Early Modernity in History and Scholarship

Goethe’s Famous Quip to his biographer Johann Peter Eckermann in 1824 that when he was eighteen Germany too was only in its teens was tossed off with a laugh, and was not the sign of historical arrogance that some commentators have made it out to be. Nevertheless, the glib remark can still rankle historians of older literature who research and teach within an academic culture of cost-effectiveness that often seems to have been struck by amnesia for history before Goethe. Taken at face value, it ignores a good 500 years of structural changes that transformed the Middle Ages into modern Europe: politically, the diminution of imperial and papal powers vis-à-vis electors, states, and territories, and the creation of constitutional guarantees; socially, the proliferation of cities and the rise of urban culture, with its officialdom and ideas about citizenship, representation, and social mobility; economically, the advent of industrial capitalism, the invention of the printing press, the marketing of books, and the expansion of international banking; intellectually, humanism, the Copernican revolution, the rise of empirical methodologies, and meritocratic theories of the nobility of mind, which, among other things, inspired co-education and the idea of gender equality; religiously, the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuit renewal of the Catholic faith, and personal expressions of spirituality (mysticism, spiritualism, pietism). This is to say nothing of other kinds of changes that had equal effect on the development of history over this half-millennium: the suppression of heresies, the witch-hunting craze, sectarianism and the wars of religion, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). All of these events and developments, together with the genre traditions inherited from the Middle Ages and the humanistic forms and styles coming across the Alps from Italy, produced complex, multilayered discourses. These discourses were transmitted by a new university-trained humanist elite and nourished the imaginations of Lessing and Herder and Goethe and Schiller in the Age of Enlightenment. Did it really all begin with Goethe? Only if one does not know one’s history.