Chapter 1

Medieval and Modern

Euan Cameron

The frontiers between epochs of human history, even within one continent and in one reasonably

continuous cultural space, are notoriously hard to pin down, and very easy to criticise or to argue

away. Yet history cannot function without periodisation. The exercise of historical analysis and

synthesis requires that one discern, discover, and to some degree ‘invent’, the meaningful

movements, phases, and landmark processes that make human history intelligible. The

expression ‘early modern’ as applied to the history of Europe (usually understood to stretch from

c. 1500 to c. 1800) is one of those useful and questionable constructions. The term, and its

German equivalent Frühneuzeit, came into normal use from the 1950s and 1960s onwards (for

more detail see Withington 2010). It entered currency among social and linguistic historians, as

a more neutral term than the ‘Renaissance and Reformation’ label that had been most widely

used up to that point. It defined a period of time, rather than assigning all of European history to

one or other of a supposedly hegemonic set of ‘movements’. Among its more distinguished early

users were G. N. Clark, J. H. Hexter, Norman F. Cantor, and the historian of science A. C.

Crombie (Clark 1957; Hexter 1961; Cantor and Werthman 1967; Crombie 1959). Yet the phrase

‘early modern’ raises conceptual problems of its own. It is as though we were defining this

period in history both with reference to the Middle Ages and to the period that followed it. ‘Early

Modern’ Europe is tending towards ‘modernity’, but has not got there yet. The shackles of the

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medieval world have been discarded, but the full freedom of modernity has not been attained.

While most present-day historians who use the term will by no means share these Whiggish

assumptions, it is important to be aware of the potential that our labels have to insinuate ideas

into our history, even ideas that we do not consciously intend or embrace.

How the early moderns defined historical periods

Historians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe had their own ideas about how to

divide history into periods. Their systems of historical time are largely forgotten today except by

specialists; yet they form an important corrective to any tendency we might feel to assume that

our schemes of periodisation are self-evident. Some historians such as Hartmann Schedel (1493)

and Sebastian Franck (1531) still divided world history into the seven ages of the world first

identified from Scripture by Augustine of Hippo (d. 429). Into the sixteenth century, many

Christian historians borrowed their sense of periods of time from the Babylonian Talmud, where

two tractates divided the world’s time into three: the first two thousand years without the law, the

second two thousand the time of the law of Moses, and the final epoch the time of the Messiah

(Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a–b; see www.halakhah.com/pdf/nezikin/Sanhedrin.pdf; and

as cited in Carion 1550, sig. *viv -viir ). Some religious visionaries remained attracted by another

threefold system, the one associated with Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) who divided world history

into the three ages of the Father, the Son, and the incoming Age of the Spirit. Some of the most

widely used textbooks of history, including that of Johannes Sleidan, arranged ancient history

according to the system of four ‘great monarchies’, traditionally construed out of the second and

seventh chapters of the biblical book of Daniel (Sleidan 1557). Since the last of these

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‘monarchies’ was mostly agreed to have been the Roman Empire, German historians since Otto

of Freising in the mid-twelfth century had postulated that the Roman Empire was ‘transferred’ to

the Franks and then to the Germans – as even Martin Luther agreed. Luther also supposed that

the end of the world was relatively near, certainly within a century or so. One of the curious

ironies of the ‘early modern’ was that many of its sharpest minds were apocalyptists, who

believed themselves to be living in the last age of the world (Millenarianism and Messianism

2001). The idea that they were ‘early’ anything, let alone ‘early modern’, would have seemed

absurd to people who held these views: they were living in the latter days of the created order.

(See Appendix 1.1)

In one significant area – perhaps only one – the historians of the Reformation era anticipated

and maybe contributed to their successors’ sense of the flow of time. Protestant historians of

Christianity believed that the centuries of the world could be divided up into phases, depending

on how remote they had become from the pristine inspiration of the early Church. In the

centuries since Pentecost the Church had progressively deviated from its apostolic roots, in

consecutive phases, some thought, of 500 or maybe of 300 years, until a dramatic transformation,

usually assigned to around the year 1500, had revealed the Gospel once again and confounded

the power of Antichrist (Cameron 2019). The putative ‘rediscovery’ of the Scriptures and the

Gospel in the Reformation amounted, in the eyes of those who lived through it, to a major

transformative moment in history. [Insert source excerpt 1.1 near here] Yet once again, the

reformers did not suppose that their epiphany moment was destined to lead to something beyond

itself, such as freedom of conscience, the secular state, or the secularisation of society as a

whole. They believed that it represented the rediscovery of something very ancient, and that it

prepared the way for the end of history.

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Defining ‘medieval’

The term and the idea of a ‘medieval’ period in human history derive from the laments and the

criticisms of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian humanists. It is claimed that Petrarch,

visiting Rome in 1341, was so moved by the sight of the ruins of the great metropolis that he

abandoned the idea to write biographies of famous men throughout known history; the

‘barbarians’ who came after the fall of Rome were of no interest (Mommsen 1942). In the hands

of Italian historians of the fifteenth century such as Lionardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, there

developed the idea of a ‘middle time’ between the decline of ancient Roman culture and the

rebirth, or resurgence, which several of them detected in their own age (McLaughlin 1988;

Ianziti 2012, 310). Initially, the early humanists characterised the ‘middle time’ specifically

either by the decline of republican values, or (more typically) by the decline of literary elegance

in Latin. They blamed this decline on, among other things, the loss of many of the works of the

great forensic orator and essayist Cicero until their rediscovery in the early fifteenth century.

Some referred to the post-antique age as one of ‘darkness’, meaning not that it was unknown, but

that it was uncultured. By the time of late seventeenth-century textbook historians such as

Georgius Hornius and Christoph Cellarius, the idea of a division of history into ancient, medieval

and modern had become established: the latter of these incorporated the scheme into the titles

and volume divisions of his work (Hornius 1666, 183; Cellarius 1702; Lukacs 1968, 15). [Insert

source excerpt 1.2 near here]

It is therefore somewhat ironic that the term ‘medieval’ has come to be embraced and

universally used by scholars who admire and study the thousand-year period from c. 500 to c.

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1500 for its own sake and on its own terms. Since 1932 a scholarly journal entitled Medium

Aevum has been published by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. It

has become conventional to divide the medieval period into three broadly defined epochs: the

early Middle Ages, usually reckoned from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to c. 1000; the

High Middle Ages, from c. 1000 to c. 1250; and the Later Middle Ages, from c. 1250 to c. 1500.

The turning-point of c. 1250 for the ‘Later’ Middle Ages has been debated, but is based on the

death of the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen in that year, followed shortly by a long

interregnum in the Empire; and by the beginnings of fragmentation in the thought-world of late

medieval scholasticism around this time (Hale, Highfield, and Smalley 1965). The idea of calling

this whole era, or even just the earlier part of it, the ‘dark ages’ is now something of a historical

fossil, though still deserving of serious rebuttal (Nelson 2007). The continuing use of the term

‘medieval’ as a guild label and as a universally recognised (if not always welcome) qualifier for

a period of European history tells us that it must be thought to mean something. The task is to

attempt to define some of what that meaning includes. It is vital, in what follows, to appreciate

that medieval Europe was in no way static over a thousand years. Generalising about this

expanse of time always means describing peoples and cultures on the move. Some would argue

that the divisions between early and later medieval history are at least as important as the

distinctions between medieval and early modern (Southern 1995-7).

In terms of Europe’s political structures, the medieval period can be book-ended, if so desired,

somewhat neatly between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when Odoacer deposed

Romulus ‘Augustulus’ of Rome in 476, to the fall of the Eastern Empire, when the Ottoman

Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and defeated Constantine XI Palaiologos in battle.

In the East, the political, administrative and cultural traditions of East Rome, later to be known

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as the Byzantine Empire, persisted throughout the period, despite being whittled away by

invaders from the East and, notoriously, being despoiled by the Fourth Crusaders in the early

thirteenth century. While historians rightly acknowledge the importance of the Eastern Empire,

whose culture was for much of the early Middle Ages more productive and sophisticated than

that of the West (Bury 1924-1936, vol IV; Herrin 2008), most of the characterisation of the

‘Middle Ages’ has in practice been drawn from events in Western, Latin Europe. In the West, the

prevailing political conditions after the fall of Rome were diffuse, at times even chaotic, as

different ethnic groups from the East and the North vied for control of fragments of Western

Europe.

Yet within the varied and shifting political environment two political ideas arose to dominate

the High Middle Ages. First, the bishopric of Rome gradually aspired to the status of a western

patriarch to rival, or even to claim authority over, the patriarchates of the East. From the eighth

century a forged text circulated which claimed to report the gift by the emperor Constantine to

Pope Sylvester II of the regalia of the Empire, and of ill-defined but considerable lands, the

supposed foundations of what became the Papal States (Valla 1922, 10-19). While the status and

credibility of the papacy would wax and wane over time, the idea of the papacy as a monarchy of

more than merely spiritual or ecclesiastical significance would establish itself. In the hands of

especially assertive popes (Gregory VII, Innocent III, Boniface VIII) the papacy aspired to more

than imperial authority, and indeed claimed to depose and replace emperors (Morris 1989).

Alongside and often in antagonism against this imperial papacy, there arose various

manifestations of a revived imperial principle. Later ages would date the revival (or ‘translation’

as medieval historians would refer to it) of the Roman Empire from the coronation of

Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800, and the further ‘translations’

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of the empire to the German dynasties of the Ottonians, the Salians, and the Hohenstaufen. The

Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling, barely governable entity which included not only much of

present-day Germany, Switzerland and Austria but also the Low Countries, Eastern France and

parts of Italy, became something of a symbol of medieval western political culture. It was an

ideal that was never quite realised; it spoke of an aspiration to universality, at a time when nearly

all politics rested on face-to-face relationships (Vollrath 1996). The apogee of these two forms of

aspirational monarchy, papacy and empire, has traditionally defined the High Middle Ages; their

decline in prestige and influence in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were traditionally

read as the decline of medieval culture itself (Bury 1924-1936, vol VII: Decline of Empire and

Papacy).

The nature of the bonds between one medieval person and another were, as just observed,

traditionally understood as face-to-face and personal (but see discussion in Reynolds 2001, 20-

34). Another characteristic that has traditionally been seen to define the Middle Ages was the

bonds established, at all levels of society, by the giving of service as a means to acquire land,

position, stability and honour. Unfree or semi-free labourers worked their lords’ lands in return

for receiving access to land for their own needs. Those lords held land from their sovereigns, in

what were traditionally termed ‘fiefs’, though the actual scope of this model of ‘classic’

feudalism has been powerfully questioned, especially for the early Middle Ages (Reynolds

2001). To discharge their military obligations to those sovereigns, they assigned landed estates to

semi-professional soldiers, medieval ‘knights’, who lived off the land (and the agricultural

majority of the population) in exchange for so many days’ service by land and sea.

In principle all these transactions were conducted without money, though it is doubtful how

far, if ever, medieval society entirely dispensed with cash rents and wages. As the medieval

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economies developed, above all in northern and central Italy, social and political structures came

into being which bore little if any relationship with the military power systems of the mostly

rural north. The city-states and communal culture of Italy offered the best counter-example of

medieval collectivism – and one of the best arguments for not overstating the difference between

Middle Ages and Renaissance (Jones 1997).

And yet, medieval economic life, theoretically and statistically dominated by the agrarian

economy and subsistence agriculture, had always been complex. Anglo-Saxon hoards attest a

thriving long-distance trade in luxuries, as do the travels of lavish manuscripts. Self-governing

communes grew up, not only in Italy but also in various places in the Holy Roman Empire,

whose political structures allowed cities to acquire quasi-independent status as immediate

subjects of the Kaiser. In practice this generated clusters of free or partly free towns in South

Germany, the Low Countries, north Germany and the Baltic coast (home to the Hanseatic

League) and wherever German peoples pushed west into East-Central Europe and established

towns as islands of German-speaking culture (Moeller 1972; Kümin 2013). As trades and craft

guilds acquired corporate existence, they metamorphosed into associations with political,

cultural, artistic and religious purposes, regulating but also supporting the lives of the members

and their host communities.

Above all – in the traditional historiography – the Middle Ages were an age of committed

faith, a faith expressed in infinitely variable ways, from the astonishing philosophical complexity

of scholastic theology to the intuitive and organic devotion that blended into magic and

superstition. The survival of Christian culture in the declining years of the Western Empire was

not a given, though the conversion of some of the Germanic peoples to Christianity (albeit in an

Arian form) before their entry into the West surely helped. Enclaves of Christian culture in the

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ancient monasteries and the episcopal cities kept both the faith and classical Latinate culture

alive, when they were surrounded by only partly Christianised rural society, and by Gothic,

Frankish or Lombard lordships whose relationship to the Church could be tenuous (Ghosh 2016).

In the High Middle Ages, as the waves of migrations ceased to disrupt, and the local organisation

of churches into parishes became more stable and uniform, Christianity evolved into something

more than just a creation of cities and monasteries. The latter of course continued to develop,

undergoing successive ‘reforms’ which progressively adjusted their relationship to the lay

community. The last great wave of monastic reforms, which produced the friars in the early

thirteenth century, created orders devoted to the service of a wider public through exemplary

instruction, preaching and education (Brooke 1975).

From the high Middle Ages onwards, an important shift in the theology of the Church’s most

sacred ministries or ‘sacraments’, and of the priesthood and Church themselves, transformed the

legal, fiscal, and social dimensions of religion. If an ordained priest held the authority of

baptising someone into the Christian faith, of absolving someone from deadly sin, or of offering

propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead, then such a person deserved (it was argued) to

be set apart from the rest of Christian society in a range of ways. He became entitled to special

treatment in respect of the law, of taxation, of the expectations of service to the community. In

turn, this legal separateness made the traditional cooperation and interdependence of lay power

and clerical authority more problematic. If clergy were such a superior order of beings, then only

clergy should decide their own appointments and promotions. This extreme and unabashed

clericalism defined medieval religious culture at national and also at local levels (Ehler and

Morrall, 1967, 29-39). It would be one of the earliest casualties of the Reformation in Protestant

territories.

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Nevertheless, the religious culture of medieval Europe remained an organic, evolving thing.

No single person or single set of decrees defined its essence. Many of its core doctrines were

defined more by custom and precedent than by constructive decrees. Local variations persisted

across provinces and regions. Its unity consisted not in forced uniformity, but an unselfconscious

belief that the way things were was the only way that they were meant to be. That helps to

explain the otherwise puzzling fact that the Christianity of the medieval West comprised

sophisticated theologies, elaborate and beautiful rituals, extreme asceticism and mystical

devotion, and a grass-roots culture that believed in the embedded power of holy words, things,

people, places and times (Flint 1991; Klaniczay 1990). At the level of the minimally educated

majority (who will in practice have known rather a lot, at least by contemporary standards, about

the stories of Scripture and Church) ‘sacral power’ was an infinitely malleable and negotiable

resource, able to help and protect them in this world as well as in the next.

The arts, ideas, philosophy and literature of the medieval era largely, though with exceptions,

shared this same organic quality. In the middle of the twelfth century two key texts, Peter

Lombard’s Book of Sentences in theology and Gratian of Bologna’s Decretum in Church law,

embodied broadly similar intellectual approaches. Texts were sifted and sorted down to a

granular level of ‘sentences’ or short extracts; inconsistencies between them could be sorted out

by logic. Each of these textbooks then received nearly infinite commentary and exposition from

successive teachers through the rest of the medieval period. This was the great age of ‘subtlety’,

of resolving contradictions by making fine distinctions. The approach proved enormously fecund

in disagreements, and led to the rise of competing schools of thought, most notably among

philosophical realists and nominalists. Yet there was astonishing consistency in the admiration

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expressed for logical method, and the belief that the one truth could be reached by applying that

method (Colish 1997, parts VI and VII).

In a similar manner religious belief and lore formed the heart of the creative arts, painting,

sculpture, music and the rest. Here again the growth was organic. No rigid line divided scriptural

stories from semi-apocryphal legends such as the life of St Anne, the mother of Mary, or of the

holy kindred. The decorative arts of the ‘Gothic’, though always more cultivated in northern

Europe than in Italy, developed in a natural, evolutionary way from one generation to the next

and according to local conditions and preferences. Alongside religious art there developed the

artistic expressions of knightly culture, of ‘chivalry’, in the decorative arts and in imaginative

literature. This medieval lore tended to efface historical distance. The greatest and most noble

military leaders of the past were celebrated in literature and art as the ‘nine worthies’ or neuf

preux, combining classical, biblical and medieval history into three sets of three paragons. All

were typically depicted in the then current military costume.

[Insert Figure 1.1 near here]

[Figure 1.1 Caption] This fourteenth-century carving at Cologne’s town hall is an early

representation of the Nine Worthies. From left to right we find, first, the three Christians:

Charlemagne, King Arthur and Godfrey of Bouillon; second, the three pagans: Julius Caesar,

Hector and Alexander the Great; and, third, the three Jews: David with a sceptre, Joshua, and

Judas Maccabeus. By Elke Wetzig (Elya) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1159570.

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Defining ‘early modern’

To identify the timespan barely scratches the surface of the processes which help to define what

it means to speak of ‘early modern’ Europe. Historians of the middle and late twentieth century

detected a whole series of ‘revolutions’ in this period: in the economy, in politics, in warfare, in

the natural sciences, and of course in the massively contentious issue of religious faith, and its

attendant expression in social and political life. In many respects historians of the early modern

have tended to emphasise transformations and new departures; medievalists who have looked at

the early modern have tended to see continuities, or at least to emphasise that anything new built

on foundations that had been laid over centuries of far from static evolutionary growth (see e.g.

Harriss 1963, criticizing G. R. Elton’s ‘revolution’ thesis outlined below). The term ‘early

modern’ remains mostly a European – and above all a Western European – concept, though some

interesting work has been done to compare and contrast equivalent stages in other world cultures

(Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998).

The controversies over revolution versus evolution appear most marked in the area of politics

and the arts of government. There is no doubt that the sixteenth century witnessed a massive

expansion in the quantity and detail of records being kept by government bodies. In part this was

a technological shift: the use of paper rather than parchment greatly reduced the cost of keeping

detailed and often repetitive or formulaic records; printing (available from the third quarter of the

fifteenth century onwards) allowed, among other things, the low-cost duplication and

promulgation of government edicts. However, there was more to the process of change than

technology. Governments relied increasingly on professional drafters and keepers of documents

(‘secretaries of state’) whose influence extended to more than mere writing or keeping of

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records. Across Europe, increasing numbers of administrators were chosen neither from the

landed nobility nor from the higher clergy. The amount of government work done around various

council tables seemed to increase greatly, from the crowns of Spain and England to the Roman

papacy. (Cf. Chapter 8: The State)

Putatively, this was also an age in which monarchies gained in prestige, and maybe also in the

uniformity and cohesiveness of their rule, at the expense of traditional devolved regional and

noble centres of power. Arguments can be and are made on both sides of this question. On one

hand, there certainly developed a new style in the self-projection of rulers. Courts became far

more splendid, and in a sense more public (Dickens 1977; Cuerva and Koller 2017). Grand

ceremonial entries of sovereigns into their cities provided occasions for ostentatious display and

cultural one-upmanship (Mulryne 2015; cf. Figure 8.3 depicting Henri II’s entry into Rouen).

Royal titles grew in elaborateness and pomp. Traditional sources of resistance to or mitigation of

royal power could be ruthlessly suppressed, as François I of France humiliated his professional

lawyer class (Knecht 1982). On the other hand, historians have argued that much of this show of

‘Renaissance monarchy’ was just that: show. The monarchies of Western Europe were almost

without exception composite entities assembled from a range of different territories over times,

which jealously guarded their traditional privileges, immunities and distinctive traditions.

Neither France nor Spain were remotely uniform in terms of law, taxation or administrative

proximity to the sovereign. The territories of Emperor Charles V formed a chaotic and

ungovernable mass of diversity (Elliott 1992). (See appendix 1.2) Ironically, the sixteenth-

century monarchy that most nearly achieved some level of geopolitical unity was England, but

that state of affairs was largely due to the work of the last Anglo-Saxon monarchs before 1066;

and England lacked, until c. 1700, a regular annual tax base on which the monarch could rely.

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Massive increases in the cost and complexity of warfare marked the early modern era. Many

of these changes were foreshadowed in the fifteenth century, especially in Italy; but their impact

became clearest in the following century. The increasing use of artillery prompted developments

in fortification: walls became thicker and more ingeniously crafted to thwart assaults. Wars

tended to feature either prolonged sieges, which exhausted resources and manpower within a few

months unless a breakthrough was achieved (as in the siege and sack of Rome in 1527); or

alternatively staged battles of huge masses of infantry wielding pikes, which required enormous

discipline and led to the rise of semi-permanent professional infantry captains. These changes did

not immediately eliminate the role of the armed knight. Armed cavalry fought with lances at the

Battle of Pavia in 1525. Henri II, king of France, died in 1559 from a bizarre accident while

jousting at the tournament held to celebrate the conclusion of peace between France and Spain at

the end of the Italian Wars. The shift away from medieval chivalry took a very long time to

process. However, the size of armies vastly increased, as did the number of expensive munitions

they dragged along, and of course their costs. While navies were used essentially for the

transport of land armies in 1500, by the end of the period ocean-going warships formed a costly

new branch of government spending. These costs encouraged rapacity in rulers, ruthlessness in

levying taxes (especially from the poorest classes) and greatly increased borrowing (from the

wealthier people who had money to lend). (Cf. Chapter 9: The Military Revolution)

The greatest political transformation wrought by the early modern era concerned religion, and

the political and social structures set up around it. (Cf. Chapter 5: Reformations). The

Reformation involved the effective rulers of each more or less self-sufficient political entity,

whether that was a nation-state, a principality or noble estate, or a self-governing town or city, in

making a choice about its creed. This made lay governments the patrons of the establishment of

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their churches, even in those lands which remained Roman Catholic. However, in 1500 that

religious upheaval was still very much in the unforeseen future. There was already evident in

western Christianity a subtle, rather elitist move away from some of the emphases of late

medieval theology and piety. Learned scholars (‘Christian humanists’) influenced by the study of

classical texts, especially the works of ancient Stoic ethics, refused to accept a medieval religious

culture which seemed to offer a hundred ways to substitute for virtue rather than seeking to instill

it. They expressed dismay at the intellectual over-elaboration into which they believed theology

had lapsed. They looked with disdain on a monastic culture apparently preoccupied with the rival

minutiae of habits, fasts, and liturgical acts. Most of all they ridiculed a ‘superstitious’ vulgar

piety that imagined that the holiness of saints or their remains could be used for profane or

material advantage. Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1467-1536) embodied this set of values in highly

accessible, beautifully written and often amusing texts, such as his Praise of Folly (Erasmus

2015). However, he wrote only in Latin (though others would translate his works into other

languages); so the immediate impact of his work reached mostly an elite group. Moreover,

Erasmus, while a propagandist for the rediscovery of ‘good letters’, remained in many respects a

critical but native citizen of late medieval religious life. He disliked his monastery experience

and despised the late scholastic theology that he tried to learn; but felt no better at home in a

world where monasteries were abolished and the fundamentals of medieval Christianity were

torn up by the roots.

The humanist movement might of itself have transformed medieval Christianity or at least

presented a potent alternative to it; but as events turned out, a different challenge, born of both

scholastic theology and Renaissance religious culture, overwhelmed the earlier movement and

swept many (especially) of its younger adherents away with it. At its heart the Reformation made

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a startling claim about Christian doctrine and therefore about life and worship. The reformers,

broadly following Martin Luther but in their own accents and styles, reasoned that God did not

intend to purify people from sin in order, eventually, to accept them as redeemed and saved;

rather, God accepted people in their still impure state, gave them undeserved grace for Christ’s

sake, and began in life the slow process of regeneration that would only be complete in a future

existence. Consequently all the anxious efforts that people made, apart from specific directions

in Scripture, to improve their spiritual condition through vows, ascetic exercises, and self-denial,

were not only a waste of time but an offence to Jesus Christ.

Few would deny that the Reformation marked a unique and massive transformation in the life

of the Christian West in those communities and territories where it was received and

implemented (Cameron 2012). There do arise, however, a host of questions: how truly new were

the ideas that sparked off this change? How widely or precisely were these ideas shared among

the leading reformers? What was the causal relationship between the ideas and the political and

social dimensions of the process? How were the messages communicated, and how accurately

were they transmitted? What role was played by different mechanisms of transmission (verbal,

printed, graphic) in the circulation of ideas? All these questions have provoked many

interventions and diverse historical theories (see e.g. Eisenstein and Johns 2002; Pettegree 2005).

Meanwhile, the Reformation had a decisive impact even on those regions where it was rejected.

‘Early Modern Catholicism’ has become, after years of semantic struggle, the favoured term to

describe a distinct form of Roman Catholicism (O’Malley 2000; Comerford and Pabel 2001). It

emerged from the sixteenth century with doctrine and practice far more precisely defined than

before. It exhibited a missional sense which carried its preachers to the limits of the known world

in the Americas and Asia. While its adherents still believed it to be the only fully valid form of

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Christian commitment, it knew that it had to win hearts, minds and souls constantly through

argument and example.

The early modern period generated a new meaning for the term ‘conscience’ and the phrase

‘freedom of conscience’. In the medieval period ‘conscience’ referred to that fallible insight by

which individuals discerned their moral obligations, which needed to be formed by pastoral

guidance through sacramental confession. In the early modern it acquired a secondary meaning:

it came to denote the sense of being irresistibly called to one or another of the faith-traditions or

confessions that were now options for the medieval Christian. The medieval principle that

disobeying one’s conscience was a sin now implied, in the views of some believers, that

conforming to a faith that one did not share was morally wrong. In the fullness of time (and as is

explained below, that process took a long time) the call of conscience was recognised as so

strong, that the idea of persecuting the citizen of a state because they held a faith different from

that of the ruler came to be theologically as well as ethically unacceptable (Braun and Vallance

2004).

Applying the term ‘early modern’ to intellectual culture and scholarship, one forms an even

stronger impression of a gradual transition across the entire period, rather than an abrupt shift

around 1500. The literary scholars of fifteenth-century Italy who invented the term ‘medieval’

also believed themselves to be living in an age of the rebirth or rediscovery of classical literary

values and style. Over time the term ‘Renaissance’ has been massively expanded to denote both

a period and movements not just in literature but in the fine arts, philosophy and much else. (Cf.

Chapter 4: Renaissance) Identifying what makes early modern intellectual culture distinctive

therefore poses a challenge. One clear turning-point should be identified: from the early

Renaissance onwards a new approach emerged towards the integrity and wholeness of a text.

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Rather than excerpting pithy extracts, early modern scholars sought to restore the full scope of an

author’s purpose and argument. With the advent of printing both as a technology and as a

business, editors and publishers began to produce the first ‘critical editions’. These were

annotated and interpreted versions of the complete text of a book or of an entire author’s works.

In the case of Classical, and in due course also biblical literature, this exercise entailed restoring

as far as possible the correct original version of the text from the disorder and error introduced

by centuries of copying. The ‘critical Renaissance’ was not the most exciting phase of early

modern scholarship, but it has left a long shadow, and many of its techniques remain valid

(Grafton 1994).

Another long process associated with this epoch was the gradual transition from the use of

Latin in the West, as the idiom of religion, scholarship, and formal international correspondence,

to the use and elaboration of vernacular languages to express ideas in high culture. Like so much

else, this journey is generally reckoned to have begun in Italy with Petrarch and Dante. Some of

the energy behind the increasing sophistication of the vernacular came, in Protestant countries,

from the new translations of the Bible and the temper of theological debate. Reaching the Latin-

reading minority was not enough, and was not even the primary point. Yet even in countries

where the Reformation failed to capture the majority, as in France and even more in Spain,

elegant and literate satires based on formerly lower-order works of literature, such as those by

Rabelais or Cervantes, raised themselves to the status of intelligent cultural commentary, and in

due course became classics (Rabelais 1970; Cervantes Saavedra 2005). [Insert source excerpt

1.3 near here]

One has, of course, not finished with the ‘revolutions’ of the early modern. In areas which

could broadly be called discovery, whether in natural philosophy or in geography and

18

exploration, the motif of ‘restoration of ancient wisdom’ proved largely inappropriate. Early

modern Europeans learned things which their ancient forbears had apparently not dreamed of,

sometimes in explicit refutation of those authors formerly regarded as authoritative, such as

Ptolemy or Galen. The most famous and most spectacular – but also quite gradual – of these

achievements lay in explaining planetary motion. The frustratingly erratic course of the planets

across the sky confronted astronomers (who were often also astrologers) with the inadequacies

and accumulated inaccuracies of Ptolemy and their ancient sources. The effects of the early

modern transformation in worlds-view were so dramatic that it is easy to overlook just how long

it took to be perfected, and to gain general acceptance. Copernicus’s hypothesis that the sun

should be computed to be in the centre of the solar system took decades to be published, and the

details were mathematically incorrect, as Tycho Brahe’s observations showed. Johannes Kepler,

around 1600, adopted elliptical planetary motion because nothing else would fit Brahe’s

observations. Galileo Galilei presented observational evidence for smaller bodies orbiting larger

ones. Isaac Newton, nearly two centuries after Copernicus, established the mathematical and

physical principles which accounted for planetary orbital speeds and distances. And meanwhile

scholars puzzled over how to understand Joshua 10:12-13, where the sun stood still at Joshua’s

request.

A similarly long process of intellectual adjustment accompanied the other major transition

that marks off the early modern, the European encounter with lands and peoples previously

unknown (to Europeans) in the Americas and elsewhere, and the beginnings of regular global

voyaging. (Cf. Chapter 10: Identities and Encounters). The European Middle Ages had been well

aware of the existence of Asia and Africa, though much of what medieval people believed about

those regions was legendary (Mandeville 2001). Columbus’s miscalculation of the distance taken

19

to reach Asia from the West derived from an erroneous calculation of the circumference of the

world which was widely current in Aristotelian thought in the Middle Ages (though more

accurate figures had been available in antiquity). Long after it was obvious that the Americas

were not part of Asia, there remained a range of cognitive challenges: where had these peoples

come from? Were they part of the descendants of Noah? How was one to explain their religious

and political customs? Were the people of distant lands all fully human, or were there non-

human prodigies among them? The learning processes required by the ‘discoveries’ lasted nearly

throughout the early modern period, and did not always shift in the direction of greater empathy

or respect for the discovered peoples (Pagden 1982/1993). Most disturbingly of all,

notwithstanding the intellectual effort expended on discerning the humanity of the native peoples

of the Americas, which led to the conclusion endorsed by the papacy that they were fully human

and should not be enslaved, the impact on the actual treatment of colonised peoples was pitifully

small. There was little or no challenge to, and barely any discussion of, the early modern practice

of the capture, enslavement and transportation to the Caribbean and Americas of thousands of

people from West Africa (Eltis 2000; Wheat 2016).

The European economy underwent structural shifts and transitions, at least in the eyes of

many recent historians. During the Middle Ages the primary drivers of economic growth and

recession had been the largely uncontrollable factors of weather, population growth, and the

supply and demand for agricultural land. Those factors remained critical through the early

modern, until agricultural advances in the eighteenth century enhanced crop yields, and

subsequent medical advances reduced infant and perinatal mortality. However, other factors

were added to the economic equation in the sixteenth century. Prices rose in a structural way

across the continent, for reasons that are still somewhat controversial. The strongest probable

20

explanation is that, despite endemic plague, the population increased and added extra demand for

resources, reversing the post-plague depression that had kept population low and demand for

land slack since the mid-fourteenth century. However, other factors played an indeterminate role.

After centuries in which Europe had had a balance of payments deficit with Asia, exchanging

precious metals for spices, silks and other luxuries, Europeans suddenly discovered new reserves

of silver within Europe itself, especially in the Eastern parts of the Empire. Then, from the mid-

sixteenth century onwards, the Spanish empire in the Americas began to import into Europe

significant amounts of gold and silver: first the plunder of the indigenous empires, then the

products of new silver mines. Both these new sources of bullion may have fed a measure of

currency inflation, though there are many uncertain factors at play, including how much of the

precious metal entered circulation as coin. Added to that may have been a measure of credit

inflation, generated by the increasing sophistication of bills of exchange and the increase in long-

distance trade (Burke 1972; Musgrave 1999).

Manufacturing in parts of northern Europe changed its configuration, as increasing amounts

of basic textile work were farmed out to small-scale workers in the countryside operating outside

the guild systems. In the past this dichotomy was read rather crudely, as a binary opposition

between archaic, restricted zero-sum practices sustained by medieval guild manufacturing,

versus new, proto-capitalistic expansive disruption and increase in productivity. More recently

historians have tended to treat the relationship between these two forms of production with

greater subtlety. Old and new practices could coordinate and collaborate as well as compete,

especially as the multiple processes for making cloth grew more complex. (Cf. Chapter 11:

Commerce and Industry) What seems clear is that in the early modern period, the market for

consumer goods, and the number of physical items, from clothes to furniture, that modestly

21

wealthy people had in their homes grew substantially. Relatively few household items from the

sixteenth century – apart from books – circulate openly in the secondhand market to this day.

Household items from the eighteenth century remain massively abundant in Europe and North

America.

Sudden change or gradual transition?

The brief summaries above have already opened up the challenge that some of the transitions

from medieval to early modern were relatively sudden and abrupt, and many others were

extremely gradual and made up of many slow steps. Some processes happened fairly quickly, but

their implications were worked out over a longer period. The discovery of printing offers a case

in point. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz devised the system of printing, by squeezing paper or

parchment on to an inked forme of assembled pieces of metal type for each character, within a

relatively few years in the 1450s. The technical proficiency of the first 42-line Bible remains

astonishing. By the 1460s-1470s the technology spread quickly: printing houses sprang up in

Italy and the Empire, though most of them went bankrupt fairly quickly, including the enterprise

of Gutenberg himself (Pettegree 2010).

However, in the short term – for some fifty years or so – the press reproduced traditional

formats of books in appearance and design similar to manuscript books. Even such obvious

devices as title pages, showing the author and content for a purchaser, took decades to become

standard. Early printed books were sold unbound, for a binder to fold and assemble to the

purchaser’s specification. The rise of a volume market in compact and affordable books

depended on the vision and commercial initiative of entrepreneurs and – in at least one case – an

22

entrepreneurial author. Classical literature, especially in Greek, was reduced to modest portable

octavo format by the Venetian Aldo Manuzio (Aldus Manutius) at the end of the fifteenth

century, in one of the great brand-defining exercises of the ages (Lowry 1979). Aldus’s style, and

that of his family of successors, would find many imitators. The two great religious authors of

the sixteenth century both exercised considerable control over the appearance of their work.

Erasmus of Rotterdam worked increasingly with Johannes Froben of Basel; Martin Luther

worked with Melchior Lotter and Hans Lufft to create a distinctive and recognisable look for his

books (Price 2017; Pettegree 2015). Over the course of time distinguished printer-publishers,

such as Blaeu in the Netherlands or Baskerville in England, would make incremental

improvements to the appearance of books.

Similarly, the religious changes of the early sixteenth century happened in about as dramatic

and unexpected a fashion as could be imagined. In 1517-18 the dispute over indulgences

appeared to be (and was seen by some) as merely a technical disagreement between preachers of

rival religious orders. Yet by 1530, distinct confessional alliances were being formed in northern

Germany, southern Germany and parts of the Swiss Confederation. These structures of

confessional allegiance presupposed that, for the foreseeable future, distinct faith communities –

distinct Churches, in effect – were a fact of life for the future. And yet, a much longer narrative

was playing out, unforeseen by nearly all the early participants and not even desired by most of

them. The initial expectation of all the ‘magisterial’ reformers was that a properly reformed

Church should serve and consist of all the Christians within a coherent political entity, whether

that was a city, or a province, or a nation. Moreover, it is probable that many if not most

religious leaders believed that either the ‘true’ confession would be victorious, or that the Second

Coming of Christ would vindicate the truth in the relatively near future. What was not envisaged

23

was the indefinite extension of the coexistence of rival faiths. Meanwhile a minority of believers,

those associated with the gathered movements known as ‘Anabaptist’ or ‘radical’ in various

forms, eschewed the idea of participating in the state altogether in order to keep the community

religiously pure. Over centuries, European religion conceded, rather than aspired to, what

became the definitive solution by c. 1800-1850: that individual people could join or not join a

church as they felt called to do so; that multiple faiths could coexist on equal terms within the

same polity; and that state law should protect that freedom of choice (Kaplan 2007).

Other processes of change, even within Europe, were incremental and gradual: their ‘turning

points’ can be located at different moments for different questions in different places. One of the

most crucial changes in European philosophy consisted in the replacement of Aristotle as the

single, supreme authority on the philosophy of being. Elements in the Italian Renaissance

advocated for the value of Plato, and his late antique successors, over Aristotle; however, far

more energy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was devoted to recovering the text of

Aristotle and translating his works into contemporary Latin direct from the Greek. Only in the

mid-seventeenth century, and then mostly in northern Europe, did the ascendancy of Aristotle

give way to a free-for-all of innovative and experimental methods for understanding reality

(Garber 1997). For many kinds of philosophy, from metaphysics to cosmology to political

thought, the seventeenth century can be argued to have been fully as important a time of

transition as the sixteenth, if not more so. (Cf. Chapter 14: Political Thught)

Change in social customs and mores may be expected to be among the slowest of cultural

phenomena to change, and at very varying speeds across social classes and geographical

locations. Historians have identified the early modern as a period of gradual refinement in

manners, customs, and social discipline. To some extent this was an impression created by early

24

modern governments, which became progressively better able to count, know, and control their

people; and by religious cultures, which increasingly fused ‘Christianisation’ with ‘civilised’

behaviour. With better keeping of records it became possible to implement the moral rules –

already articulated in medieval ethics – which mandated monogamous relationships within

marriage and called for the postponement of marriage until the partners had resources to support

it. Illegitimacy rates, only able to be calculated after sixteenth century developments in record

keeping, reached historic lows in the mid-seventeenth century in many places. More

insubstantially but just as importantly, bourgeois societies found ways to resolve conflict and

defuse tension without the threat of violence or disorder: concepts of honour became less focused

on force. The so-called ‘civilizing process’ would gradually lead to a Europe in which weapons

were no longer worn in public save by uniformed forces (Elias 1994; Burke, Harrison, Slack

2000).

One should also distinguish between processes that involved human intention and design and

those which took their human participants by surprise. The processes of change in the economy

and in politics were, by and large, the unplanned products of innumerable short-term decisions

based on expediency rather than principle. While there was a flourishing discourse of ‘reason of

state’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the language of political rule and obedience

bore little relation to the actual balance of power. Dynastic accident, mortality and rulers’

decision to marry (or not) determined the creation of ‘Spain’ out of Aragon and Castile rather

than Castile and Portugal; the creation of the unmanageable composite of Charles V and I’s

empire in Germany, Italy, Iberia and the Americas; the eventual combining of the crowns of

England and Scotland; and the unstable fates of the crowns of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary.

25

The most destructive continental war of the early 1700s was provoked by the death without heirs

of the severely disabled Carlos II of Spain.

What may not have changed?

It is also important to acknowledge historical questions, themes or issues where the transition

from medieval to early modern demonstrates no clear changes, or is so much less significant than

other earlier or later transformations that we should not even try to assign meaning to it. Family

history is one such area. A long-standing, though now much questioned historical theory

interpreted the pre-modern period in European history, from the settled Middle Ages through to

the late eighteenth century, as an age of patriarchal and economically determined family

structures. In this view, the pre-modern family was primarily an economic unit where children

were valued as sources of free labour. Their individuality was not recognised, and neither was

‘childhood’ regarded as a distinct stage of life. The ‘companionate family’ characterised by a

small nuclear household with close emotional bonds was a creation of the middle-class culture of

the late eighteenth century (Ariès 1965; Stone 1977). Many if not all details of this view are now

discredited: abundant primary sources have radically revised our understanding of the emotional

life of early modern people. However, one cannot assume that the emergence of a greater body

of literature about family relations, ranging from Leon Battista Alberti’s writings on family life

(unpublished in his own time) and Erasmus’s widely read Colloquies on education and child-

rearing, actually tells us that anything changed in how families lived their lives around 1500.

Demographers, whose data can expose large-scale trends on such questions as age at first

26

marriage, family size, and illegitimacy rates, depend on sources which only come into being in

sufficient quantity from the middle of the sixteenth century (Wrigley and Schofield 1981).

Similar questions need to be raised on the issue of gender. Because of the greater availability

of written evidence (outside the specialised area of religious communities, where it existed

before) the early modern period has been a fruitful one in the writing of histories of masculinities

and femininities. Successive waves of feminist historiography have vastly increased the attention

given to, and the available knowledge of, women’s experiences in the pre-modern (Wiesner

2008; Roper 1989). (Cf. Chapter 3: Gender and Social Relations) A fruitful debate has arisen

over how the destinies and experiences of women diverged with the Reformation, as religious

opportunities for women narrowed in Protestant countries (but with enhanced respect for clergy

spouses and for lay people in general) and diversified in Catholicism (subject to the increased

pressure for the cloistering of nuns). Yet for those men and women who did not have religious

vocations or did not belong to the clergy class, it is hard to discern how the end of the medieval

period could be seen as a major, let alone a decisive transition in gender roles and relations.

A similarly problematic area, of great interest to historians, would be attitudes and beliefs

among the less educated majority of people regarding such questions as illness, the weather, and

the power of symbols and rituals over such things. A proliferation of texts of pastoral advice and

theological analysis from the mid-fourteenth century greatly increased historians’ knowledge of

what ordinary people were supposed to believe, and how the religious elites responded to their

beliefs and practices (Bailey 2013). In the Reformation, Protestant theologians refocused the

rhetorical critique of ‘superstition’ on to the rituals and practices positively embraced and

defended by medieval Catholic theologians, rather than those practices that were already suspect

(Cameron 2010). However, this change in theological strategies tells us little about any shifts in

27

popular beliefs themselves. The beliefs of the less educated never existed in sealed

compartments, excluded from the reflections of preachers and pastors; there was a constant

exchange, in which the customs and practices of educated and less educated alike varied across a

wide spectrum and responded to each other’s tale-telling (Scribner 1988). However, it is hard to

detect significant, world-changing shifts in such beliefs until c. 1800, when the world of

literature started to regard beliefs in magic, spells, ghosts and the like as a quaint residue of the

past rather than a living risk.

One major exception needs to be registered here. The early modern period, or the first two

centuries of it, was largely coterminous with the legal persecution of witches in Europe. (Cf.

Chapter 13: Popular Cultures and Witchcraft). The theory of witches, a bizarre assemblage of

motifs from folklore and the legends of inquisitors into heresy, entered the historical record in

the first half of the fifteenth century. Its most notorious textbook, the Malleus Maleficarum,

appeared in print in the mid-1480s and was reprinted over and over again until the 1660s

(Institoris 2006). However, the greatest volume of trials for this largely imaginary crime took

place between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. The last trials took place in the

mid-eighteenth century (Roper 2004; Levack 2006). During this period many ordinary people

were persuaded that they, their children, their animals or their crops were suffering from the

consequences of hostile sorcery. A smaller number of people may have believed themselves to

have the supernatural power to inflict harm on their neighbours by ill-willed thoughts (Briggs

1996). What was new in the ‘early modern’ was the legally established dogma that such people,

‘witches’, had assembled by supernatural means in remote places, where they submitted

themselves to a devil who had appeared to them in visible form, and to whom they owed their

supposed ability to cause harm. The more that scholars have studied the witch-beliefs of

28

individual local communities, the more varied in character, and the farther removed from the

theories of demonologists, such beliefs have appeared. It must now be an open question whether

the assumptions at the heart of the supernatural universe of late medieval people changed in any

clearly discernible way, at least before the onset of industrialisation and urbanisation.

In a slightly different way, the changes to the theory and practice of medicine in the early

modern period, while hugely significant at an intellectual and literary level, appear to have made

modest if any inroads into the basic facts of disease and mortality. The humoral system of

medical theory, derived from the school of Galen and widely taught in the Middle Ages,

persisted well into the early modern, along with the dangerous and pointless medical practices of

bleeding and purging. Serious and substantial debates into the cause of plague occurred, with the

eventual outcome that the one effective remedy, that of isolating and quarantining the affected

districts, began to be more widely practiced. Anatomy and physiology began to be better

understood, thanks to the groundbreaking illustrative work of the anatomist Andreas Vesalius.

However, medical services were available only to limited sectors of the population, and it is an

open question how far medicine actually prolonged life or reduced suffering, for those who could

obtain it, right through the early modern period. (Cf. Chapter 12: Science and Reason)

Where to place the emphasis?

Historians tend to divide into camps, or tendencies, according to whether they seek to identify

major changes at key points in history, or whether they prefer to question, critique or knock

down the claims made for such major changes. To some extent the choice is a matter of subject

and field. Social historians have tended to talk about ‘the past’ in general terms: they locate this

29

loosely defined period from the beginning of viable records of society and culture to the major

changes linked to industrialisation and urbanisation. Demographers and historians of

macroeconomic conditions, such as the Annales school of French social historical writing after

the Second World War, envisaged history moving on a glacial scale determined by geography

and climate as much as by specific human choices (Braudel 1972-3, 1982-5 and 2001).

Occasionally institutional historians discern truly radical shifts in administration and

government and build whole schemes of interpretation around them, only to have those knocked

down by their colleagues. A generation ago G. R. Elton’s theory of a major shift in governmental

practice in 1530s England acquired, for a few years, almost the status of orthodoxy (Elton 1953).

He claimed that in this brief period, under the influence of a uniquely powerful bureaucrat-

politician Thomas Cromwell, England took a great leap forward into collective committee-based

government. Elton’s argument suffered a fairly decisive rebuttal in the 1960s and 1970s, largely

from medievalists who successfully demonstrated unrecognised continuities from medieval to

early modern government. A larger point, however, not always heeded by Anglocentric

historians, has greater staying power: over time, even governments that aspired to absolute rule

(such as Spain or the Papal States) found it expedient to govern by committee, with the aid of

professional record-keepers (Lovett 1986; Mayer 2013).

In the case of the Reformation, the fault-lines of controversy are many and various.

Generations of past historians have sought to detect in the ‘pre-reform’ movements of the later

Middle Ages the instincts and impulses that would later be exploited by the Protestant

movement. These arguments often depended on ideologically driven partisanship. Protestant

historians who discovered ‘forerunners’ among the pre-reformers hoped to demonstrate a need

for what the sixteenth-century reformers later provided (Ullmann 1863-77). Catholic scholars

30

tried to prove the opposite: there was so much energy behind the improvement of the later

medieval Church, they claimed, that Luther’s campaign was ill-founded, based on

misconceptions of what Catholicism really meant, and unnecessary (Jansen 1905-10, Denifle

1913-16). Among more recent scholars the confessional partisanship has diminished but has not

entirely disappeared. That is especially true among historians who defend the old religious order

in England and deplore the (admittedly) cynical and manipulative policies of its reforming rulers

(Duffy 2005; but compare Hamm 2004). (See Appendix 1.3) Theological historians, as Steven

Ozment remarked years ago, tend to be nomads who pursue ideas across millennia and explore

them as largely compatible phenomena, whenever they are discussed. Socio-economic historians

of Reformation movements have tended to focus on one small area over a relatively compact

period of time, leaving the larger, long-range questions to others (Ozment 1975, 1-2).

On another level, there are many historians who prefer to dilute the single, decisive impact of

‘the Reformation’ by stressing its plural, diverse, and therefore more spread-out quality. They

draw attention to important differences between the German and the Swiss reformers, and note

the shaky boundary that separates some early ‘magisterial’ reformers, such as Zwingli, from the

so-called ‘radical’ preachers who would go on to abandon the idea of the state-church altogether

(Lindberg 2010; Eire 2016). For the early 1520s the distinction between those movements,

especially in Switzerland and south Germany, which would eventually become established

churches on one hand, and the so-called ‘radical’ movements on the other, could be drawn at the

level of pure theology but not so easily in terms of social or cultural aspects. That is, the early

‘radicals’ and some of the inchoate voluntary movements that became the ‘civic Reformations’

looked extremely similar in terms of their political behaviour. It seems likely that the cultural

shifts associated with the Reformation brought a new kind of interactive political movement into

31

being, which would be continually reinvented across the early modern and modern eras (Te

Brake 1999).

If one takes an approach to religion focused on social and governmental questions, there is

much to be said in favour of stressing the analogies and similarities between the state-building

and state-enhancing practices of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches in parts of Germany

(Schilling 1992). A school of religious history has long struggled over the dividing lines to be

drawn within the Reformation era itself, from the early, disruptive and creative years to the more

structured, controlling age of the ‘confessional orthodox’, that lasted from c. 1560 to at least the

late seventeenth century. Some historians like to speak of ‘long reformations’ or ‘long centuries’

on the justifiable basis that it takes a long time for major changes to work out their consequences,

and to demonstrate that they have, indeed, the staying power to become determining historical

processes.

It is fitting to close this essay where it began, with the historical vision of the early modern

people themselves. Despite the traumas of the Reformation century, scholars in the sixteenth and

into the seventeenth centuries largely continued to believe that the history of the world could be

written from Hebrew Scripture, reading forward from creation. The most scrupulous scholarly

minds of that period puzzled over precisely how to calculate the course of time from the creation

to the incarnation, and from the incarnation to the consummation of history in the end-times. Not

all were preoccupied with the end of the world, even if a secular philosopher (and physician)

such as Thomas Browne in the mid-seventeenth century could be convinced that it was ‘too late

to be ambitious’ (Browne 1658, 73). By the early 1700s learned adepts such as William Whiston

and Isaac Newton were struggling over the same puzzles of biblical chronology as their

predecessors among the Protestant reformers, or indeed as chronological pioneers such as Julius

32

Africanus, Eusebius of Caesarea, or Bede of Jarrow. By the later eighteenth century, however,

the time-line proposed (for example) by Joseph Priestley would read time backwards from

creation to the years Before Christ. This means of counting, though used and proposed by Isaac

Newton, would gradually open European minds to the possibility that time stretched back to vast

distances of the past, retrievably only by geologists. In the light of geological time, or even in the

light of the many millennia that the human species took to evolve to the point where we could

generate written records, it becomes far harder for us than for sixteenth-century people to believe

that the transitions between one period and another in the corner of one of the world’s land-

masses have such an enduring importance. Yet they do: for we still live largely within the

structures and according to the legacies that those ages bequeathed to Western society and

culture.

33

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