Humanities 210
Early Modern Europe
This course studies the culture, state, and society in the centuries of Europe’s decisive transformation to an imperial power. Beginning in the early 14th century and ending with Louis XIV in France and early Enlightenment rationalism in England, we examine the first stages of Europe’s “modernization.” The course opens with Dante and the culture of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. In the humanist tradition from Petrarch, we trace the rise of a Renaissance episteme—intensified individualism, a science of microcosm and macrocosm, and renewed religious confidence—in the context of urban capitalism; religious, military, and technological innovations; popular culture traditions; the exploration and conquest of new and alien worlds; the church’s struggle for cultural containment; and political experimentation in city-state, monarchy, and empire. The first semester culminates in an examination of crisis and creativity in the generation of the 16th century: Machiavelli, More, Erasmus, Luther, and Montaigne. The second term opens with the play of Reformation, Counter Reformation, and scientific and philosophical change in Shakespeare, Galileo and his critics, and in Bacon’s and Descartes’s efforts at a new logic to fit the needs of worldly observation and religious anxiety. We then contrast 17th-century France and England, where new social and political orders and a neoclassical culture exemplify different constructive responses to the turmoil of religious wars, social and economic change, and the breakdown of inherited values. The course ends with the apparent recovery of confidence in the age of the early Enlightenment.