Life defies the rules of good drama: great changes do not occur within short time-spans. The erosion and eventual disintegration of the medieval historiographical model took place over four hundred years. No one scholar or innovation was responsible. Rather, the doubts that surfaced because of responses to new circumstances gradually eroded the traditional view on how past, present, and future were connected, much as the ceaseless lapping of waves erodes a coastline.
Between 1350 and the early 1700s decisive changes occurred that have led modern historians to select various persons or years in that period as the beginning of, or the transition to, the modern age. Such designations have produced sharp controversies over the exact character of this period of Western Civilization because, on the one hand, many elements of the traditional world view persisted yet, on the other hand, vast changes redrew the image of that world. In the age of discovery the world became global; scholars and philosophers conjured up new visions of nature and the cosmos; the works of classical antiquity were recovered, critically assessed, and adulated to an unprecedented degree; over a thousand years of a united Latin Christendom ended; and the state, emerging as the basic framework for peoples’ lives, provoked discussions of statecraft, collective identity, customs, and laws.
Contemporary historians perceived these changes one by one. At first they could not conceive of any overall view of history divorced from the medieval Christian one and simply accommodated each change and its accompanying insights to the time-proven model of medieval Christian historiography. Eventually though, by the eighteenth century such step-by-step adaptations had yielded to a new approach, one that sought meaning on the grand scale in the flow of events from past to present to future.
World History
