Introduction

Upon awakening on 1 January 1500, Flemish merchants, French ladies-in-waiting, Neapolitan fishermen, Muscovite peasants and Castilian nuns would have had little grounds to suspect the dawning of a new era. It was not necessarily the beginning of a new year either, given that 25 March served as the starting date in many regions. On that day, as from time immemorial, nobles prided themselves on their lineage and lordship, while commoners cherished bonds of kinship and neighbourhood. Women found themselves subordinate to men, poor people depended on acts of charity, and peasants struggled to make ends meet. The Church occupied a towering position in everybody’s lives, even though reformers and heretics had started to shake its foundations. Few Europeans could read or write and only a select number had ever ventured beyond the boundaries of their principality or diocese. From a historical perspective, however, these people lived in exciting times. Mediterranean sailors explored waters well beyond familiar coastlines, while scholars rediscovered works from Antiquity which challenged the medieval worldview in fundamental respects. Benefiting from population losses caused by plague, most dramatically the black Death in the late 1340s, labourers and smallholders found opportunities to earn better wages and to cultivate larger holdings. The recent invention of the printing press, furthermore, offered Europe its first instrument of mass communication. A complex blend of continuity and change, of course, characterizes any point of the historical process, and periodization – a useful tool to structure information from the past – is a notoriously difficult task (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998; Starn 2002). Common criteria are changes in ruling dynasties, technological breakthroughs, demographic crises and the emergence of new cultural movements. These, however, rarely coincide and the identification of actual transition dates depends very much on regional context, socio-economic variables and the observer’s perspective. The Italian scholar Petrarch distinguished between the ‘old’ age of Antiquity, the ‘dark’ Middle Ages and his own ‘new’ age already in the fourteenth century, but the notion of a distinct early modern period is relatively recent. It gained wider currency (and institutionalization in specialized journals, organizations and curricula) only from the mid-twentieth century, albeit with significant chronological variations: the accession of the Tudors in 1485 and the late seventeenth century serve as period boundaries

in English historiography, the Reformation from the early 1500s and the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 in the German-speaking world. Other interpretations locate its beginnings in the Renaissance (starting in late medieval Italian city-states) or Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage in 1492. In recognition of the multiplicity of transformations and the gradual nature of many processes, many historians now perceive a broad transitional phase between the medieval and early modern periods, spanning the century from c. 1450 to c. 1550. This book operates with a similarly flexible starting date. The following two hundred years offer a number of further notable landmarks, especially the Scientific Revolution from around 1600, the new system of international relations created by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 or the beginning of the Enlightenment c. 1700, but the next major cluster of transformations appears in the decades around 1800, the approximate date chosen as the end point for this survey: economists highlight the agricultural and early inDustRial Revolutions in pioneering regions like England, political scientists the proclamation of principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ in the French Revolution of 1789 and communication historians the advent of the railway in the nineteenth century. What had been an ‘early’ form of modernity – i.e. a period with ‘advanced’ features such as rival confessions, print media, growing mobility (Box 1) and expanding state power, but persisting elements of medieval culture like political inequality, religious intolerance and the predominance of agricultural production – gave way, very gradually and incompletely it has to be said, to an era shaped by individual rights, mechanization and the expansion of mass communication.