Читать книгу What is Early Modern History? - Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks - Страница 8

Despite these critiques, “early modern” seems here to stay, as a handy through problematic term. The aim of this book is thus to sort out the early modern muddle, and introduce key topics and theories in the field as these have emerged over the last several decades. The book surveys various subfields of history, discussing the marks of modernity that have traditionally been seen as emerging in them, and ways in which they have been questioned, nuanced, and rethought. As you explore the concept of modernity, you will also gain a sense of broader issues and concerns in early modern studies, how these have changed, and how they relate to developments within history as a discipline.

Because “early modern” began as a concept in economic history, Chapter 1 surveys economic and social history of the era, including Marxist historiography, quantitative analyses, debates about how and why capitalism and industrialization emerged, studies of consumption, the Annales school, historical demography, and family history, as well as the history of the body, medicine and health, the emotions, and the senses. Chapter 2 discusses scholarship on the religious, intellectual, and cultural movements that have long been viewed as central to the West’s modernizing trajectory, including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, and highlights history’s material and linguistic/cultural turns. Chapter 3 focuses on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, incorporating key directions in literary studies, art history, and queer theory to discuss scholarship on women’s ideas and actions, debates about female rule and gender difference, notions of masculinity, and the emergence of “modern” sexuality.

Moving beyond Europe, Chapter 4 examines the growth of the Atlantic world as a unit of study, surveying changing views of exploration and the Columbian Exchange, slavery and the slave trade, cultural blending in religious and marital practices, and the development of racial hierarchies. Bringing politics into the story, the chapter discusses trends in the analysis of nation-states, nationalism, empires, and the Atlantic revolutions – American, French, and Haitian. Chapter 5 widens the scope further still, surveying work that explores topics increasingly being investigated on a global scale: how goods, people, and ideas moved around the world, the relationship between warfare and the expansion of states and empires, and the impact of environmental change, especially the Little Ice Age, along with the broader intersection between humans and the natural world. Chapter 6 explores popular and public presentations of the period, and how these have changed – or not – in the last several decades as a result of new research, changing public interests, new technologies, and other factors. The chapter suggests that “what is early modern history?” is a question that matters not just to historians, but also to the wider public. The book ends with a brief afterword discussing the future of early modern history within the context of the extraordinary events of 2020 caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus.