Early Modern Period: Renaissance Word of the Week

An academic term that defines the transitional period between the medieval era and modernity, roughly spanning circa 1500-1800.

Like any attempt at historic periodization, defining exact start and end dates is not an exact science, however, and you will always find an ill fit at the margins for any dates chosen.

However, most scholars agree that some combination of the 1453 Fall of Constantinople, the late-1400s adoption of the movable-type printing press across Europe, 1492 journey of Columbus heralding the European Age of Exploration , and the Protestant Reformation (traditionally dating to 1517) all mark the changing of an era.

Likewise, the end date marking a shift to cultural modernity is slippery. Most scholars look to the American and French Revolutions of the late Eighteenth Century as a line of demarcation, although whether those tumultuous events are early modern or fully modern is likewise debated.

The Renaissance is often considered to be a subset of the Early Modern, especially as scholars continue to debate how early or late the Renaissance lasted as well as the appropriateness of it as a term to cover cultural developments beyond Humanism and the arts.

(There is a lot of debate continuing in academic circles, sometimes contentious, about whether even to use the term “Renaissance” outside of a very specific span of time in the Italian Peninsula. I’ll leave that for a later post.)

In the context of that debate, the term “early modern” has risen in popularity and use among historians over the past several decades after it was originally coined by American historian Lynn Thorndike in his 1926 work A Short History of Civilization.