A period piece; period dress; period charm: even popular speech marks the pastness of the past by talking in periods. “It's not my period,” responds the historian, making clear how we partition the past by dividing it periodically. This habit of periodizing the past—of parceling it into periods and estranging it from the present by giving it a period flavor—began in the period formerly known as the Renaissance but now generally called early modern. That shift in both naming and framing shows that periodization has a history and that it is not just historians who have a stake in how we divide the various parts of the past.
Early Modern Histories of Time brings together a distinguished team of scholars to examine the period when periodization first became an urgent issue. In fifteen discrete chapters, opened by a richly illuminating introduction by the editors, the volume ranges widely across contemporary and retrospective conceptions of periodization, mostly in the centuries between the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution (as historians would periodize it), or from Shakespeare to the Restoration (as literary scholars might prefer). Many contributors note that contemporaries construed periods in two contrasting, even incompatible, ways: as cyclical or circular, like the periods of the moon or menstrual periods, yet also as linear and time bound. They also generated novel temporalities such as the centuries invented by the Magdeburg Centuriators or the life cycles determined by English parish registrations of births and deaths after 1538. Even without our current battles over Renaissance versus early modern, or how to distinguish the parts of a literature curriculum, the period itself had plenty of competing ideas of periodization to inspire fertile reflection.
The most compelling essays in Early Modern Histories of Time set up conversations between past and present periodizations. For example, the two opening essays, by the historian Tim Harris and the literary scholar Nigel Smith, introduce their respective fields’ approaches to periodization with acute historiographic surveys and well-chosen historical examples: an ideal dialogue to open a graduate, or even an undergraduate, seminar in either discipline. The Reformation and its redefinition of sacred and secular time naturally bulk large, with three chapters on “Religion,” by Euan Cameron (on periodization in early modern church history, from Augustine to Luther, Caspar Peucer, and John Foxe, among others), Ethan Shagan (a luminous reflection on periodization and the secular, contra Charles Taylor), and James Simpson (making a masterly case for “trans-Reformation” literary history, crossing conventional boundaries of medieval and early modern).
The bulk of Early Modern Histories of Time comprises case studies, two in architectural history and social history focusing on the built environment of Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon (by Kate Giles) and the periodicity of “laundry time” in sixteenth-century England (by Natasha Korda), and the rest in literary history. Among these, Gordon Teskey sets up a dazzling play of resonances among early modern English poets, while Julianne Werlin focuses on the “emotional periodization” (169) of Renaissance love poetry; Douglas Bruster and Julia Reinhard Lupton treat, respectively, “Shakespeare, Period” and “Periodic Shakespeare”; Steven Zwicker examines John Dryden's engagement with time after the Restoration, and Mihoko Suzuki offers “a Gramscian perspective” (246) on continuity across the alleged periodic watershed of 1660; and, in the concluding pair of chapters, Heather Dubrow argues suggestively that “periodization involves not only temporality but spatiality” (251), and volume editor Kristen Poole rounds off the collection with a time-hopping reflection on typology, from Origen to the popular biblical hermeneutics of the early seventeenth-century English author of Origenic “hexapla,” Andrew Willet. The closing words of Poole's essay pose a key question that animates the collection as a whole: how may we, as scholars, cultivate the idiomatic knowledge needed to understand our period “while enabling expansive intellectual inquiry beyond the box of a historical period?” (282).
“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson famously urged. Less notoriously, he observed, “We cannot not periodize,” as if preemptively answering Jacques Le Goff's more recent challenge in his Faut-il vraiment découper l'histoire en tranches? (Must we divide history into periods?, 2014). Such decoupage is now practically inevitable yet still perpetually unsettling to almost every sort of historian. Early Modern Histories of Time provides an indispensable survey of just how periodization became both inescapable and endlessly, fruitfully debatable. Period.
