Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

By Kristen Poole and Owen Williams

Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today.

Contributors: Douglas Bruster, Euan Cameron, Heather Dubrow, Kate Giles, Tim Harris, Natasha Korda, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Kristen Poole, Ethan H. Shagan, James Simpson, Nigel Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, Gordon Teskey, Julianne Werlin, Owen Williams, Steven N. Zwicker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296563

Book preview

Early Modern Histories of Time

Early Modern Histories of Time

The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and

Seventeenth-Century England

Edited by Kristen Poole and

Owen Williams

PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH

FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Poole, Kristen, editor. | Williams, Owen, 1970– editor.

Title: Early modern histories of time : the periodizations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England / edited by Kristen Poole and Owen Williams.

Description: First edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017140 | ISBN 9780812251524 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0812251520 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Periodization. | English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | History—Periodization—History—16th century. | History—Periodization—History—17th century. | Great Britain—History—16th century—Periodization. | Great Britain—History—17th century—Periodization.

Classification: LCC PR414 .E38 2019 | DDC 820.9/0030722—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017140

CONTENTS

Introduction

KRISTEN POOLE AND OWEN WILLIAMS

PERIODIZATION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY STUDIES: AN OVERVIEW

Chapter 1. Periodizing the Early Modern: The Historian’s View

TIM HARRIS

Chapter 2. Time Boundaries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies

NIGEL SMITH

PART I. RELIGION

Chapter 3. How Early Modern Church Historians Defined Periods in History

EUAN CAMERON

Chapter 4. Periodization and the Secular

ETHAN H. SHAGAN

Chapter 5. Trans-Reformation English Literary History

JAMES SIMPSON

PART II. MATERIALITY

Chapter 6. Time and Place in Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon

KATE GILES

Chapter 7. Much Ado About Ruffs: Laundry Time in Feminist Counter-Archives

NATASHA KORDA

PART III. POETICS

Chapter 8. The Period Concept and Seventeenth-Century Poetry

GORDON TESKEY

Chapter 9. Love Poetry and Periodization

JULIANNE WERLIN

PART IV. SHAKESPEARE

Chapter 10. Shakespeare, Period

DOUGLAS BRUSTER

Chapter 11. Periodic Shakespeare

JULIA REINHARD LUPTON

PART V. SELF-EMPLACEMENT

Chapter 12. John Dryden and Restoration Time: Writing the Self Within Time, Through Time, Beyond Time

STEVEN N. ZWICKER

Chapter 13. Did the English Seventeenth Century Really End at 1660? Subaltern Perspectives on the Continuing Impact of the English Civil Wars

MIHOKO SUZUKI

PART VI. BEYOND TIME

Chapter 14. Space Travel: Spatiality and/or Temporality in the Study of Periodization

HEATHER DUBROW

Chapter 15. Always, Already, Again: Toward a New Typological Historiography

KRISTEN POOLE

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Early Modern Histories of Time

Introduction

Kristen Poole and Owen Williams

The Dialectic of Chronologies

This volume explores historical periodization from two perspectives: it addresses how today’s scholars of early modern England work with and within the idea of historical periods, and how people living during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood chronology, antecedent, and temporal division. In particular, the authors of these essays are interested in how temporal models that are indigenous to the early modern period might inform our own intellectual habits of conceptualizing time and history. What happens when we take up early modern models of historicity and use them to assess early modern culture, literature, and art? (As discussed below, the need to use a period label like early modern even when rethinking period labels demonstrates why such naming is both necessary and deeply problematic.) In what ways are our modes of chronology indebted to the historiography of the very times that are the object of our study, thus prescribing our historical narrative? Conversely, in what ways have we imposed historical categories on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that chafe against the temporal epistemologies of the people we seek to understand?

A text that demonstrates some of these problems is Thomas Blundeville’s theoretical treatise on historiography, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574). Here, Blundeville laments what passed for historical understanding for many of his contemporaries:

I can not tell whyther I may deryde, or rather pittie the great follie of those which having consumed all theyr lyfe tyme in hystories, doe know nothing in the ende, but the discents, genealoges, and petygrees, of noble men, and when such a King or Emperour raigned, & such lyke stuffe, which knowledge though it be necessarie and meete to be observed, yet it is not to be co[m]pared to the knowledge that is gotten by such observacions as we require, & be of greater importaunce.¹

Instead of knowing the dates and genealogies of monarchs & such lyke stuffe, Blundeville insists on learning more important information—such as the weather and the time of day when various deeds took place: It shalbe needefull sometyme to note the daies according as they be eyther whote [hot] or colde, cleare or clowdye, drye or moyste, windye or snowye, holy dayes or working dayes, and wh[e]ther it be in the morning, at noonetyde, or in the evening, and likewise the nights togither with the differences of the tymes and seasons thereof, and fynally the very houre.² There is intentional shock value here: to claim that learning about the petygrees, of noble men is to know nothing in the ende, and that it is more important to know that someone in the past did something on a cloudy Sunday around noon, is to radically upend inherited notions of what constitutes history and its worth. The purpose of historical study, asserts the humanist Blundeville, is not to memorize information about a chain of rulers but to gather thereof such iudgement and knowledge as you may therby be the more able, as well to direct your private actions, as to give Counsell lyke a most prudent Counseller in publyke causes.³ Blundeville’s historical ideology thus informs both private and public actions, and works at both a micro- and a macrolevel. For in addition to knowing the weather at the time of particular deeds, Blundeville asserts that a good history also needs to address issues of trade, public revenues, the military force, and the manner of a government.⁴ This combination of both micro- and macroforces is important for understanding the rise and fall that, for Blundeville, marks historical movement, the beginning, augmentacion, state, declynacion, and ende of a Countrie or Citie, or empire.⁵ The self-evident goal of learning about history in this way is that we may learne thereby to acknowledge the providence of God, wherby all things are governed and directed.⁶

In many ways, we are the inheritors of the humanist ethos that informed Blundeville’s concept of historiography. We largely reject historical teaching that focuses on memorizing a parade of leaders (say, the kings and queens of England, or the presidents of the United States). We value the specificity of the microstudies of social history, and the systemic analysis of economic history. We largely continue to think of time in terms of epochs, of historical arcs that have a beginning, an augmentation, stasis, a decline, and an end; microhistories are subsumed under these larger arcs. But in other ways, Blundeville’s habits of thought and his wider epistemology are strange to us. The particulars of the weather—which in Blundeville’s account, suggest an explanatory correspondence with the qualities (wet or dry, cold or hot) that defined the model of the humoral body that dominated contemporary medical and psychological theories—rarely factor into our accounts of history. And while we organize time into epochs, adapting inherited models like Francesco Petrarch’s while developing new concepts like the anthropocene, our narratives of rise and fall are not in the interest of discerning the patterns of divine providence. Where Blundeville is looking to history to find the hand of God, we might be looking to trace, say, the development of capitalism.

Blundeville’s historiography, then, can be seen as both consonant and discordant with the prevailing modes of current history writing. Of particular interest to the topic of this volume is Blundeville’s idea of historical period. He does not use the word period, but that is understandable: the use of the word to mean a length of time in history characterized by some prevalent or distinguishing condition, circumstance, occurrence, etc., or by the rule of a particular government, dynasty, etc.; an age, era does not come about until the very end of the sixteenth century.⁷ But if Blundeville does not yet have our familiar word to name the concept, he is nonetheless arguing that history should not be recorded and understood as a string of consecutive individual lives, but as larger stretches of time that trace the rise and fall of a country, city, or empire. He is essentially arguing for a shift from thinking of historical chronology through individual people to larger geopolitical units that endure over a longer stretch of time than a human life. Here, again, we find both consonance and dissonance with modern historiography: modern historians also measure time in periods, not individual lives, and also look for patterns of emergence and fading, although today we more often consider social, political, or epistemological factors instead of the life and death of a particular place.

The example of Blundeville thus illustrates a curious feature of historiography: our understandings of chronology and historical period frequently do not correspond with those of the very people being periodized. This fundamental disjunction—we categorize people from the past with categories that would have been unfamiliar and strange to them, even as we adapt inherited models of thinking about time—sparks a new set of historiographical questions. How do current models of the past encounter, accommodate, and account for the models of history prevalent within the period being studied? How might conceptual models from the past shape or subvert models of the past? And how can these models (those from the past, those of the present) enter into a productive intellectual dialectic?

While this volume’s experiment in repurposing indigenous temporal models for our own historiographical ends is innovative, it also retraces the path of the humanists who were so intellectually influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Thomas M. Greene has shown, dialectical imitation was a central humanist strategy, one that did not merely call attention to the textual/historical layering that occurred when authors imitated and strove to outdo ancient antecedents. It was an approach that simultaneously drew the texts into active, even agonistic dialogue with each other. Thus dialectical imitation offers an implicit perspective on history and anachronism, even as it profoundly responds to that resistance or ambivalence toward imitation that was a necessary and congenital feature of humanism.⁸ Like the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists who could simultaneously appropriate and resist inherited forms, the authors of the essays in this volume use early modern texts in a way that sustains the fraught relationship between recovery, estrangement, and understanding.

In recent decades, many scholars have debated how we should divide up the past (e.g., where epochal shifts occurred, whether periods are primarily defined by events, or even which discernible qualities distinguish a period). Simultaneously but often separately, many scholars have interrogated how previous thinkers conceived of time itself. Those interested in contemporary debates about the politics of periodization and those interested in the historical epistemology of time have not necessarily been in dialogue. This volume aims to bridge these conversations in the hopes that attending to early modern ideas about time, chronology, and historicity can prompt vibrant thinking about these same concerns in our own historical context.

Periodization, at its most basic, is the division of the idea of time into discrete categories according to intellectually or historically valued characteristics or qualities. It is one of the ways in which we try to know time and we try to explain it to ourselves and to others. Since many people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were keenly interested in their place within a variety of overlapping historical models (think Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated into English around the same time Blundeville was writing, versus Petrarch’s grand tripartite scheme of history) and were actively developing innovative ways to present and relate to the past, engaging sympathetically with these varied chronological models leads us to think more dynamically about periodization itself. The motivation for this kind of a turn to the past is not antiquarian or nostalgic, a wistful desire to recover mental habits from days of yore. Nor is the goal to discover a more authentic understanding of period, as if applying indigenous temporal models to a given historical era could somehow produce a more genuine or accurate understanding of how we partition and qualify time. Rather, the early modern experimentation with different temporal figurations—an experimentation that could be lively, anxious, delightful, or profound—presents us with an occasion for the serious work of intellectual play. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceptions of chronology and temporality offer provocative, creative intellectual avenues for reconceptualizing debates over periodization altogether.

This volume sets out to recover the diversity and complexity of these earlier temporal models and habits of thought, and to consider their contemporary effects on a number of scholarly areas that include religion, material culture, poetics, Shakespeare, and self-emplacement. The essays work with, not against, the ambiguity built into that very word contemporary: they consider early modern temporality in its local historical context, and also the ways it affects us today. In other words, these essays think at once about how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporal models shaped the thought-worlds of those living during those centuries, and how they can fruitfully influence our own working concepts of historical period. While recognizing the alterity of the then, the volume throws the past into an intellectual dialogue with the now. The collection also considers what may lie beyond periodization, that is, ways of conceptualizing history that reach beyond chronological division to contemplate the role of space/place and multiple temporal frames.

The contributors to this volume take up the challenge of using early modern chronological models—ranging from models based on eschatology to those based on laundry, for example, or those based on social traditions of marriage to those emanating from the materiality of the architectural palimpsest—to rethink our own notions of historicity in strikingly diverse ways. But they share a core set of questions that speak to the current stakes in the profession: How do indigenous historical categories provide us with a new vocabulary for discussing and organizing time? How do we avoid the tautology of valorizing the early modern simply through our recognition of protomodern and progressive ideas of time? How do the historical categories we find within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries compel us to embrace, realign, or jettison our own traditional (anachronistic) period divisions? These essays present a range of approaches from scholars in early modern studies taking up the question of the temporal categorization of literature and history in ways that challenge, profess, critique, confirm, and reject models drawn from within the very texts and cultural constructs we study.

Periodic Reassessments

Those living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were also questioning and redefining their placement in time; they, too, were interested in charting temporal boundaries, distinguishing themselves from their ancestors by placing themselves in new temporal settings vis-à-vis the past. This was an intellectual project that was happening across Europe, and especially in religious contexts. In Germany, for instance, the Magdeburg Centuries established a formal time scheme that grounded different historical eras in perceived levels of ecclesiastical purity. In England, numerous sectarians sought to return to the purer forms of Christian practice they believed existed in the early Church; this movement of repristination led to an intensified awareness of historical eras, differences, and distances. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people had an array of schemes for organizing historical time, including inherited models that coincided or clashed in various ways. Hesiod had offered the ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron before Ovid eliminated the Heroic Age; Saint Paul introduced the tripartite division of history into the age of nature, the age of Mosaic law, and the age of grace; Petrarch contributed the famous (or infamous) classification of Antiquity-Medieval-Renaissance. The early Christians had adapted the Roman habit of documenting time according to the year of an emperor’s reign by recording time in terms of the ongoing reign of Christ (Anno Domini); medieval and later chroniclers continued to register time through monarchal and imperial reigns; and early modern reformers and antiquarians, armed with advances in translation, mathematics, and archaeology, attempted to date time from the origins of the world.

Then as now, many of these temporal markers had become naturalized to the point of becoming culturally unconscious: we use the word centuries without thinking of its military association with Roman legions, and someone could know that his or her birth year is 1982 without considering (or, increasingly, even knowing) that this means 1,982 years after the posited nativity of Christ. But in the sixteenth century especially, a number of cultural developments—the printing press; humanist recovery of ancient languages; advances in cartography; an expanded bureaucracy and enhanced record keeping; encounters with the primitive societies of the New World—could suddenly defamiliarize particular temporal habits of thought. For instance, an English mandate of 1538 requiring all birth and death years to be recorded in the new parish registers established the value of calendric time as distinctive from the knowledge that someone was born during the harvest (thereby privileging seasonal cycle), or in a postlapsarian world (thereby emphasizing cosmic time). In a different way, there is a strangeness in the early modern use of the word age as a chronological marker. Age as historical period coincides comfortably with the notion of human chronological age, and we can find the word signaling a strong sense of temporal self-emplacement (some do thinke, that it is in vaine for men to write in this age⁹). Yet the concept of an age can also move into the abstract. Most famously, we find Shakespeare—whose plays resound with emphatic insistence on the now¹⁰—being hailed by Ben Jonson in the First Folio as not of an age, but for all time. Jonson’s encomium has been used as a slogan for Shakespeare’s universality, but it signals a contemporary habit of trying to calculate temporal emplacement, and perhaps the difficulty of doing so.

A vibrant interest in dynastic history at both elite and popular levels also prompted a heightened consciousness about historical divisions and one’s location within the flow of time. The rapid rise of English nationalism, the attendant market demand for extensive chronicle histories of Britain, and what D. R. Woolf has called that peculiar dialogue with history which was so much a part of Tudor statesmanship led to the listing of monarchical genealogies and accounts of national origins that usually reached back to various origin myths involving Brut or other legendary ancients.¹¹ These varied accounts of English history and chronology resulted in multiple temporal frameworks that would seem to sit incongruously side by side, and might even point to a degree of temporal anxiety: witness the account of Henry V’s life in Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles, where the start of the king’s reign is temporally placed "in the yeare of the world 5375, after the birth of our saviour, by our account 1413, the third of the emperor Sigismund: the three and thirtith [sic] of Charles the sixt [sic] French king, and in the seventh yeare of governance in Scotland under … Robert the third."¹² Here, Genesiacal, Christological, imperial, and monarchical frameworks are piled on one another to situate the English king; these seem to denote not so much a confusion of authority as the multiplicity of temporal conceptions within which the reader might be placed, or might place him- or herself.

If sixteenth-century developments compelled a heightened interest in thinking about chronology, our own moment is again interrogating the ways in which we construct historical time. Until recently, professional scholars of history and literature had settled on a set of categories that provided a stable working vocabulary to talk about the past. The traditional divisions of Classical (or Ancient), Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment seemed to work well enough. But then we started to question these categories. In one vein, scholars started to question the implications of the labels themselves. The Renaissance became the Early Modern—always anticipating the Modern (itself a highly problematic term)—before becoming (in some circles) the Post-Medieval. The Enlightenment became the less charged Eighteenth Century, which promptly prefaced itself with the Long to gobble up much of the seventeenth century; then the Middle Ages also became the Long, extending from the third century to the eighteenth (very long indeed!).¹³ In another vein, some scholars have questioned the intellectual validity of historical periods at all (an issue that becomes more pressing with the accelerating rate of globalization and the corresponding need to understand history in a global context). As Lawrence Besserman notes in the opening of his 1996 collection The Challenge of Periodization, In some of the most influential and innovative quarters of contemporary literary and cultural studies, periodization … finds itself in very bad odor indeed.¹⁴ In his introduction to the volume, Besserman traces how various strands of poststructuralist thought, ranging from that of Fredric Jameson to Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida, rendered the epistemological stability of historical periods intellectually dubious. Indeed, as Lee Patterson observes, historical periods even came to be questionable on ethical grounds: If it is true that we now live in a postmodern world that has subverted all centralized, totalized and hierarchized systems, that affirms the marginal, the hybrid, and the regional, and that has decentered the subject, then periodization is an agency of repression that must be discarded.¹⁵

More than two decades after Besserman’s collection, we seem to be entering a moment where the only thing settled about all of our period categories is that they are unsettled. While Patterson’s assertion that historical periods are agents of repression might be ideologically extreme, there have recently been more pragmatic calls for reconsidering how periodization drives the curricular organization of literary studies (as Ted Underwood argues in his influential Why Literary Periods Mattered¹⁶). There have been calls for abandoning periodization altogether. Noting, among other factors, the implications of periodization for the academic job market, Eric Hayot contends, The profession has failed, first, to institutionalize a reasonable range of competing concepts that would mitigate some of the obvious limitations of periodization as a method, and, second, to formalize in institutional form significant transconceptual categories that would call attention to the boundaries periodization creates within the historical field of literature.¹⁷ More theoretically, the very nature of time is at issue. Bruno Latour asserts that we have never been modern,¹⁸ and Jonathan Gil Harris rethinks time as pleated and palimpsested, adapting Michel Serres’s notions of time into the multitemporal and the polychronic.¹⁹ As is doubtlessly apparent, neither of these temporal epistemologies lend themselves to periodization as it has been practiced. Already postmodern—or, if Latour has his way, nonmodern—are we now postperiodization as well?²⁰ If so, how does our potentially metahistoric moment shape our discussions of the past and our objects of study? Or do we find that the more we question period divisions, the more they assert their pragmatic intellectual and professional necessity?

Our own moment of theorizing the organization of historical time thus shares an affinity with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period (here, and throughout the volume, use of the term becomes inevitable even as the very concept is questioned), time was not always, or even primarily, hegemonic and teleological. We find a tremendous diversity in terms of temporal models and habits of thought concerning one’s place in time. Some of these modes continued and proliferated or reinforced the inherited schemes that relied on scriptural or classical idioms; others offered radically new chronologies and temporalities. The present volume problematizes the periodization of the early modern by resuscitating a wide range of these earlier chronological models, ways of thinking about time that affected (and continue to affect) our perception and construction of literature and history.

Modeling Time: Lines and Circles

In many ways, then, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced transformations in the conceptualization of history. For our own particular historical moment, one that is arguably a sea change of the post–World War II Western cultural and intellectual order, inherited models of historicity are similarly seeming less intuitive, as a variety of pressures—new technologies, new epistemologies, and a shifting of the economic sands of the academy—are causing a reorganization of our working models of chronology. (The notion of a sea change is itself an indigenous concept, as it is a term borrowed from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest). As we reconceive our ways of understanding and organizing the past, previous temporal modes can provide useful, germane, and imaginative paths for intellectual engagement.

It is important at the outset to contend with a couple of challenges to this discussion, however. First, as much as these essays seek new models of time and chronology, rethinking or even challenging historical periodization inevitably requires the use of historical periods. More particularly, even as the authors in this volume recognize the well-rehearsed political problems with the label of early modern, we find ourselves needing to return to a label that is often also the subject of the critique. Like a popular early modern emblem of cyclicality, the drakon ouroboros (the ancient image of a serpent devouring its tail), even attempts to move away from conventional historical periods regularly return to the working vocabulary of conventional historical periods. This intellectual problem demonstrates the fundamental necessity of naming temporal areas in order to do historically informed work and of gathering disciplines into mutually constitutive knowledge communities focused on particular moments of the past. We acknowledge this circularity of logic, while at the same time we recognize the historicity of our working categories—the challenge is at once inherent and inherited. Indeed, the circular mode of using period to critique period structurally reflects the dominant mode of early modern historicity, which, as Achsah Guibbory has shown, was cyclical.²¹ We do well to remember that the etymological meaning of period is circular; Guibbory cites Sir William Temple’s An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), particularly Temple’s observation that Science and Arts have run their circles, and had their periods in the Several Parts of the World.²² Like the ouroboros, or the idea of revolution, time for the early moderns was largely understood as circular and recursive.

Yet the ouroboros itself presents at once a synchronic and closed system and also a diachronic exemplar of the migration of models across time, as it moved from Egyptian through Greek, Roman, and medieval culture into the seventeenth century, absorbing and preserving associations from classical philosophy, gnosticism, hermeticism, and alchemy. Recognizing the historical baggage of our inherited intellectual models similarly forces us to confront the cognitive force of the timeline. And here we encounter the second pervasive challenge to discussions of periodization. The timeline has become such a naturalized and dominant way of conceiving history that it can seem epistemologically inescapable. The intellectual energies and technological advances that led to the sixteenth-century cartographic revolution in the conceptualization of space spurred a corresponding flourishing of models for depicting time, as Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have shown in their beautifully illustrated Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline.²³ But the profusion of creative experiments for visualizing chronology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had, by the eighteenth century, settled into normative linear depictions, and over the course of the nineteenth century, envisioning history in the form of a timeline became second nature.²⁴ (We might note, for instance, the seemingly unself-conscious irony in Besserman’s description of cyclical history, which he nonetheless pictures in linear terms: If we sight along points marking configurations of the ideas of progress, decline, and renewal in history, a line from Petrarch, to Polydore Vergil, to Hegel, to Marx and beyond is plainly evident.²⁵) Establishing the parameters of the Early Modern, or the Medieval, or the Long Eighteenth Century has often been conceived as repositioning historical endpoints along a sliding linear scale. Moderns have therefore distorted the idea of period—taking a circular concept and rendering it linear so that it may be segmented—and, more profoundly, have discussed the lives and events of people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a temporal model that not only is anachronistic (the timeline) but also works against the ways in which these people primarily conceptualized their own place in history. The essays in this volume seek to explore, through various approaches, this and other intellectual contradictions.

The timeline and the notion of human time as fundamentally progressive or teleological are mutually informative, and both influence modern habits of periodization. Patterson has defined periodization as a sequence that insisted upon discontinuity, ascribed to each period its own special quality, and then organized them into a teleological pattern culminating in itself.²⁶ This conceptual structure has been woven into the intellectual fabric of most contemporary humanities disciplines, thus creating the illusion of having always already been present. In the wake of the theoretical writings of Fredric Jameson and Michel Foucault (among many others), the understanding of teleological progress implicit in nearly all periodizing schemes has been largely rejected by the current generation of scholars,²⁷ as has the corresponding implication that history can be understood as a series of ruptures and rejections of that which came before. In this moment of reimagining historical time in experimental ways that rebut latent progressive, teleological prejudices, returning to the time experiments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers suggestive new forms of temporality and chronology. These can inform intellectual and literary history in ways that can contradict, complicate, or complement one another.

The Essays in This Volume

The essays here offer not so much definitive assertions of new temporalities and chronologies as a series of explorations and thought experiments. In various ways—some direct and appropriative, some oblique and subtle—all the authors take up an early modern mode of temporal thinking and contemplate how it might help us to rethink our own habits of chronologizing. The essays have been grouped to offer sets of complementary studies focused on particular aspects of temporal concerns.

The collection opens with an overview of the current state of periodization in two major disciplines interested in the question: historiography and literary studies. As a matched pair, the essays trace out the issues that periods present to historians (concerned with identifying and unpacking social, political, and economic patterns) and literary scholars (concerned with such patterns but also with the aesthetic). Some of the problems of periodization are shared by these disciplines, but important distinctions also result from their objects of study and their approaches. Noting that historians study problems rather than periods, Tim Harris reviews the history of early modern, both as a term employed by modern historians—for far longer than many have thought—and as a mode of periodization. Harris encourages an increase in transperiod studies, more extensive theoretical work in early modern historiography, and a greater attention to larger historical metanarratives in order to create a more dynamic and critical field of study. Central to his essay is the claim that historians’ subfields—economic, political, religious, social/ demographic—and their available sources significantly influence the time frames that they adopt. Nigel Smith takes us into the various complexities of periodization in literary studies, flagging the problems presented when English literature is considered in its broader international context. He notes that a particular concern for periodizing early modern literary texts is that they are often explicitly concerned with time and how time is to be represented, thereby presenting and analyzing temporalities that fall outside of the historian’s purview.²⁸ Attending to questions of literary style raises a set of critical concerns and models that differ from those of historiography, and Smith offers new formalism as a critical approach that elucidates the transhistorical nature of the imaginative texts of the period(s).

Following this introductory overview, the three essays in Part I take up questions related to religion and periodization. How did Christians conceptually organize historical time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did this organization influence subsequent historiographical understandings of historical period? How does studying the different ways believers conceptualized time cause us to rethink our own historiographical terms and divisions? The section opens with an essay by religious historian Euan Cameron that addresses the fundamental issue of the ways early modern historians conceived of time. Not surprisingly in a belief system structured around a Messiah’s Second Coming, time was of central concern to Christian theologians and church historians. Observing that much of historiography is an exercise of trying to find order in chaos, Cameron notes the particular religious relevance of this search in the sixteenth century: Finding meaning in the confusion of events was not just a quest to understand humanity: it was a search for the marks of God. One way to discern meaning, to keep the chaos at bay, was to identify meaningful periods and phases in the history of the world.²⁹ Ethan H. Shagan reexamines the crucial notion of the secular, which has often been considered progressive and thus associated with the modern. Shagan observes that the distinction of the religious and the secular is a false binary in early modern Christianity, since the secular is constituted by the entirety of time after Christ’s ascension—that is, the saeculum awaiting the saecula saeculorum, the worldly anticipation of the world without end. What marks the early modern period is not a move toward modern secularity, then, but a historical time when Christianity was firmly established in the saeculum, and Shagan argues that we should respect and perhaps even use the early modern construct of the secular to inform our scholarship. James Simpson contributes to the debate over periodization and religion from a position on the late medieval/early modern margins, and he offers Trans-Reformation Studies as a useful literary-historical approach for expanding our understanding of English religious culture. While Simpson focuses on early modern religion, he also broadens that perspective when he argues, Periodization is not simply a matter of the shape of history itself but also a matter of what we need from history when.³⁰ Emerging at the dawn of the new millennium when medievalists began crossing the periodic boundary of 1534,³¹ this critical approach recognizes the importance of the Reformation itself as an early modern temporal episteme; corrects the prejudices of Whig historicisms not quite dead; and bolsters a diachronic historicism.

The essays in Part II explore how periodization relates to materiality. How did the material conditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English life shape notions of time? How did buildings, labor, and artifacts correspond to historical categories? How might this relationship of the material and the historical shape our own habits of periodization? Archaeologist Kate Giles provides a case study of temporality and material culture in early modern England. Studying a handful of medieval buildings in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, she argues that archaeology’s stratigraphic methodologies reveal the palimpsestic nature of matter and time in the guild buildings and, by extension, early modern England in general. In an essay that will resonate with both social and religious historians and scholars of literature, she explains that the material legacy of the past informs communities’ negotiation of the present, and thus, the construction of the future.³² Specifically, she traces how local politics and religion can have intergenerational impact on physical structures that defy neat concepts of historical period. Working on a very different scale, Natasha Korda presents laundry time as a feminist counternarrative to traditional modes of reckoning time and history that have long been the domain of male scholars. Focusing on the ruff as perhaps the most prominent thing that reifies Elizabethan culture, Korda advocates archival work focused on the everyday, with the goal of chronicling the history not of traditional periodization, but of ordinary, quotidian periodicity. She reminds us of the scholarly labor performed by forgotten pioneering female historians who recovered the material processes that anticipated our recent material turn in the archive, and points to Virginia Woolf’s use of the Elizabethan ruff as a meditation on the cyclical temporality of recurrence.

Part III considers the relationship of periodization and poetics. How did early modern poets conceptualize historical time? In what ways does poetry replicate or repudiate contemporary models of temporal movement, divisions, and structures? How did/do poetic tropes present temporal movements that help us to think through issues of periodization? In his reading of poetics and periodization, Gordon Teskey claims that a work of art has a starting point, but no definite conclusion; there is no way to predict what it will prophetically inspire for later creators. He suggests that the term period is as much a cultural concept as a historical one, a term that weaves together time, place, style, and language. To show this is the case, Teskey considers various stylistic systems and the shifting cosmologies that they express, moving from the sixteenth century’s belief in cosmological correspondences to the figurative language of the seventeenth century’s metaphysical poets and beyond. In a different vein, Julianne Werlin investigates the span of an individual life as an often-overlooked marker of periodization. She argues that early modern love poetry offers an intimate perspective on historical temporality that reflects demographic trends, and that, in turn, the shifting marriage demographics during the period have pronounced effects on the products of poets. Looking at lyric poetry and sonnet cycles as both a response to cultural reality and a means of examining that reality, she traces the relationship between love poetry and the increasing eroticization of courtship and married love during the seventeenth century.

Part IV engages the place of Shakespeare in our understanding of historical period. How do Shakespeare’s models of time or ways of thinking about historicity continue to shape our own engagement with the plays? Conversely, how do Shakespeare’s plays—manifestly interested in the construction of history—influence our notions of temporality? In Shakespeare, Period, Douglas Bruster goes so far as to argue that Shakespeare has become the emblem of English literary history before considering the liabilities of such synecdoche. According to Bruster, "developments in our own time have made it possible, even likely, for some readers to equate Shakespeare with the past, as the figure who represents that great gulf of time in which printed words became the very currency of civilization,³³ and he traces the extent to which Shakespeare studies has usurped attention from other periods, texts, and authors. Working with Shakespeare’s use of ghosts and memory, Bruster also argues that, as a monument to the past, Shakespeare risks accusations of obsolescence and oversaturation, whether they originate in the classroom, with university administrators, or from budget-cutting politicians. In Periodic Shakespeare, Julia Reinhard Lupton approaches periodization as an ongoing process of responsiveness to shifting interpretive, social, and performance conditions."³⁴ Working through the dynamic relationships of the characters in The Winter’s Tale, she theorizes the nature of Shakespearean drama, arguing that the plays’ signature virtue is their renewability throughout different times, periods, and expressive modes; Shakespeare’s virtue comes from his asking artists and audiences to consider their own sense of historical location and dislocation, to mark the ages of man as they reread Shakespeare over the course of a lifetime, and to participate in the cocreative work of judgment, memory, and imagination.³⁵

The essays in Part V contemplate the experience of historical self-emplacement. How did individuals living within the early modern period understand and experience their own historical subjectivity? What expressions of conscious historical self-emplacement do we find, and how do these differ for various artistic, historiographic, or literary expressions? Steven N. Zwicker unpacks how experiences of time and the relationship between time and English politics and society during the Restoration are expressed in the writing of John Dryden. Zwicker focuses on the various temporalities found in Dryden’s poetry, temporalities that range from the un-apocalyptic mood of his Heroique Stanzas (1658) to the teasing sense of Old Testament time and typologies in the ironic sacred history of Absalom and Achitophel (1681).³⁶ Zwicker records Dryden’s responses to life in Stuart England, reactions that the poet articulates through various periodization schemas in