The Radicality of the Consciousness of a New Beginning and a Transformation in Early Modernity

Among the many turns, transformations, and changes of paradigm that European intellectual history knows or claims for itself, early modernity's break with the Middle Ages takes on a special significance: it is exceptional in its radicality and not only had an unusual and unusually wide effect in its immediate context, but also led to consequences that continue to influence the present.

Since roughly the middle of the fourteenth century, one finds a large number of statements among philosophers, scientists, artists and even among theologians that give voice in almost identical terms to the conviction that the period between antiquity and one's respective present was a time of the complete decline of the sciences and arts. This criticism, for which one could take Petrarch's diatribes against the Aristotelians in Padua as an example, either refers to one's own present or to the immediate past. Petrarch, however, goes back all the way to the period of classical Rome in order to justify and legitimize his new position. In doing so, he becomes the prototype and inspiration for similar tendencies that seek to interpret their immediate present as a revival of “the” antiquity. A critique whose primary target was specific phenomena in the fourteenth century that were experienced as signs of immanent decline became a critique of the entire period spanning “the” antiquity and the “new” age.