Frühe Neuzeit — Early Modernity: Reflections on a New Category of Literary History

Summary

The Rise of a Macroepoch in the Cultural Sciences

Frühe Neuzeit as a Historical Category did not yet exist for our great teachers in the early twentieth century. The primary challenge they set for themselves, especially in the extraordinarily productive decade of the 1920s, was to restore the concept of the baroque to its proper meaning. An eighteenthcentury term from art history meant as a contrastive stylistic concept to Renaissance, baroque was further distorted in the nineteenth century by purveyors of a romantic nationalism, who sought to invest it with distinctively Germanic qualities. This issue turned into a cardinal problem of the discipline of German literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft) and stirred deep feelings related to national identity and modernity. By contrast, it found little resonance among scholars of other European literatures, for whom the Baroque represented only one cultural epoch among others without exceptional significance for the larger questions of identity. Nor did the concept resonate as a term designating a period within the discipline of history (Geschichtswissenschaft). In the 1940s historians introduced Frühe Neuzeit as a unitary concept for apprehending the development of Europe between the late Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. Literaturwissenschaft did not begin to organize the relevant subperiods (Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque) under this rubric until about the last third of the century. Although it has become the accepted period term for scholarship in the field, “early modernity” has not been applied, until the present undertaking, as a category within the writing of a complete history of German literature.

We may begin by considering the temporal and structural boundaries of early modern literature. Simply to make the macroepoch coterminous with the outer temporal boundaries of the epochs that gave us our previous nomenclatures (Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque) and to make its problems synonymous with those with which scholarship in these epochs has been traditionally concerned would yield an all too narrow view.