How different from us?

The Ends of Life: Roads to Human Fulfilment in Early Modern England, by Keith Thomas

The English past is not what it was, for professional historians anyway. The rest of us still talk about the Tudors and the Stuarts, about Renaissance and Reformation and the Augustan Age. But within the academy all these dynasties and eras are now bundled up into what is called the Early Modern period. The inhabitants of this huge stretch of time can only be made sense of, it seems, if we think of them as a rough, awkward prelude to Us.

It is startling how rapidly Early Mod has flattened the competition, and flattened our island story into a tale with only two parts, Before and After Modernisation. For it is a quite recent coining. Sir Keith Thomas tells us that when he gave a lecture to the British Academy in 1976 on ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was introducing him, remarked that he had never heard the expression. Even today there is nothing in most dictionaries between ‘Early Closing’ and ‘Early Victorian’. Yet every PhD candidate must learn to speak Early Modern, and the university presses pour out titles like ‘Early Modern Hermaphrodites’ and ‘The Context of Bear-baiting in Early Modern England’.

The odd thing is that, as Thomas points out, nobody seems quite sure when ‘Early Modern’ begins or ends. Suggested starting dates range between 1300 and 1560, and the end date may be fixed anywhere between 1660 and 1800 — or even later. On the web, I spotted a conference advertised in Oklahoma on ‘Early Modern Culture 1492-1848’. At the other end, Professor Colin Morris places ‘the discovery of the individual’ somewhere near the beginning of the 12th century. So that makes about 700 years in which our ancestors were trying to get up to speed.