Introduction to Volume I: reformations

Pinpointing a precise date at which the Middle Ages ended and Modernity began is a fraught exercise. The date of 1500 CE is often used by those seeking to delimit these two ‘historical periods’ but there is actually no consensus among historians. Indeed, nothing particularly remarkable occurred in the year 1500. Depending on the nationality of the modern historian involved, or alternatively the thematic focus of their research (cultural history, economic history, political history, art history and religious history, to name only a few possibilities), many dates have been selected as turning points that brought about the end of the Middle Ages and heralded ‘early’ Modernity. Since the nineteenth century, numerous historians of European culture, art and literature have pointed to the Renaissance as the starting point of Modernity. The Renaissance created a community of European intellectuals, the humanists, who developed an interest in the languages and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and increasingly critiqued texts that had, hereto, always been held to be authoritative. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, these thinkers emphasised the individuality of human beings by noting that humans were capable of dignity, physical and moral beauty, and full of potential. This ‘re-birth’ of European culture through the reclamation of Greco-Roman culture and art began and occurred gradually, over a long period of history that precedes the sixteenth century and continued well into that century. The editors of this volume, however, have selected 1517 as its starting point both for reasons of practicality, since it limits the sources included in this volume to the sixteenth century, but also to highlight the significance of the Reformation, which is reflected in many of the texts contained in this volume.