JEMCS Forum: What is Early Modern?

In an 1890 issue of Modern Language Notes, James Garnett of the University of Virginia protested that scholars deployed the terms "Middle English" and "Early English" too cavalierly when they were discussing the language of Chaucer. Garnett proposed to close the Old English period at 1150 and the Middle English period at 1400, with all subsequent strands of the language falling into the category of Modern English. Recognizing that some scholars might seek out more subtlety in their classifications, he suggested that we call "Early Modern" the English spoken and written between 1400 and 1600 (189). The following year, Henry Sweet made a similar argument, but Sweet stipulated that "Early Modern" English was to be confined to the years 1500-1650 (211).

Following the 1890s, many philologists and historians of the English language entered into this debate about how to classify and assign dates to the evolving English tongue. In fact, at the turn of the last century, the term "Early Modern" had some of its most specific meanings to date—if dates are, in fact, an index of specificity—precisely when it referred to phases in the chronological development of English. In that respect, the words "Early Modern" performed a more or less purely sequential function, designating the years preceding and following the point in question as only numerically—and not necessarily historically or culturally—different.

More recently, however, we have come to question whether the periods— or even the individual years—that appear simply to follow one another are indeed of the same literary, historical, or cultural valence. We have furthermore begun to interrogate the meanings of successive years and periods when we compare them across cultures, recognizing the Eurocentrism—and, indeed, the Anglocentrism—that has characterized much reflection on the "Early Modern." Does "Early Modern" refer simply to that which came before modern? Is such a designation always and everywhere valid? Or does "Early Modern" have specific historical—and cultural—valences exceeding its ordinal classification? In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller write that the term "Early Modern" allows them "to explore continuities (as well as differences) between the literature of the 1640s and 1650s and the literature preceding and immediately following it. The result is to challenge and complicate traditional chronological boundaries . . ." (5). For Loewenstein and Mueller, "Early Modern" refers at least in part to a contested zone, one that does not simply link two ostensibly known quantities. But "Early Modern" is not simply about a period of time: Loewenstein and Mueller write that they chose the phrase "Early Modern" over the word "Renaissance" because in their view "the word 'Renaissance' meaning rebirth evokes a world of high or urbane literary culture, often associated with the court, humanism and the great revival of antiquity leading to an emulation of classical models for composition" (6).

Loewenstein and Mueller's choice of "Early Modern" over "Renaissance" is a sign of the times, in light of the fact that an increasing number of English departments appear to be using the former to replace the latter, perhaps for the very reasons Loewenstein and Mueller delineate. But how do we understand the term "Early Modern" when it refers to a time and a culture other than post-medieval Britain? Does "Early Modern" indicate a break, or perhaps merely a discontinuity, in historical or cultural chronologies—one that separates us decisively from the past? Or does it refer to a period much like our own, save the fact that its analogous institutions, phenomena, modes of knowing, and interrelationships exist in a less developed form? Could "Early Modern" invoke particular intellectual, economic, philosophic, and aesthetic movements and developments largely unrelated to manifestations of those phenomena in our own time?

Our own era—or perhaps better, our current moment—is characterized in large part by far-reaching changes in science and technology, communication, globalization, and world economics, and by new aesthetic forms. The years— perhaps in some cases the many years—following what we conventionally call the medieval period were equally profoundly affected by increased empirical observation...