define ourselves. In choosing to adopt the identifier "early modern," academics seek the opportunity to break from their own past and re-imagine themselves through the mechanism of renaming. For some, it is an attempt to escape from periodization based on convenient century markers such as the eighteenth century (usually with the forty years after the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 tacked on). For Renaissance scholars, the term represents an opportunity to resist being tied by definition to the past, no matter how much that past was reborn. (The descriptor "Augustan" was discarded for similar reasons.) By the time I began my career, "the Augustan Age," with its connotations of a literary and philosophical era defined by an even more remote age, was rarely used. Instead, scholarship that covered the years between 1660 and 1800 expanded its scope, adding the word studies to its name and professional organization to indicate the interdisciplinary nature of its subject matter and approach. Two decades ago, a group of academics, myself included, met at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference and decided to inaugurate a new scholarly entity. We chose the term "Early Modern" for this group specifically to escape from the periodization that we felt had become claustrophobic, hoping at the same time to indicate our rejection of the reification of specific canons of literature, thought, and approach. For us, the term represented an attempt to prevent the past from becoming ossified, to allow for wiggle room in terms of approach and subject matter. The term was left deliberately baggy, to indicate inclusiveness; it represented an ideal of scholarly community rather than a clearly understood period of study. In this sense, "Early Modern" was a term related to a distinct, specific past—our own.

As a field of study, by contrast, Early Modernity is neither exact nor knowable. Rather, it is a time and culture that we try to recapture by searching for traces left in texts, art, music; along the way, however, we inevitably leave traces of ourselves so that the Early Modern comes to mirror our own demographics and self perceptions. Thirty or forty years ago, for example, the Early Modern era, wherever we choose to locate it, was largely male and white. Its women were inarticulate, and its non-Caucasian peoples were mute. Today, after decades of recovery work aided most recently by digital resources such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Early English Books Online, our vision of the early modern past is more integrated; it is hard to imagine a conference in the field that does not include numerous panels studying the works and worlds of women, and at the very least making a bow toward the existence of a world outside of Western Europe. There are limitations to our effort to reconstruct the past, of course. Slaves and non-European peoples were often not literate—at least not in European languages. Women were circumscribed in their sphere...