The Fold of Periodization and the Emergence of Secular Politics

• In Event: Trading Freedom for Liberty: Redefining Rights, Sovereignty, and Identity in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

It is now well recognized that period boundaries are markers of political claims, not empirical realities. Yet the use of periods in scholarly analysis has not diminished, and one period marker — that of the “early modern” — has been on the upsurge for several decades. In some quarters this demarcation is intended as a softening of the problematic medieval/modern divide, in that it allows for a gradual transition from medieval to modern forms of politics, state formation, social forms. Others argue that the establishment of an “early modern” period reinforces the teleological and Eurocentric timeline underlying the medieval/modern divide. This paper engages the problem of periodization by examining some of the historiographical and rhetorical maneuvers by which times and cultures have been sorted into conflicting, value-laden temporal categories. It will consider the relation between this process and the proclaimed universalism of liberal modernity and the stakes of this rhetoric today.

Author

• Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island