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.

This is the first truly global study of the Society of Jesus's early missions. Up to now historians have treated the early-modern Catholic missionary project as a disjointed collection of regional missions rather than as a single world-encompassing example of religious globalization. Luke Clossey shows how the vast distances separating missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with traditional views of the Society as a tightly centralized military machine. In fact, connections unmediated by Rome sprung up between the missions throughout the seventeenth century. He follows trails of personnel, money, relics and information between missions in seventeenth-century China, Germany and Mexico, and explores how Jesuits understood space and time and visualized universal mission and salvation. This pioneering study demonstrates that a global perspective is essential to understanding the Jesuits and will be required reading for historians of Catholicism and the early-modern world.

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The Early Modern Muddle

Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions

Evidence that privileges processes of consumption over those of production is critical to a reevaluation of nineteenth-century global integration and European economic growth. The growing body of documentation provided by early modern household inventory studies, along with new research on the contours of European demand for both imported manufactures and locally produced imitations, suggests that the time is now ripe for just such a reevaluation. Particularly, the consumption of tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, porcelain, and silk and cotton textiles increased dramatically in western Europe beginning in the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Use of the new commodities spread rapidly, both in geographical and social space. A variety of household inventory studies from the Netherlands and England are used to document the presence of many of these so-called luxury goods by the working poor by the middle of the eighteenth century. European demand for these goods was fueled not only by the rich with their growing surplus incomes but also by the much more numerous lower and middling classes.

Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World

This thesis examines the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England. In 1681 when Henry Care established his periodical The Popish Courant he chose the format of a dialogue because people were ‘so set upon dialoging.’ Care’s choice of dialogue for his periodical is indicative of the popularity of dialogue in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite the popularity that dialogue enjoyed in this period it has not received comparative attention by scholars. This thesis seeks to address this gap and make two specific historiographical contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates how the digitization of early modern sources can enable scholars to approach literary history from perspectives that physical books prevent. Using the digital collections of Early English Books Online, British Periodicals Online, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online for its source material this thesis has used a database of dialogues to analyze the genre and provide contextual knowledge about the genre as a whole that can illuminate the rhetorical objectives behind specific uses of dialogue. This is particularly exposed in the final chapter that utilizes this contextual information to understand the appeal of dialogue in Roger L’Estrange’s Observator.

Secondly this thesis adds to the growing number of studies of early modern genres such as pamphlets, newspapers, ballads, and chapbooks. The period under discussion was one of significant change in terms of political and social circumstances and this thesis demonstrates that dialogue was sensitive to these political events. By situating the dialogue within the broader print landscape of seventeenth-century England the thesis maps how dialogue adapted to changing circumstances with pamphlet dialogues, periodical dialogues, and dialogues of the dead, in particular emerging in response to social and political events. Looking at the dialogue in the context of other literary forms this thesis argues that the appeal of dialogue was its flexibility and ability to educate a broad range of people across all demographics of seventeenth-century England.

The Early Modern Muddle

Citations

Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions

Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World

'Of dialogue, that great and powerful art' : a study of the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England

The Concept of Grace

The Modern Period

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