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Periods and Movements in European Enlightenment

Explore the complexities of periodisation and movements in the context of the European Enlightenment, examining the Renaissance as a dynamic movement rather than a fixed age. Dive into the debate of whether the Enlightenment was a movement or a period, challenging traditional historical categorizations.

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Periods and Movements in European Enlightenment

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  1. HI203 The European WorldEnlightenment and Modernity?The Problem of PeriodisationJonathan Davies Powerpoint will be on the website

  2. QUESTIONS • What is a period and what is a movement? • How might periods and movements relate to each other?

  3. …the Renaissance was not so much an “Age” as it was a movement. A “movement” is something that is proclaimed. It attracts fanatics, on the one hand, who can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t belong to it and hangers-on who come and go; there is a spectrum of intensity in any movement just as there are usually various factions or “wings.” There are also opponents and plenty of neutral outsiders who have other worries. I think we can most effortlessly describe the Renaissance as a movement of this kind. E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance - Period or Movement?’, in A.G. Dickens et al., Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London, 1974), pp.9-30

  4. Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and endings and consistent content in between, the Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen as a movement of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable persons variously responded in different times and places. It would be in this sense a network of diverse, sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting cultures, not a single, time-bound culture. Randolph Starn, ‘Renaissance Redux’, The American Historical Review 103 (1998), 122-124

  5. Was the Enlightenment a movement or a period?

  6. Source: John Jeffries Martin, ‘The Renaissance: between myth and history’, in John Jeffries Martin (ed.), The Renaissance: Italy and abroad (London, 2003), 1-23 (p. 14)

  7. Source: John Jeffries Martin, ‘The Renaissance: between myth and history’, in John Jeffries Martin (ed.), The Renaissance: Italy and abroad (London, 2003), 1-23 (p. 14)

  8. …the argument that attached the Renaissance to the modern world was based on two assumptions: that the modern world does, in fact, constitute some kind of intelligible entity, and that modernity has emerged by way of a single linear process. Neither of these assumptions is, at least for me, self-evident… the collapse of the idea of progress has profoundly subverted our sense of the direction of history. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, American Historical Review 84 (1979), 1-15 (p. 5)

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