Journal of Early Modern History 

About: Journal of Early Modern History is an academic journal published by Brill. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Empire. It has an ISSN identifier of 1385-3783. Over the lifetime, 467 publications have been published receiving 2801 citations.

The Early Modern Muddle

Abstract: This article traces the career of "Early Modernity" as a covering term for a post-medieval, pre-modern historical period and a deliberate challenge to the historiographical conventions of "ages" (Renaissance, Reformation, etc.), centuries, or national histories. The author argues that the widespread but uncritical acceptance of this usage has obscured its limitations and equivocations and discusses possible alternatives.

Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu

Abstract: The issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important differences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.

Gog and Magog On Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition

Abstract: Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic destroyers prophesied in the book of Revelations, gave concrete expression to the apocalyptic climate that dominated medieval thinking about the future-and the present. They permeated medieval texts and appeared in most maps of the world. Historians are coming to understand medieval and early modern world maps not primarily as rather primitive technical tools but as cultural documents. Such maps expressed in graphic form the world view(s) of medieval elites (princely, scholarly, mercantile). The traditional contents of mappaemundi and early printed maps place them firmly in the tradition of medieval learning, yet they show signs very early on of skeptical and "empirical" questioning directed at received (mainly ancient) wisdom concerning the existence, location, population, and qualities of traditional cartographic *topoi (e.g., the kingdom of Prester John). As Renaissance source-scholarship, rules of evidence, and overseas exploration reshaped cartography, world maps underwent both a rapid transformation into sources of up-to-date information and a certain retrenchment of traditional contents, especially in distant and marginal areas. Gog and Magog are among the principal remnants of the medieval dream of the world. They appear, often with reference to Marco Polo, on world maps well into the seventeenth century. Early modern Europeans continued to view much of the world through medieval lenses.