ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the nature of modernity–historical to its core–in terms of the late seventeenth-century battle over literature, technology, religion, and science in Western Europe. Modernity is a social construction, a category by which to view the world and in terms of that view to remake it. The themes of concern with tradition and of the contrasting visions held by religion and science are recurrent ones in all multiples of modernity. Quarrel, parallel, or battle–these are the terms in which the coming of modernity was proclaimed. Modernity from early on has been not just a European battle, but a global one. All modernities conjure up a tradition of their own. Indeed, each tradition is a reflection of the modernity before it, an accumulation of the past and the present against which the new modernity must define itself in battle.
