Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (review)

The early modern period is one that sits, sometimes uncomfortably, between the medieval and the modern. As a category of periodization it is often ill-defined, its key dates, and even turning points, still debated amongst historians. In his new study, Dr Withington acknowledges this ambiguity and attempts a redefinition of the early modern period. He does not attempt to define the period from a twenty-first-century perspective but, rather, tries to illustrate how early modern people would have viewed their own period and their own modernity.

To achieve this, Withington dives into a linguistic study of the period. Relying heavily on the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Withington chooses a number of keywords (‘modern’, ‘society’, ‘commonwealth’, and ‘company’) to analyse and track throughout the early modern period. He analyses the appearance of his keywords in the titles of the vernacular texts of the ESTC to show the ways in which these words define the early modern period. Withington acknowledges the limitations of this approach, which ignores non-printed sources and relies on the cataloguing efficiency of the ESTC. It does, however, serve as an invaluable starting point in what is a new approach to defining this period.

The first section of Withington’s book jumps between exploring the twentieth- and the nineteenth-century usages of ‘Early Modern’. He focuses on the period between William Johnson’s 1869 lecture Early Modern Europe and John U. Nef’s emphatic and deliberate use of ‘Early Modern’ in his 1942 article in the Economic History Review. Withington sees these two events as turning points in our modern usage of ‘Early Modern’. He argues that Johnson’s use of the term reflected the Victorians’ desire to make sense of their own time in relation to the relatively recent past. Withington demonstrates that ‘Early Modern’ was never initially meant as a label of periodization but, rather, as a way of understanding the relationship between the present and the past. Nef’s influential study argued that England experienced an early Industrial Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period he refers to as ‘Early Modern’. Like Johnson, Nef understands this period as being fundamentally different from the medieval and a necessary precursor to our own, modern, society. Withington shows us that ‘Early Modern’ came to redefine our way of looking at modernity. The modern is shown not to have evolved from the Industrial Revolution but to have set down roots some four centuries earlier. Most importantly, Withington reminds us that this period was not seen as a stagnant phase, filling in time between the medieval and the modern but was actively defined as a time of rapid historical change.

After a comprehensive historiography, Withington moves on to the second part of his study: a close linguistic analysis of ‘modern’ and ‘society’ as the terms appeared in vernacular titles from the ESTC. Withington tracks these two words from the 1570s to the 1700s and finds that their evolution follows an almost identical trajectory. Both words, when analysed as a percentage of all printed vernacular texts, rise in usage significantly throughout this period. Withington demonstrates that early modern people embraced the term ‘modern’ in the 1570s and not, as has been suggested elsewhere, in the 1660s. ‘Society’ is integrated in a similar fashion. Both words took on new meanings in this period that separated them from their previous associations. ‘Modern’ came to be understood as ‘new’ when compared to a previous era. ‘Society’ became actively defined as a group who had formed a voluntary association. These redefinitions created a new way for early modern people to define their own times.

Withington takes the same approach to his analysis of ‘commonwealth’ and ‘company’. ‘Commonwealth’ rose in a similar pattern to ‘modern’ and ‘society’ but, not surprisingly, suffered a severe downturn after 1660. He particularly focuses on the links between ‘company’ and ‘society’ and the...