Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.

In the second decade of the sixteenth century some musicians began to tire of teleologies. Chapter 15 describes a “new sonorousness” that would soon flourish in music by composers such as Jean Richafort and Adrian Willaert. Whereas their settings of the Pater noster embrace continuous musical flow, Josquin’s reaches new heights in projecting an esthetics of opposition.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

Literary historians generally explain change by narrating it. Narrative history excels at identifying individual events, authors, and works that exemplify transformations of literary culture. On the other hand, narrative often struggles to represent continuous trends. Since numbers are designed to describe differences of magnitude, quantitative methods can trace a curve and give a more nuanced picture of gradual change. As quantitative methods have become more common in literary studies, it has become clear that many important aspects of literary history are in fact gradual processes extending over relatively long timelines. But there have also, certainly, been moments of rapid change – in some cases initiated by a single book or author. More crucially, readers seem to want the kind of meaning produced by narration. Thus, quantitative methods are never likely to entirely replace a periodized narrative; they merely provide an alternative mode of description.

The chapter ‘Concepts in Greek Mathematics’ by Reviel Netz problematises a set of assumptions commonly encountered in the literature on Greek mathematics, which typically derive from a supposedly objective, a-historical conception of mathematical theory and practice. In sharp opposition to that tradition, Netz raises the possibility that the purpose of engaging with mathematical concepts may have been different in antiquity than what it has been taken to be. He asks central questions afresh, for instance: why do mathematical texts begin with definitions, and what is the purpose of mathematical definitions and of axioms. In connection to these issues, he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy, between engaging with mathematical concepts and philosophical thinking. He also advances the thesis that the relations between mathematics and philosophy changed through the various eras of antiquity, as did mathematical concepts and the role of mathematical definitions. We should seriously entertain the idea that even mathematical concepts need to be viewed within a given historical and cultural context.

The Introduction defines debt as a financial tool and as a theological concept, summarizing the role of debt in the late medieval English economy and in the sacrament of penance. This dual definition challenges the “separate spheres” interpretive paradigm that dominates literary history. A paradigm in which economics and theology are constitutive of two ideally separate modes, this dominant interpretive approach frames the shift from feudalism to capitalism as a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and communalism to modern individualism and competitive acquisition. Understanding capitalism as an economy of debt makes possible a new perspective on economic change in late medieval England, one that revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism and challenges Weberian periodisation. The image of God as a bookkeeper and the concomitant understanding of sin as a debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a possibility for all people, but as a requirement.

I introduce this volume of the New Cambridge History of Japan with two questions: How is it that Anglophone scholars have come to refer to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and immediately surrounding years as Japan’s “early modern” period? And does calling the period early modern suggest something fundamentally different from the term used in Japanese, kinsei? When the first Cambridge History of Japan was published, in 1991, the answer to the latter question was yes: the kinsei of “the Japanese” was “more feudal than modern,” whereas the early modernity of “Western historians” was “more modern than feudal.” As this introduction demonstrates, however, the term kinsei has nothing to do with feudalism. The evolution of the terms of periodization used to refer to the Tokugawa era tell us something important about the global history of conceptualizing historical time, particularly the surprising career of modernity.

In 1274, a monk by the name of Primat from the Parisian monastery of Saint-Denis completed his magnum opus, a chronicle in Old French titled the Roman des rois. As its name suggests, this composition dealt with Frankish and French history from the perspective of its kings. It worked its way from the Franks’ earliest origins in ancient Troy, through three royal dynasties, concluding with the reign of the great Capetian monarch, Philip Augustus (d. 1223).

Dynastic periodization has traditionally structured the chronological ordering of China’s history. The period from 900 to 1350 encompasses two major dynasties, Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367). Historians in China and elsewhere typically saw the Song as culturally vibrant and militarily weak, and the Yuan as a conquest dynasty that briefly interrupted the narrative flow of Chinese history until the restoration of “native” rule in the following Ming (1368–1644). Twentieth-century national politics recast China’s history along a linear (ancient, medieval, modern) timeline rather than a dynastic cyclical one, placing the Song and Yuan in a medieval-to-modern transition. The high degree of commercialization and monetization of the Song economy led scholars to view the Song as experiencing an economic transformation that fostered dramatic changes in Song society. Recent interest in cultural diversity as well as political concerns with the role of minority peoples – in both the People’s Republic of China and elsewhere – have drawn new attention to the Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin empires that rose on the Song borders, as well as the Mongol conquest and rule of China as the Yuan dynasty. Middle-period China encompasses processes of political unification, social and economic transformations, and profound cultural achievements.

The conclusion reviews the period and themes covered in the book. Different kinds of time played out in different sectors. Clothing reflects this temporal and spatial diversity. Viewed from the perspective of what people wore, however, this was the time of the Mao suit, or at least of the zhifu. Not everyone wore one; there were periods of light and shade in the intensity of dress conformity; there were differences between town and country, between male and female, even between decades. Throughout this period, however, zhifu had hegemonic status. In 1983, even as the Western suit was surging back into fashion, the Zhongshan suit was promoted as the ‘representative garment’ of men’s clothing in China, a garment that encapsulated national feeling, expressed the style of the Chinese people, and was also admired and loved by them.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

The epilogue reflects on some of the implications of the localized nature of the study and the historicism it practices. It questions the period boundary between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature as well as the too easy application of the term metaphysical to a disparate set of writers. In the process, it argues for an awareness of the distances that texts traveled as they influenced other writers and an openness to adopting a wider, more transnational, sense of literary connections and networks.

Eventful analysis employs the most unfrozen and hence the most exploratory strand of CHA. It employs historical comparisons and explores transformation patterns, that is, patterns of qualitative change. It uses two key tools: historical description and conceptualization. The aim of historical description is to figure out what is going on, to gain a basic understand of a phenomenon before proceeding to explain it. Often this involves de-redescribing a phenomena that has qualitatively changed over time. Historical description, in turn, involves six concrete steps: fact gathering, chronicling, concatenation, periodizing, looking for intercurrence patterns, and rethinking research questions. Conceptualization serves to make historical description more comparativist and to explore broader patterns. The chapter discusses how to replace proper names with broader concepts by defining both the positive and the negative pole of concepts. It lists criteria for assessing the content and temporcal validity of concepts.

This introductory chapter presents the book’s themes and contents, taking up the topic of how we define the Roman Middle Republican period. While the periodization to which “Middle” Republic pertains is wholly modern, the essays in this book argue for a discrete unit of historical inquiry. Our “Middle Republican” period was transformative for the societies of Rome and Italy, while its full dynamism is best captured through an expansive and capacious approach embodied by this collection of chapters.

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

This chapter is an introduction, addressing some preliminary issues: (a) the readership of this book; (b) the long history of the Chinese language as a natural laboratory in testing hypotheses in linguistics, human cognition, and civilization; (c) the periodization of the Chinese language; (d) the selection of historical texts; and (e) the structure of this book.

Presents a history of the theatre closures of 1642, describing its effects on the production, reception, and conceptions of drama across the eighteen-year prohibition and tracing its influence in modern dramatic criticism. The Introduction unpacks the pervasive metaphor of the "death" of theatre after 1642, and the understanding of playbooks as the treasured remains of a theatrical culture now extinct. Demonstrates how the theatrical prohibition spurred theatrical nostalgia, print publication, and play reading, all crucial factors in English drama’s acquisition of a literary status. Takes the reader on an imaginary walking tour around London during the theatrical prohibition, attending to signs of theatre’s demise and printed drama’s endurance. Describes the emergence of three printed dramatic forms in the 1650s: the serial play collection, the all-drama commonplace book, and comprehensive catalogues of English printed drama, texts in which we see an emerging sense of what we now call “early modern drama” as a coherent genre and critical field. Demonstrates that the pre-1642 period came to be understood as a distinct cultural moment (the “last age”) associated with a discrete collection of plays (“old plays”), arguing that this conception paved the way for a coherent system of critical study and disciplinary analysis.