by Cristina Nuta -

The difficulty with the 'modern' as a category of historical periodization is that its meaning changes relative to the time (and place) of the classification. We may distinguish five main stages in the development of the idea since its emergence within Western culture at around the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD.

To begin with, the Latin term modernus was used to replace the cyclical opposition of ‘old and new’ characteristic of pagan antiquity with a sense of the present as an irreversible break with the past. It was this sense of the present as ‘new’ which was the basis for the conflicts between ancients and moderns which punctuated the middle ages from the second half of the twelfth century to the beginning of the Renaissance.

The first major semantic shift took place with the development of the consciousness of a new age in Europe in the course of the fifteenth century. This was initially registered by the emergence of the terms 'Renaissance' and 'Reformation' denoting the threshold of a new period; by the designation of the preceding epoch, now taken to be definitely over, as the 'Middle Ages'; and by the fixing of the term Antiquity to denote the pagan culture of Greece and Rome. In the process, a new relationship between the ancient and the modern was established at the expense of the Middle Ages, since the Renaissance gave precedence to the ancient over all other cultures. At this stage the modern was opposed to the medieval, rather than to the ancient, and it had a right to preference only in so far as it imitated the ancient.

In the third stage, running through the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, the terms Renaissance and Reformation because descriptive of now completed historical periods. This called for a term denoting the new period as a whole which followed the 'Middle Ages'. It was at this point that the connotation of novelty in the term modernus, meaning ‘of today’ as opposed to 'of yesterday'-what is over, finished, or historically surpassed-was revived. The Renaissance had attempted to replace the authority of the Church with the authority of the ancients. It was the ancients themselves who now came under attack from the standpoint of the present in the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, or the ‘Battle of the Books’ as it came to be known.

It was during a fourth phase, the Enlightenment and its aftermath, that this sense of a qualitative newness about the times, of their being completely other and better than what had gone before, was consolidated. Two things made this possible: a reorientation towards the future consequent upon the Christian eschatology's shedding of its expectation of the imminent arrival of doomsday, and the opening up of the new horizons of expectation by the advance of the sciences, and the growing consciousness of the 'New World' and its peoples. The modern is no longer simply opposed to either the ancient or the medieval periods, but more generally to 'tradition'. The logic of the new, fashion, and aesthetic modernism may thus be understood as the result of an aestheticization of ‘modernity’ as a form of historical consciousness and its transformation into a general model of social experience.

Finally, to take us up to the present, we must add a fifth stage in which the peculiar and paradoxical abstractness of the temporality of modernity is at once problematized and affirmed. 'Modernity', fixed now as a discrete historical period within its own temporal scheme, hardens into a name and is left stranded in the past. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is replaced with a Quarrel of the Moderns and the Contemporaries. The latter became the Postmoderns.
Historical Interpretations of Modernity written by Cristina Nuta for FamousWhy.com
FamousWhy.com - Famous People ... Famous Regions, a Lot Of Articles and Free Software Downloads
Historical Interpretations of Modernity Image Source : empire.k12.ca.us

---

Tags: historical, interpretations, modernity, classification, roman empire	[edit tags]

Category: Education  - ( Education Archive)

Date Added: 08 March '07

---

Add a link to this page on any related website, blog or forum using this code :

---