Late Early Modern

The switch in terminology from Renaissance to early modern was plainly a deliberate intervention in the moment of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, which dates from the mid-1980s, and was designed to undermine periodization as well as the hitherto exclusive focus on elite culture and high cultural texts. (Though see Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England 19-44 for evidence that "early modern" is of Victorian coinage, and 45-70 for evidence that the phrase had wide currency among economic historians in the first half of the twentieth century.) Furthermore, "renaissance," like "Restoration" or BC/AD, is hardly a neutral term, but presumes some progressive, whiggish awakening from a stupor. You are already taking sides using such terminology, and it is fair to say that still scholars who prefer "renaissance" tend to be more conservative and those who prefer "early modern" tend to be more progressive.

Institutionally, some of the readers of this journal will remember that when we began organizing the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, this meeting was designed to attract work beyond Europe and North America, and as such "renaissance" is hopelessly Eurocentric and has little meaning or no meaning for Asia or Africa, no reference outside of a European context. GEMCS was intended from the beginning to be more inclusive chronologically and a conceptual alternative to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Conceptually, early modern allows, enables, and encourages a continuity, rather than the absolute breaks that course catalogs, college curriculums, and the Modern Language Association job list categories still impose. These are categories that, despite endless critique, by simple inertia and institutional investment as yet determine training, hiring, and, through the curriculum, teaching. Nonetheless, the switch to early modern clearly encourages a longer view, a greater arch (though not quite like Annales longue durée), whether one stresses continuity or rupture. Versions of the longer arch are nicely exemplified in Raymond Williams's early work, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). Early modern also has the advantage of obviating such clumsy terms as the "long eighteenth century," though it invites such equally clumsy substitutes as "late early modern" (a description that, in fact, I prefer to eighteenth century). Wherever one's work is situated in the eighteenth century, as a cultural and historical formation, it has more in common with an agricultural old society (as Harold Perkins has it), a face-to-face society (as Peter Laslett has it), than it does to an urbanized, industrialized, and capitalized nineteenth century. Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity offers a particular rich recent example of such fruits, as a prehistory of domesticity and the novel, reaching further back than any study has before. As such, it is unlike all the histories of the novel spawned by Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel that are predicated on novelty and an absolute break between seventeenth-century romance and eighteenth-century novel. For those of us (here read "leftist") still given to the larger view, for whom Williams's dialectic of residual, dominant, and emergent still offers the most flexible, capacious, and efficacious model for understanding cultural change, the larger arch is a precondition of any adequate narrative of change.

Despite these manifold benefits, surely there are those who will argue, and not unreasonably, that this switch only reinforces a monumental binary between early modern and modern, unwittingly reinforcing a Foucaultian insistence on epistemic break roughly around 1789, and reinforcing an obviously Eurocentric date and event. So too early modern/modern pretty plainly depends on a modernization narrative, making the Weberian paradigm all but universal: first there was a mythic period of unchanging tradition and then a revolutionary rupture ushers in the fall into modernity, a narrative that is inescapably teleological—all history is prehistory to the present. As a student of the novel, for which all accounts of its development and rise constitute one or another form of modernization narrative, I find this less troubling than most, since I believe that the Weberian modernization narrative underwrites the whole division of the humanities and some of the social sciences as well.

In...