Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate by Yosie Levine (review)

Introduction David Porter A War of Worlds: Becoming 'Early Modern' and the Challenge of Comparison Ayesha Ramachandran Eurasian Literature Walter Cohen Asia-Centered Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World Luke Clossey Pornography, Chastity, and 'Early Modernity' in China and England, 1500-1640 Katherine Carlitz Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity Richard Vinograd Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern Jack Goldstone Did China's Late Empire have an Early Modern Era? R. Bin Wong Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China Martin Powers Areas, Networks, and the Search for 'Early Modern' East Asia Kenneth Pomeranz

Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism Daniel Vitkus (bio) The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity Bruno Latour declares, in We Have Never Been Modern, that "Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists. . ." (10). I suppose that the impossible task of this journal's forum on the question of (early) modernity is to contend with all of that intellectual baggage. The easiest solution is to reject the label of "modernity" (and, along with it, "early modernity") entirely. We could take all the definitions and debates and throw them into a massive data dump. But that would be too easy. The weight of our predecessors hangs on us, demanding that we respond, even if we reject the popular notion that would declare modernity to be a rationality, progress, Westernization and modernization that came to replace other and older ways of life. So what definition of "modernity" or "early modernity" can we employ, if any? What is modernity? Is it a style? a trope? a narrative? a shift in paradigm or episteme? Is it a historical "period"? If so, when did it begin? When did it end? or did it end? We could begin by accepting the notion that there is a historical "period" called "modernity" (and I do not like the term "period" because it implies a full stop, a rupture, a break, and an end), but if we were to do that, we would need to emphasize that this "modernity" is merely a conceptual framework, one of many possible frameworks, for understanding the past. A historical narrative that includes modernity is part of a story we tell about the past, but it is a narrative that is never completely disinterested or all-comprehensive. And yet the [End Page 155] telling and re-telling of the past, our painstaking efforts to sort through the many-layered historical record, and the endless debates generated by the impulse to recount and comprehend our shared origins—these are enabling, even necessary, labors. Inevitably, "modernity" is an artificial notion, but that does not mean that it is a useless one. History in its fullness is a vast and largely irrecoverable mass of events, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And yet it is our job as scholars to make some sense of the past, examining and analyzing the existing archive in order to reconstruct the shapes of time and organize history in a meaningful way that helps us to understand our relationship to earlier times and societies. Since economic systems are the primary mechanisms of social reproduction that organize human societies, they comprise the appropriate objects of description for a basic understanding of long-term historical change. As Engels puts it, "according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life" (39). Following a long line of scholars, from Marx to R. H. Tawney to Immanuel Wallerstein to Robert Brenner, I contend that the shift from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode is the process that gradually initiates modernity. In other words, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we begin to perceive a wide-ranging social and cultural transformation that we can call "the early modern."1 And what began in the early modern period (with primitive accumulation and the origins of globalization) unfolded in the form of industrial capitalism and today has become postmodern consumer capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed to the early modern period as the beginning of what would later become a world-wide capitalist system: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This...

The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance Antonis Hadjikyriacou (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Governance, Historiography, Ottoman Empire The conceptual tools associated with the historiography of early modernity have received scant attention.1 The lexicon for the study of this period currently includes concepts such as fluidity, ambiguity, adaptability, permeability, malleability, flexibility, accommodation, elasticity, pragmatism, exchange, or encounter. I will here discuss the context within which this trend emerged, and then shift attention to a recently popular term used to describe imperial rule: governance. The idea of early modernity as an explanatory, analytical or heuristic tool—different those purposes as they may be—gained traction in Ottomanist historiography sometime in the 1990s. The timing was not by chance. Firstly, as more than one contributor to this volume has pointed out, this was the result of the historiographical quest to offer a valid alternative to the orientalist decline paradigm. Early modernity implied that the Ottoman Empire was not inherently different from its European counterparts and experienced similar or identical historical processes. One of the pioneers of early modernity in the Ottoman context, Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj, insisted on a social history agenda— interestingly, something that was gradually abandoned by later proponents of the approach. The early modern perspective opened new vistas for comparative studies, something that radically changed the field. However, the development of this perspective proved unable to account for historical questions at the explanatory level—unless one assumes that the Ottoman Empire failed to transition from early modernity to modernity proper, thereby adopting a developmentalist stage-theory approach of national state building. [End Page 37] This brings us to the second reason why the concept of early modernity appeared in the 1990s: That modernization theory had by then reached its explanatory capacity. The quest for a teleological path to the modern nation-state had restricted historians for too long. Scholars no longer accept long-standing binaries such as institutionalized/informal practices, centralization/decentralization, consolidated/fluid identities, or market/moral economy. Rather, the current consensus understands these processes as coexisting in non-mutually exclusive ways. This lack of consistency with modernization theory and its foundational assumptions did not preclude the development of modern structures. On a different level, the waning of area studies was another associated development, giving room for global, connected or entangled history.2 Equally important is the political/ideological context of this conjuncture. The end of the Cold War heralded the victory of liberal democracy and its values. The notion of multiculturalism rose in prominence both as ideology and policy in order to provide answers to questions of cultural and religious diversity or integration in the face of waves of migrants and refugees in the western world. Influenced by this intellectual climate, which concurrently included a temporary (if superficial) receding of nationalist ideology and historiography, historians turned to multiethnic and multireligious empires for answers and inspiration. The Ottoman Empire was a particularly fertile ground to elaborate on and document what an early modern multicultural polity looked like and how it administered and managed its populations. Despite the value and usefulness (if not necessity) of abandoning the rigid categories of modernization theory, there are various problems with the way early modernity has been conceptualized. I will limit my comments here to the lexicon of early modernity that I have referred to in my introductory paragraph. To name one implication that has escaped attention, the ease with which such concepts are employed renders early modernity a reflection of the current condition of late modernity. In other words, the language of the present globalized condition is projected back to a romanticized primordial pre-modern past. Such a linear periodization means that the flexibility and fluidity of early and late modernity were interrupted by a modern “digression,” which temporarily consolidated the human condition. Thus, it reifies modernity itself as the central and defining element of the preceding and subsequent era. The sense conveyed by most studies celebrating the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of Ottoman rule is that of a paradise lost, a cosmopolitan milieu that [End Page 38] twentieth-century nationalist modernity may have obliterated, but is coming back with a vengeance. Click for larger view View...

JEMCS Forum:What is Early Modern? Thomas Dipiero and Devoney Looser 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 [End Page 69] 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 [End Page 70] observation...

If we wanted to find out what it might have felt like to have lived at a certain time and place, then according to one popular way of understanding their value, autobiography and biography would be...

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviewed by: The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World Karen Oslund (bio) The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. By John F. Richards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+682. $75. The Unending Frontier is an ambitious contribution to the fields of early modern history, world history, and environmental history. John Richards identifies a series of environmental changes occurring as a result of developing state structures in the early modern period—among them, the settlement of frontiers, biological invasions from the Old World to the New, and the search for new energy resources. He traces these changes through an impressive number of case studies, including Tokugawa Japan, colonial Brazil, and the indigenous people of Russian Siberia, as well as the better-known examples of the Spanish in the New World and early modern Britain. As these examples demonstrate, people all over the early modern world faced similar environmental issues, such as the pressure that expanding states and rising populations placed on the land. Richards describes different strategies by which various states met these challenges. His juxtaposition of chapters on early modern Britain and Tokugawa Japan is particularly effective. While Japan dealt with the crises of late-eighteenth-century famines with severe austerity measures, forest conservation programs, and intensification of fishing and whaling, the Tudor and Stuart rulers sought to expand their resources by draining wetlands and by switching the primary energy source from wood to coal in response to the depletion of the forests. As Richards notes, the British failure to recognize limits to growth was the more usual for early modern states, and the chapters on frontier settlement in Russia, whaling and walrus hunting, and Dutch and Chinese settlement on Taiwan provide other examples of the "windfall mindset in frontier societies" (p. 619) that Richards argues characterizes the early modern world. This book could have been even more interesting for historians of technology if the comparison between different ideologies of control of nature presented in the chapters on Japan and Britain had been pursued consistently throughout the entire volume, rather than treating the various chapters as self-contained narratives about different early modern societies and their treatment of the environment. As it stands, historians of technology will probably find the final section of the book the most useful. "The World Hunt" discusses the fur hunt in North America and Siberia, whaling and walrus hunting, and cod fishing in the North Atlantic. In the previous three sections, some of the details about technologies of land reclamation or logging tend to be glossed over; here Richards gives more attention to the comparative analysis of different techniques of whaling and fishing. Although [End Page 861] the book is not directly aimed at historians of technology, and does not provide any new analytic approaches to this field, it is a useful synthesis of information about a variety of tools and technologies used in the early modern world. The major weakness of Richards's book is in fact its analytic content. The Unending Frontier, as Richards explains in the preface, grew out of his teaching of environmental history and world history and reflects his deep commitment to world history as both a pedagogic and scholarly field. The book is an invaluable resource for anyone teaching similar courses, and also useful for classes in early modern European history, Atlantic history, or colonial American history. However, its breadth does not lend itself to close and rigorous argument, even in the chapter on the Mughal Empire, which is Richards's field of expertise. At times repetitious, this lengthy volume would have benefited from more careful editing, especially in the chapter on Russia, which conflates the time line of events and is likely to confuse the general reader. This does not prevent Richards from setting forth interesting insights in individual chapters—showing, for example, that in colonial Mexico and Brazil, Spanish and Portuguese settlement initially reduced pressure on land resources rather than increasing it, although this entailed devastating effects on the native populations. Readers of The Unending Frontier cannot fail to be persuaded by the amount of evidence presented for Richards's main contention, that during the early...

Reviewed by: Japanese Warrior Prints 1646-1905 Nam-Lin Hur (bio) James King and Yuriko Iwakiri, editors. Japanese Warrior Prints 1646-1905. Brill. 2007. 408. US$154.00 In understanding the warrior prints (musha-e) that flourished in Japan, we need two sets of materials: the warrior prints themselves and the historical tales of war (gunki monogatari) from which these prints were drawn. The warrior prints emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and came to an end in 1905 - the year the Russo-Japanese War was concluded. [End Page 448] Japanese Warrior Prints 1645-1905 contains a finely selected group of representative warrior prints that visualize heroic samurai figures who coloured the critical moments of Japanese history. This collection of illustrations, which is presented chronologically and accompanied by well-documented renditions, offers a rich repertoire of visual representations of heroism. It is worth noting that these prints not only entertained readers but also helped to support the woodblock-print industry in early modern and Meiji times. The editors of this volume, James King and Yuriko Iwakiri, have done a wonderful job in locating, collecting, classifying, and cataloguing a wide range of warrior prints. This publication will surely serve as a comprehensive introduction to Western readers who might ask why and how the Japanese people became so infatuated with heroic warriors and their tales, which stretch from the Shōmonki (Chronicle of Masakado, 940) to the Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Peace, c. 1340-67) in early modern times. Interestingly, the background of warrior prints is found in ancient and medieval times, but the prints themselves were a product of early modern times. One might wonder about this. The editors do not directly tackle this question but, rather, focus on the details of the comings and goings of the artists who produced the prints as well as the artistic styles and literary and theatrical ramifications of these pieces over time. In the historical trajectory of warrior prints, the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), which was followed ten year later by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), proved to be a turning point in that the previous heroic samurai and their much-cherished sword fights were replaced with modern military officers and the unprecedented machinery of war. This produced a new genre, often referred to as sensō-e (war pictures). As King and Iwakiri point out, 'Whilst musha-e as a genre was often infused with nostalgia, sensō-e are propaganda pieces, advertisements of the military triumphs which glorify the courage and determination of the "modern" Japanese army and navy.' Still, this new genre of sensō-e reflected, to some extent, the traditional sentiments of heroic tales, all of which featured acts of bravery conducted against insurmountable odds. To be sure, in early modern times the warrior prints could not escape government censorship. But the most critical challenge, and the one that eventually ended the tradition of warrior prints, was, understandably, 'the new lithographic and photographic technologies which allowed war reportage to be circulated more immediately and, in the opinion of many, more realistically.' Modern technology delivered the death knell of the warrior prints, which had been embedded in a superhuman heroism that refused the limits of time and space. But the termination of warrior prints did not mean the demise of warrior culture, which has been carved deep into the collective psyche [End Page 449] of the Japanese. In early modern times, for example, Empress Jingū (and, by extension, her son Emperor Ōjin), who had, according to legend, conquered the ancient Korean kingdoms, brought the Japanese to the height of national pride. She was certainly a military hero. Similarly, the high points of the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War at the turn of the nineteenth century, which were thoroughly exploited for representation in warrior prints, decisively elevated Japan to the status of a great power. It is ironic that the flowering of warrior prints in these years presaged their demise. Still, the heroic images of warrior prints continued to survive until 1945, albeit through a different medium. Japanese Warrior Prints 1645-1905 offers a valuable graphic introduction to the enduring power of warrior culture in Japanese history. Nam...

Reviews 143 laxly confusions, of sex and gender in the early modern period. What may seem at first glance to be anomalous probably is not. The Bedtrick's ambition, comparativist orientation, and its play fulness prevent it from argumentatively engaging questions "cul tural studies* might pose: what is at work to approve this copu lating pair and condemn another? what allows the fictional indi vidual to evade social demands? what might the conjugal/forni cating pair displace? what might the "tricked" partner represent? In Splitting theDifference, Doniger concludes "gender trumps cul ture." By mounting evidence that individuals are ignorant of the identity (frequently overtly split or fragmented) of those with whom they are most physically intimate, Doniger implies in The Bedtrick that indeed "culture is the shadow of gender." However, the surrogates, so crucial to the bedtrick, are as likely to repre sent a beleaguered figure of nostalgia, the status quo, or a restored order, as an object or subject of sexual desire. The Bedtrick engenders a good many more questions than it answers, and therein may lie its greatest value. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. 390 pp. $69.95. Reviewed by Donna C. Woodford Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, edited by Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, is the firstbook in the new Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series fromAshgate. The book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on mothers and other caregiving figures in the early modern peri od. Spanning the disciplines of literature, music, art history, and social history, and covering territories throughout Europe and the Americas, the essays explore the roles of caregivers in the early modern world and the ways inwhich those roles were interpreted and used both by the caregivers themselves and by the cultures inwhich they lived. In her introductory essay, Miller establishes the book's aim of exploring the "spectrum, and spectacle, ofmaternity in particular and of female caregivers at large in the early modern period" (1). The concepts of spectrum and spectacle prove central to the vol ume since the essays not only examine a variety of caregivers, including "mothers and stepmothers, midwives and wet nurses, wise women and witches, saints and Amazons, murderers and 144 The Journal for Early Modern Cultured Studies nurturers," but also explore the many ways inwhich those care giving roles were turned into spectacles that sometimes empow ered or glorified the caregiver and sometimes limited or condemned her (1). Early modern women, Miller observes, were often identi fied by their caregiving responsibilities both inside and outside the family, and while roles such as mother, midwife, wet nurse, and educator could potentially empower women by giving them author ity in the home and in the community, these same roles could be used to define and limit the condition of female caregivers or to condemn women who did not live up to a given ideal. The essays in this volume are divided into five categories: conception and lactation; nurture and instruction; domestic pro duction; social authority; and mortality. Part One includes four essays on the subjects of conception and lactation, and while these essays explore different disciplines in different countries, they together show how the breast and the womb could alternately be constructed as sources of life and feminine creativity and as dan gerous threats to men and a patriarchal society. In her essay, Judith Rose suggests that both the poet, Gaspara Stampa, and the painter, Sofinisba Anguissola, ally themselves with images of the Virgin Mary and thus with a positive, acceptable form of creativity for female artists. Likewise, Yavneh examines Anguissola's realis tically depicted nursing Madonna and suggests that the artist was drawing parallels between the influence ofmaternal milk and the influence of a female artist. In contrast, Caroline Bicks's essay is a fascinating examination of early modern fears about the power of midwives both to spread stories about the paternity of a child and to emasculate male children by tying the umbilical cord too short, which was thought to affect both the length of the child's genitals and his ability to speak freely...

Art History, Boundary Crossing, Making Worlds

The Battle Rages On

This note will investigate different ways to understand water in the early modern and modern periods, by taking inspiration from the recent conference The Water Cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean, 1500-1900. Held in Venice on the 13th, 14th and 15th September 2023, the conference was organised by the ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900’s team, composed by Principal Investigator David Gentilcore, together with Gaia Bruno, Oscar Schiavone, Rachele Scuro, Salvatore Valenti, and myself. Given the multiplicity of research questions and methodological approaches mobilised by the conference participants, this paper is of course not an exhaustive review of how various strains of historiography have rethought key questions of the early modern period through the lens of water studies, but will rather offer a series of glimpses into macro areas, which have been divided into ‘Water knowledge’, ‘Water Cultures’, ‘Water conflicts’. These macro areas, which correspond to the various panels of the conference, are of course not separated from each other, instead presenting many points of contact, in terms of themes and methodology. Due to constraints in space and the expertise of author of the present note, not all sessions of the three-day conference have been given equal attention, despite being all included in the discussion.

Practices of 'rescue' and 'reform' of women who were labelled 'prostitutes' were far older than the modern laws that Wolfenden sat to reconsider. Since the early modern period, religious organizations had sought to incarcerate errant women in penitentiaries where they could be saved from their dissolute ways, a practice that continued and increased through the early modern and modern periods. Popular ideas about the causes of prostitution focussed either upon narratives of the 'fallen' woman who was forced into selling sex through seduction, pregnancy, and abandonment or upon the image of the highly sexualized independent female, who was given over to debauchery and unable to control herself.

Shtadlanut (Jewish intercession/advocacy) and tzedakah (charity/righteousness) are often associated with the early modern period and closely assigned to Jewish figures that represented Jewish commu...

Reviewed by: The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory Stephanie Trigg The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. x + 277 pp. There was once a time when “the medieval” was a stable signifier. We were relatively comfortable with the idea that the Middle Ages was a finite historical [End Page 367] period that was superseded, sooner or later — now, in this country, or then, in that one — by the Renaissance or the early modern period. We used to be very clear about the difference between scholars who studied medieval history, literature, and culture, and those who studied the early modern or modern periods. We also made routine distinctions between the “real” medieval and its medievalistic afterlife. One was historical, stable, and homogenous, known comprehensively to itself and to a small body of scholarly devotees; the other was freely available to enthusiasts of all stripes, and nearly always incorrect or misleading in its representations. Above all, the medieval was serious in its inscrutability, where the medievalistic was, at best, playful and imaginative and, at worst, marked by error and misinformation. The genealogy of this “once upon a time” — when the relation between the medieval past and the modern present was more certain — has recently become the object of scrutiny. Critical and historical assumptions about the way we have conceptualized “the medieval” have had profound implications for our understanding of “the modern,” to say nothing of the ways we interpret medieval literature and culture. This rich collection of essays edited by Andrew Cole and Vance Smith constitutes an important intervention into such questions. Most of the contributors are best known for their work on medieval literature, history, and historiography, but the collection should be read as a collaborative work of intellectual history with serious implications for the study of modernity. The medievalistic, here, is not the space of imaginative and fantastic recreation but a crucial strand in the intellectual genesis of modernity. The introduction establishes the genealogy and argument of the book. Many thinkers have defined the progression from medieval to modern times as a process of secularization. In particular, the loosening of Christianity’s hold on social and spiritual thought is often said to account for the transition from a medieval spiritual, religious, theological, or even feudal world-view to a secular modern one. This model has not gone unchallenged (it remains one of the most hotly contested questions in late medieval and early modern English literary studies, at least), but Cole and Smith are particularly interested in the debates surrounding Hans Blumenberg’s work. Their title and the collection as a whole respond, as it were, to Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). Blumenberg had argued against the secularization thesis, proposing instead that modernity depended on a significant post-medieval assertion of its own sovereignty, rather than a triumphant liberation from the metaphysical structures and systems of the Middle Ages (i.e. secularization). Many of the contributors to this collection engage closely with Blumenberg and his predecessors, especially Karl Löwith, and the collection is thus oriented much more to German philosophical scholarship than to the French theoretical and critical tradition, whose debt to medieval thought has been excavated so tellingly by Bruce Holsinger in The Premodern Condition. But in a similar fashion, this book is concerned with the excavation [End Page 368] of medievalism in the works of modernist philosophers, literary theorists, and historians. Like Holsinger, Cole and Smith emphasize the ongoing life of the medieval in contemporary critical and cultural theory, but they argue against Blumenberg by underlining modernity’s unresolved relation with the medieval: “We view the medieval turn in critical theory as an essential component of theory’s own history of self-making, a history that is itself bound up with the larger and well-known ‘project of modernity’” (1). Contra Blumenberg, they argue for the persistence of many medieval intellectual modes and traditions that, Blumenberg argues, modernity leaves behind in its own creative processes of self-invention. They also propose that modernity cannot be fully accounted for without the medieval...