Vai alla Homepage del Portale di Ateneo Second Cycle Degree/Two Year Master in Global cultures

PROVIDENTIAL MODERNITY: MILLENARIAN POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

John J. Martin (Duke University)

from 26 April 2021 at 17:00 to 29 April 2021 at 19:00

Aula SPECOLA – Piazza San Giovanni in Monte, 2 – Bologna, Italy

The short class focuses on the ways Christian, Jewish, and Muslim eschatologies shaped the political imaginaries of the long sixteenth-century. We will (1) explore the circulation of apocalyptic texts across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures in the late Middle Ages and early modern period; (2) examine the ways that these ideas shaped the political history of the period; and (3) and complicate the very notion of modernity. On this last point, it is my goal to demonstrate that what we have traditionally called “modernity” has a discontinuous history. Thus, there are not only “multiple modernities” across cultures (S. N. Eisenstadt, 2000) but also multiple modernities across time. In particular, our work will seek to test the hypothesis that the form of “modernity” that emerged in the sixteenth century – in the first age of globalization – differed radically from the notion of modernity we associated with progress – a configuration that first appears – and then only tenuously – in the late seventeenth century.