ABSTRACT

For those interested in grand theory, the debate about modernity and when the modern world began revolves around the question of whether or not human experience is teleological, that is, does the history of mankind demonstrate some purpose and a goal toward which it is constantly moving? This is the realm of the philosophy of history, a concept that arose in the eighteenth century as theological explanations of the meaning of human experience were giving way to rationalist and scientific explanations, and as the Christian apocalyptic conception of history gave way to the theory of progress. In recent years, this issue has been associated with the debate between Karl Lowith and Hans Blumenberg about whether from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century there was a zone within which the modern world began and that secularization was a key determining factor in the shaping of the modern world. This debate is largely one involving academic theorists and has little resonance outside of academia.1 Francis

Fukuyama, however, did reach a wide popular audience with a variation on this debate when he published his controversial The End of History. He argued that human history reveals “a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies-in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.” 2

These theoretical debates about the nature of modernity and about the developmental processes identified with modernization are not generally speaking of interest to working historians, the scholars represented in the present volume. Those debates would require another book and a very different set of authors. They are, so to speak, the overarching grand narrative of debate about modernity. The present volume has a narrower focus and reflects the perspectives of individuals who are concerned with medieval history and medieval literature, participants in an older scholarly debate, a subset so to speak of the meta-historical debate. If the meta-narrative is the overarching discussion of the origins of modernity, the architecturally elegant broad span over the medieval-modern divide, then the efforts of historians and literary scholars are rather like the work of the engineers who deal with such specific details as the length and the depth of the various divisions between the medieval and the modern, the basic elements required to create the substructure upon which the overall span depends.