New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship

by Ann Blair (Editor), Nicholas Popper (Editor)

Overview

An illuminating exploration of the new frontiers—and unsettled geographical, temporal, and thematic borders—of early modern European history.

The study of early modern Europe has long been the source of some of the most creative and influential movements in historical scholarship. New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship explores recent developments in historiography both to exhibit the field's continuing vibrancy and to highlight emerging challenges to long-assumed truths. Essays examine

• how key ideas and intellectual practices arose, circulated through scholarly culture, and gave way to subsequent forms
• Europe's transforming relationship with Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the rest of the world
• how overlooked evidence illuminates vital but obscured people, practices, and objects
• connections between disciplines, types of sources, time periods, and places

Opening up emerging possibilities, this book demonstrates that early modern European scholarship remains a source for groundbreaking historical insights and methodologies that would benefit the study of any time and place.

Contributors: Alexander Bevilacqua, Ann Blair, Daniela Bleichmar, William J. Bulman, Frederic Clark, Anthony Grafton, Jill Kraye, Yuen-Gen Liang, Elizabeth McCahill, Nicholas Popper, Amanda Wunder

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421440934
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/10/2021
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.04(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age.

Nicholas Popper is an associate professor of history at the College of William & Mary and the author of Walter Ralegh's "History of the World" and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Nicholas Popper and Ann Blair
Part I. Chronological Horizons
Chapter 1. Humanism between Middle Ages and Renaissance
Elizabeth McCahill
Chapter 2. From Renaissance to Enlightenment
William J. Bulman
Part II. Geographical Horizons
Chapter 3. New Worlds, New Texts: Rewriting the Book of Nature
Daniela Bleichmar
Chapter 4. Beyond East and West
Alexander Bevilacqua
Part III. Disciplinary and Generic Horizons
Chapter 5. Reconfiguring the Boundary between Humanism and Philosophy
Jill Kraye
Chapter 6. The Varieties of Historia in Early Modern Europe
Frederic Clark
Chapter 7. The Knowledge of Early Modernity: New Histories of Sciences and the Humanities
Nicholas Popper
Part IV. Evidentiary Horizons
Chapter 8. Material Histories: Museum Objects and the Material Culture of Early Modern Europe
Amanda Wunder
Chapter 9. New Knowledge Makers
Ann Blair
Chapter 10. History, Historians, and the Production of Societies in the Past and Future
Yuen-Gen Liang
Epilogue
Anthony Grafton
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Color illustrations follow page XXX

What People are Saying About This

Peter Burke

This welcome volume describes and contributes to the transformation of the field.

Sarah Gwyneth Ross

"Offering the reader a wonderful treat, these lively, well-crafted essays speak directly and meaningfully to the volume's central questions: What's new and interesting in the field of early modern European history? Why should readers in the twenty-first century still care deeply about developments prior to 1800? I really love this book."

Pamela O. Long

This collection of brilliant essays provides innovative discussions of a fascinating new early modern history—global, multifaceted, populated with a diverse cast of characters, and focused on materials and practices, as well as texts.

From the Publisher

These lively, well-crafted essays speak directly and meaningfully to the volume's central questions: What's new and interesting in the field of early modern European history? Why should readers in the twenty-first century still care deeply about developments prior to 1800? I love this book.
—Sarah Gwyneth Ross, author of Everyday Renaissances: The Quest for Cultural Legitimacy in Venice

This collection of brilliant essays provides innovative discussions of a fascinating new early modern history—global, multifaceted, populated with a diverse cast of characters, and focused on materials and practices, as well as texts.
—Pamela O. Long, author of Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

This welcome volume describes and contributes to the transformation of the field.
—Peter Burke, author of The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag