Labelling Times The ‘Early Modern’ – European Past and Global Now

Labelling Times
The ‘Early Modern’ – European Past and Global Now

(Symposium for the Inauguration of the Wolfenbüttel “Arbeitskreis Frühneuzeitforschung”)
(Organisation: Andreas Mahler and Cornel Zwierlein)

Wolfenbüttel, 30 June - 02 July 2021

Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2020

The postulation and construction of epochs has traditionally been seen as one of the more fundamental issues of historiographical practice. Though the term ‘epoché’ itself, as is well known, rather refers to the threshold between times, to periods of transition, or to a kind of temporal ‘in-between’, epochs in today’s everyday use tend to be treated as seemingly homogeneous epistemic entities marking and delimitting the thoroughgoing indistinction of continuous physical time. They in this way – no matter whether they are historical, teleological or even merely numeric – primarily function as pragmatic labels, referential commodities or as bare ‘umbrella terms’ used (though oftentimes immediately relativized by concepts such as the ‘a-simultaneity of the simultaneous’) to designate some kind of postulated if not assumed unity.

The concept of the ‘early modern’ refers to the most recent ‘humanist’ division of historical time into the ternary Antiquity – the Middle Ages – Modernity, as has become widely accepted after World War II above all in German and Anglo-Saxon historiography. The integration of the two Wolfenbüttel research circles for the Renaissance and the Baroque into one seems to invite a renewed discussion of the question of terminology, not least since in the meantime approaches in social, economic, and climatological historiography have led to quite substantial variations with regard to the classical division still prevalent in political, literary and art history. Postmodernist as well as postcolonial and eurocritical perspectives have in turn, though rather late, begun to attack the basic epochal concepts of Western historiography. Though coinages like ‘Early Modern China’ or ‘Early Modern Indonesia’ tend to become more and more frequent, the question still remains what they could possibly denote. If one does not want to fall back into simplistic patterns of temporal division, or blandly accept the moment of the first encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans in the New World as the beginning of the ‘early modern’, one will have to ask what the transfer of epochal concepts such as this one tries to achieve and to what extent this in turn is apt to create repercussions on inner-European conceptualizations.

The symposium for the inauguration of the newly established Wolfenbüttel research circle for the Early Modernity (Arbeitskreis Frühneuzeitforschung) intends to pursue precisely these questions. While traditional terms like the ‘Renaissance’, the ‘Baroque’, the ‘pre-modern’ or the ‘early modern’, ‘Early Modernity’, the ‘Sixteenth’ or the ‘Seventeenth Century’ risk calling up unthought-of or unwanted presuppositions and connotations, there have hardly ever been any new suggestions proposing alternative designations or terms of which one could truthfully say that they have caught on. In addition, the terms actually in use seem to be grounded in inexplicit basic assumptions about the nature of historical change, which they either conceptualize as an unbroken continuity of events or as a revolutionary sequence of abrupt breaches or as a transformational negotiation of processes of assimilation and accommodation.

Accordingly, the general focus of the symposium will lie, on the one hand, on the discussion of the notion of epochs, their necessity or, as for that, eluctability, as well as the general problems of their terminological designation. On the other hand, there will be a specific focus on the concept of the ‘early modern’ and its traditional automatisms, such as the risking of a simplistic caricature of the Middle Ages as its complementary worse ‘other’, or the incurring of an uncritical emphatic celebration of ‘making it new’, or the implication of a somewhat tautological inauguration of some unstoppable everlasting progress – or, alternatively, the falling prey to the resigned conclusion that this is a problem that will never be solved and should in consequence not be dealt with at all. Finally, there is a special interest in the aporias resulting from the projection of European conceptualizations onto global questions, which also includes the invitation of alternative conceptualizations apart from traditional repetitions of accusations of eurocentrism.

The symposium is organized in five sections:

Section I: Sense and nonsense of epochal labels: the ‘early modern’ and periodization
Section I is dedicated to the general problem of the creation and postulation of epochs, asking for the usefulness of periodization with regard to the ‘early modern’ as a subcategory in the triad Antiquity – Middle Ages – Modernity. Alternative proposals of periodization following dynasties, deities or astronomical cycles can here be taken into consideration.

Section II: Problems of epoch-oriented terminology-based historiography: basic assumptions and connotations
Section II is focused on a language-critical analysis of terms designating epochs with regard to their hidden assumptions and the connotations implied in their semantics. Central to the debate will be the immense inflation of the concept of the ‘modern’ as an all-explaining passepartout term on the one hand and as an empty, and hence useless, chiffre on the other.

Section III: Epoch and discipline: uses of the early modern in the different fields of investigation
Section III will follow conceptualizations and uses of the early modern in the various academic disciplines, exploring its problematic status, its self-effacing institutionalization and concomitant ‘reification’. This includes in particular comparisons between the different European traditions (England, France, Eastern Europe etc.), but also between the different subjects within the Humanities, in the conceptualization of epochs as part of a history of epistemes or styles as well as with reference to the challenges brought forward by newer developments in climatologically oriented historiography (Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age).

Section IV: ‘Global early modernities’ as a terminological Trojan horse?
Section IV intends to pursue the question of potential consequences or inherited problems to be taken into account in the frequently unconscious and implicit transfer of the concept of the ‘early modern’ to non-European cultures, areas or events, and addresses the unreflected assumptions and unwanted implications involved in such a transfer (as well as possible ways out).

Section V: Autarchical early modernities on a global scale?
Section V will take into view the historiographical patterns and traditions, in which, inversely, global cultures seem to postulate, declare, and ‘find’ a ‘Renaissance’ or a phenomenon of the ‘Baroque’, not as a transfer from European patterns but as an ‘autarchical’ development of their own, and will discuss the consequences of such a metaphorical use for contemporary historiography.

Proposals with a title plus section reference and an abstract of (roughly) 300 words by 31 October 2020 please to one of the two organizers: Andreas Mahler, FU Berlin ([email protected] ), Cornel Zwierlein, FU Berlin ([email protected]).

The conference will take place in Wolfenbüttel. Travel and hotel expenses of active participants will be covered by the Herzog August Bibliothek.