Journal Article

Does the Early Modern Still Matter? Narratives of Decline and Early Modern(ist) Voices

Terpstra, Nicholas

2019

Overview

One thing that is striking about current cultural and political discourse is how commonly the conversation turns to motifs of decline. It informs academics' sense of whether universities, and the humanities in particular, have a future and a task. It stalks our discussions with graduate and undergraduate students about career possibilities. It is the inflammatory low note in appeals voiced around the world to make countries great again. Too often these declensionist narratives keep attention riveted on some idealized mid-twentieth-century past that has been decontextualized and made normative. At their worst, these narratives rationalize abandoning values in the purported pursuit of them. Short of that, they often paralyze creative discussion by aiming to revive some unexamined status quo rather than working toward a different future that might incorporate more people, voices, experiences, and opportunities. This cultural reflex is familiar to early modernists regardless of disciplines because we encounter it both in the texts we read and in the corner of the academy that we inhabit. The older terms that we may now use self-consciously if at all-Renaissance and Reformation-speak to an ethos lasting at least three centuries, from the late fourteenth, that traced the path to the future through the past. It was a past often barely grasped and so all the more often idealized, contested, ideological, and invented. That invented past was the silver lining barely luminous around the dark clouds that early moderns complained of when decrying the \"recent\" decline that had corrupted manners, grammar, spirit, letters, integrity, and form. The slim light of that invented past could expand for those scholars and reformers who had the determined discipline to push farther back to purer models in Greek, Roman, and early Christian traditions.

• Publisher: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers Inc,The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago Press
• Subject: 16th century / 20th century / Authorship / College students / Early modern period / Humanities / Modernism / Narratives / Why does early modern scholarship matter in general? Why does it matter now, in particular, especially given the current political and cultural discourse?