Early Modern: "By Any Other Name . . ."?

I am specialist in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. By defining the field by centuries, I am already trying to sidestep the frequently thorny and sometimes fraught issue of periodization and naming. My area of study has been called, both formally and informally, by many a name, including: Golden Age, Siglo de Oro, los Siglos de Oro, Renaissance and Baroque, and finally, Early Modern or its equivalent in Spain de la primera modernidad. As we know, the very validity of periodization has been questioned by postmodern theory. At the same time, these categories, while marked both by history and by ideology, are useful on some level in research and teaching. It certainly seems to be in vogue these days, at least among US Hispanists both in literature and in history, to use the early modern designation, but not to the complete exclusion of what some might consider the more traditional label, Golden Age.

The use of early modern may well respond to a critique of the charged term "Golden Age." People question how one can refer to a period as "golden" when it is associated with the expulsion of Jews and Moriscos from Spain, and when it coincides with the colonization and resultant decimation of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The most common answer, though perhaps not entirely satisfying, is that the term "golden" refers to literary and artistic production. Categories like Renaissance and Baroque can be imprecise as well, since they are used to describe often distinct literary or artistic or cultural manifestations across different cultures that occur at unique stages over a varying amount of time and in particular socio-historic contexts. As a result, these terms may be problematic when looking to analyze the artistic or intellectual production of a number of cultures or from a more comparative perspective. The term early modern may just be another misleading category, if colleagues in English departments are using it to speak solely of the English Renaissance.

What can be gained from the use of the term early modern in its broader or even broadest sense speaks to a larger, and perhaps more challenging, issue: comparative studies across national and linguistic traditions. As we know, Renaissance may mean something different, both in temporal and aesthetic terms, for Italy than it does for England or Spain. Associating the term early modern solely with the word Renaissance can result in a limited understanding of the ongoing—if often uneven—development of new directions in intellectual, artistic, and scientific discovery and experimentation. Rarely is anything so neatly or clearly definable. I am taking it as a given that we accept that the developments or shifts that make one period of study apparently different from another (e.g., Medieval vs. Renaissance) are gradual, far from clearly defined in all cases, and ought not be linked to a specific event. The death of author Pedro Calderón de la Barca in 1681 is often used to mark the end of Spain's Golden Age, but it is not the only terminus that is used. Furthermore, just as manuscript culture still existed alongside print culture after the advent of the printing press, it is clear that the transition from one period to another occurs slowly, at times in a kind of tug-of-war, but with significant overlap.

My sense of early modern is that it more readily allows for the idea of a continuum that surely reaches back into the fifteenth century and forward into the eighteenth, as opposed to a more arbitrary division that marks the fifteenth century as Medieval and the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth as the Enlightenment. However, to better understand the intricate negotiations and complex growing pains associated with any sort of definable epistemological shift, this transition from one period to the next must always be conceived as a unique process determined by a number of factors that are in flux. Without a doubt, the concept of early modern takes into account the present-day resonances inherent in the use of modern, if even in some embryonic form. The early modern...