The Role of the State

Rational Elephants or Hominoid Apes:Which is Early Modern? Laura Brown (bio) and Bryan Alkemeyer (bio) This perspective on the term "early modern" as it is used in literary studies is based on two assumptions. The first one is that the term strongly privileges modernity, either by pointing forward toward modernity on behalf of the literary culture of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, or by using key categories associated with modernity to understand those earlier periods. Second, the discussion here assumes that concrete literary cultural phenomena that demonstrate either proximity or distance between modernity and the so-called "early modern period" are strategically useful in gauging the relevance of the phrase that we are seeking to evaluate. What are the key connections that underlie the privileging of modernity from the perspective of the category "early modern"? Most frequently, the literary culture of the earlier periods in question is drawn into the purview of modernity through its imaginative engagement with one or more of the major historical shifts that distinguish the medieval from the modern period—the political, social, and economic changes evident in the rise of enclosure, agricultural innovation, mercantile capitalism, imperialism, slavery, private property, credit, consumption, commodification, and nationalism, to name a few. This historical context, and the argument that these changes lead directly to modernity, have exerted a powerful shaping force on the development of the category of the early modern. Thus Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse characterize this period as an era of "startling and profound" transformations that create a connection between "intellectual and artistic practice" (7) and "the onset of modernity" (23). [End Page 61] The term "early modern," then, reflects an engagement with change on the part of literary studies, and in turn pushes the analysis of the literary culture of this period toward the discovery of revolution or novelty. The human-animal relation offers a focal point for a practical trial of this engagement with revolution. In intellectual history, questions about the definition of the human parallel those political, social, and economic changes that have come to shape the definition of the early modern. These questions emerge pointedly in connection with ideas about and representations of animals in imaginative literature. As historians have recently demonstrated, the so-called "early modern period" can be shown to contain fundamental shifts in the perception of the natural world that are based on new developments in natural history, empirical science, and biological classification, and include, in Keith Thomas's words, a "narrowing gap" (117) between human and animal, which in turn shapes some of the key ontological debates of modernity. Each of the two test cases that follow takes the imaginative representation of animals as an exemplary thesis—a concrete exploration of what is at stake in the use of the concept of early modern to describe the past. I The paradigm for the human-animal relation in the period from 1550 to 1750 differs sharply from the modern paradigm in two major ways. First, it uses narratives of magical transformations in order to compare humans with animals and to challenge common conceptions of human nature. Second, earlier writers view a variety of non-apes, including the elephant, pig, and horse, as crucial figures for defining human nature. To understand the human-animal relation in this period, modern readers must leave behind Darwinian notions about the transformation of species and the special status of the ape as the closest relative of the human. Since the term "early modern" might obscure these differences, "pre-modern" may be a more effective category for the human-animal relation in this period. The pre-modern tradition of transformation narratives adapts a dialogue by Plutarch; this recursion to a classical model attests to the enduring value of concepts such as "Renaissance" and "Neo-Classical," which describe these particular narratives more accurately than "early modern" would. Plutarch's dialogue "Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti" is itself an adaptation of the Circe episode from Homer's Odyssey.1 In Plutarch's innovative re-telling, a character named [End Page 62] Gryllus, who has been transformed from a human into a pig, temporarily regains the capacity for speech. Although Odysseus attempts to persuade Gryllus to accept...

The Battle Rages On

The torsion angle of the Japanese femora of the early modern Edo (early and late series) and modern periods were measured. In the modern period, this angle is in males and females significantly larger than in the early series of the early modern Edo period and shows a gradual increase from the early modern Edo to the modern period. It is was always larger in females than in males. This change may be in part due to sedentary habits or living posture of the latter half in the early modern Edo period.

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...

History of domestic service in South Asia is beginning to attract scholars but a rich historiography around it is still distant and difficult. The forms of servitude are different across different times, places and contexts. The sources available to scholars for specific sites and moments in history are marked by extreme diversity of language, genre, concerns, and vantage points. Studies based on exploration of particular kinds of texts across dissimilar contexts make for a good beginning. Using insights from apparently disjointed explorations of servitude in uneven locales, we sketch a tentative template to study changing patterns of service relations and their articulations in the long duration beginning with the early modern period and reaching up to our own times. The study of domestic service yields empathetic vignettes of lives of domestic servants. They also yield insights on various forms of servitude and their centrality to social and economic relationships in a manner that can potentially upset the set historiographic paradigms of work, leisure, household, labour and ‘labour laws’ in the early modern and modern periods.

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...

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.

Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History Kathryn M. De Luna (bio) This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa's early and more recent pasts need each other's labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether "labor" is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans. It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other's knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other's fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we [End Page 235] recognize change and continuity differently: what is foreign on one side of the threshold is often well-known and well-studied on the other side. Practices that appear novel in the early modern and modern periods might look like an iteration of a durable strategy from the perspective of the medieval and early African pasts, not the least because specialists in these periods tend to write about much longer periods of time. Some of the articles in this issue already straddle such chronological thresholds, looking both forward and back to draw out continuities and changes. Martino, for example, recognizes parallels between the colonial labor regimes of the plantations of Spanish Fernando Pó and earlier regimes of slavery. These similarities have inspired some scholars, Martino explains, to suggest the emergence of "neo-slavery" in West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, Martino also insists that the legal framework of the labor contract changed significantly the strategies of touts, "recruiters," who would have been responsible for enslavement in an economy based on neo-slavery. The efforts of touts were, Martino argues, a unique, non-violent form of banditry that was entirely dependent on the skill and savoir-faire of trickster-recruiters. In contrast, Keese looks forward in time. He describes the complex history of forced labor in the French Congo and compares the strategies of the colonial state to those of the post-colonial state. Keese uses Jean-François Bayart's argument that political control and labor control depended on corporeal punishment in independent Africa, seeing in Bayart's thesis great continuity with the colonial period, even while keeping open the possible influence of Soviet labor regimes on post-colonial labor practices.3 Like Martino and Keese, this essay seeks to peer across chronological thresholds, albeit from the perspective of a student of earlier periods. The insistence that "precolonial" pasts matter is by no means a new perspective. For well over a decade historians have called for (and demonstrated the significance of) greater attention to histories that predate colonialism in efforts to understand the twentieth century.4 The success of the earliest such calls have, themselves, been called into question, as historians increasingly focus on writing postcolonial histories and as fewer train in the methods of recovering earlier, undocumented pasts.5 But it is possible to perceive in recent scholarship a (perhaps growing) interest in connecting the recent past to much older histories. New work tracks across centuries and sometimes millennia how earlier ideas about race and ethnicity, perceptions of the environment, and changing practices of faith, motherhood, and politics inform the histories of colonialism and even the decades after Independence.6 A few have even suggested that, in some cases, the colonial period—the focus of most essays in this collection—was more like a pause [End Page 236...

VOLUME 52 (2022)

It is high time to re-evaluate the Renaissance. Everyone agrees that the Burckhardtian paradigm is outmoded, with its emphasis on individualism and progress and-far worse in the eyes of some-its bold attempt to characterize the period as a whole. But without Burckhardt’s belief in a unifying Zeitgeist, it has been difficult to find an alternative and less deterministic way of discussing Renaissance culture in its historical context. As a result, Renaissance studies have gone in many different directions, so that art, music, literature, and history are now normally treated as separate disciplines. The period itself has become progressively indistinct, overlapped on one side by the later Middle Ages, which it is claimed anticipated Renaissance individualism and artistic culture, and on the other by the early mod ern period, with its scientific discoveries and inventions. At the same time as these local frontier disputes have been taking place, the barbarians have been foregathering to assault the foundations of this highbrow territory in the name of ‘the New History’: history from below, quantitative history, history of the body-and of the silent voices missing from traditional history.

Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of <i>Richard II</i> and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method

Notes on Contributors

This article is devoted to the problem of dogmatic and critical aspects of political and legal thought in Western Europe in the early Modern period (c. 1600 - 1750). Modern period is a turning point in the history of not only the entire world civilization, but also of philosophical thought and political science, at the "junction" of which the teachings on state and law were formed. The early Modern period – the time of the collapse of the feudal socio-economic formation and the crisis of the essentially dogmatic scholastic worldview - gives an impetus to the development of capitalist economic relations in Western Europe, which was accompanied by the strengthening of the critical dominant in philosophical and scientific thought. During the historical period under review, the critical aspect was gradually developing in the context of Western European doctrines about the state and law, although at the same time political thinkers of the dogmatic persuasion continued to build their systems. Thus, this article highlights a rather ambiguous problem of the correlation of dogmatic and critical aspects in the Western European political and legal thought of the early Modern period

A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul

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...