The European World Lecture: week 1 (7.x.2010)
The Historiography of Early Modernity
Professor Steve Hindle
1. Terminology & Periodisation
a) ‘early modernity’: by definition implies a definition of ‘modernity’; so what is the
threshold of modernity? The enlightenment? The French Revolution? The English
Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? The Industrial
Revolution? The Black Death? Modernity looks different in varying geographical
and historiographical contexts
b) A relatively recent coinage: what was once called ‘Tudor-Stuart’ history in the
English context; ‘ancien regime’ history in the French or European context; and
still is called ‘Ren-Ref) (Renaissance and Reformation History) in North
American Universities. 1st coined in the 19thc. But common usage only from the
1970s: Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975); Burke,
Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978). Implies a history that moves
beyond constitutional and political developments to social and cultural issues.
c) A paradoxical term: the phrase ‘early modern’ captures the ambiguity of a period
that was somehow familiar, somehow alien. The past is a foreign country, but
sometimes we speak the same language as they did.
d) This lecture designed to get you to think about how the study of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries have developed over time, emphasising in particular new
methods and approaches. Thesis: that the ‘early modern period’ has been a fruitful
testing ground for changing historiographical approaches more generally. So what
follows is a history of historical thought about the early modern period . . .
2. Ranke and the Empiricist Tradition (c.1820-1930)
a) A German tradition: Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886); founding father of history as a
professional discipline (archives; footnotes; source criticism; seminars); emphasis on high
politics and diplomacy; History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1824): wie es eigentlich
gewesesen (=’how it really/essentially was’); reputation for factual narratives of orthodox
political history; focus on states and great men (‘world historical figures’); allegedly
‘scientific’ (verification; objectivity); in reality much more complex: key role for empathy
(imagination and intuition) and for art/drama/style (pen portraits, flashbacks).
b) Legacy: the tradition of high political narrative history (Elton 1953).
3. The Annales School and History as a Social Science (c.1930-1980)
a) Phase 1: Marc Bloch (1886-1944); Lucien Febvre (1878-1956); Annales d’Histoire
Economique et Sociale (1929-46); Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilisations (1946-) ;
Phase II: Fernand Braudel (1902-85); The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World
(1948); influence spreading especially to the USA.
b) Profound hostility to German empiricism; rejection of political history and of exclusively
archival sources; aimed at l’histoire totale, drawing on the methodologies of the new social
sciences (sociology, demography; geography). Emphasis on continuity (la longue duree),
enduring structures of geo-history landscape, climate: ‘the Mediterranean was 99 days long’.
Three modes of historical time (structure; conjuncture; event). Team-based field-work and
quantification; human studied collectively in their natural environment
b) Legacy: the tradition of demographic history (Wrigley & Schofield 1981); but also
histories of everything (landscape; dress; diet; menstruation; literacy)
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4. Thompson, Davis and ‘History From Below’ (c.1965-1990)
a) In England E.P. Thompson (1924-1993); ‘The Moral Economy of the Crowd’ (P&P 1971)
in the US N.Z Davies (1928-) ‘The Reasons of Misrule’ (P&P 1971); ‘The Rites of Violence’
(P&P 1973). Frustration with the ‘structuralism’ of the Annales school; desire to recover the
agency of subordinate groups (the poor, the governed, women), esp. the popular mentalities of
subordination. Partly inspired by the Marxism of Eighteenth Brumaire (‘men make their own
history . . .’), but their socialism was decidedly humanistic; despite theoretical influences,
methodology very empirical, speaking with (for?) the dead in the ‘archives of repression’ (the
law courts). Emphasis still on collective mentalities (crowds, youth groups)
b) Legacy: the ‘new social history’; the history of experience (esp. of poverty, illiteracy).
5. Thomas, Ginzburg and Historical Anthropology (1965-?)
a) In England K.V. Thomas (1933-); Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); in Italy Carlo
Ginzburg (1939-) The Cheese and the Worms (1976); both scholars heavily influenced by
anthropology (the study of man in ‘primitive’ society), especially in seeking to understand the
strange in the apparently familiar (‘the past is a foreign country, they do things
differentlythere’). Interpreting the alien or the bizarre in its own cultural context (i.e within
the system of beliefs/symbols/practices with whih contemporaries were familiar). Tradition
headed in two directions: i) Thomas remained interested in collective mentalities and was
frustrated that witch beliefs were not amenable to quantification (‘fell back on the intellectual
equivalent of the bow and arrow in the nuclear age’): took his questions from anthropology
but his answers from the archive, piling up examples of witch accusations, ghost beliefs,
astrological practices; ii) Ginzburg turned away from the quantitative, and refracted the
empirical evidence through literary criticism; sought to explore individuals in their own
cultural context; micro-histories of individual mentality (‘the cosmos of a 16th c. miller’); the
historian should both ask anthropological questions of the responses to the anthropological
questions of the inquisitors; and enter into an explicit dialogue with the reader about the
silences/ambiguities of that evidence.
b) Legacy: ‘the new cultural history’: from macro-history to micro-history
6. The Linguistic Turn and Post Modernism (1990a) Much more influential in the historiography of the modern than of the early modern period
(early modernists might argue that micro-history is their own version of post-modernism, esp.
because it retreats from macro-historical meta-narratives). A broader intellectual movement of
the 1980s/90s, rejecting grand historical schemes or meta-narratives; emphasising the role of
language in structuring social action; hence the need to focus on representation and on
discourses; particularly good example Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons (1997);
emphasises the languages in which witchcraft was described and analysed (by judges, by
theologians, by monarchs), seems uninterested in the reality of thousands of women being
burned at the stake; morally disengaged?
b) Legacy: histories that mean whatever historians want them to mean
7. Conclusions: Is ‘Early Modernity’ a Viable Category of Historical Analysis?
a) The early modern period has been a peculiarly effective testing ground for new approaches
to the discipline of history; problems of evidence are more acute; questions of methodology
more pressing. This is where the action is!
b) Most of the innovations on the intellectual history of the discipline have been imported
from other disciplines (history as a net consumer of ideas from the social sciences)
c) A wide range of historiographical approaches are now available: histories of power; of
resources; of experience; of meaning; or representation. No agreed methodology, though
some methodologies more fashionable than others. No agreement even within the Warwick
History Department (no single ‘Warwick school’).
d) Over the coming weeks and months you will encounter wide variety of historiographical
approaches to ‘early modernity’—political, religious, social, economic, cultural, intellectual.
The key question is whether, having encountered all these, you think ‘early modernity’ is still
a viable category of historical analysis?