Modern Age History: We explain what the Modern Age was, its discoveries, beginning, end and other characteristics. Also, Renaissance humanism.
What was the Modern Age?
The Modern Age or Modernity was the period of universal history that lasted between the middle of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century, that is, between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Contemporary Age.
It was a time of great changes in the political, social, economic, cultural and scientific spheres, which laid the foundations of the world as we know it today. It marked a departure from the religious dogmas that during the Middle Ages limited thought and art (what some authors called “obscurantism”). The intellectual movement that promoted this change was called Renaissance humanism. In addition, the Protestant Reformation arose during this period. You must read about Renaissance Literature once!
In the Modern Age, modern states were established in Europe and a social class linked to commerce and other urban activities was established: the bourgeoisie. With this fact and the global expansion of the nascent Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch empires, Europe was placed at the center of the world’s political and economic scene.
For this reason, in the study of the Modern Age, much emphasis is often placed on Western Europe, but many academics criticize this emphasis and even the idea of a “Modern Age” because they consider them Eurocentric.
Although there is no consensus as to when the Modern Age began, two possible events are usually taken as indicators of its beginning: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 (which put an end to the Byzantine Empire) or the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of America in 1492. Its end is usually marked by the French Revolution of 1789, although some scholars opt for the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. Maybe you should definitely read about Proselytism once!
KEY POINTS
- The Modern Age was the period of universal history that was located between the Middle Ages and the Contemporary Age, between the 15th and 18th centuries.
- It was a time of philosophical and cultural changes, such as those introduced by Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
- It meant the appearance of the modern State and the formation of European colonial empires that expanded to other continents.
- The Protestant Reformation arose, which separated from the Catholic Church, and the predominant role of the bourgeoisie in the world economy was consolidated.
Characteristics of the Modern Age
Broadly speaking, the Modern Age can be characterized as follows:
- It was a period of profound changes in Western culture and society, whose first impulse was given by the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Thus, the medieval tradition focused exclusively on the figure of God was abandoned and the new values of reason and science were favoured.
- It was a time of formation of the great European imperial powers, with the strengthening of their monarchies, known generically as the “Ancien Régime”. These empires established colonies on other continents, which initiated a competition for obtaining resources according to the principles of mercantilism. In this way, the foundations for the global expansion of capitalism were laid.
- It was an era of exploration and colonial expansion in America (where a war of conquest was carried out that marked the end of the pre-Columbian empires), Africa, Asia and Oceania, which led to the spread of modern ideas, European languages and the Christian religion throughout much of the world.
- It was the time when modern states were born, which had a clearly delimited territory, a more or less constant population, a centralized government and a bureaucracy. An example of this were the absolute monarchies.
- This was the period in which a new social class grew and consolidated: the bourgeoisie. This class did not base its wealth on inheritance or the privileges of nobility but on commercial and professional activity, and it concentrated economic power throughout the Modern Age. However, political power continued to be in the hands of the monarchy and the aristocracy.
- It was a phase of transformation for the Catholic Church, which was challenged by the Protestant Reformation and by humanism. Western culture began a path of secularization.
- It was a period in which great changes occurred in science and technology, which had an enormous impact on the working, military and philosophical life of the West. In addition, faith in progress, communication and reason was established, new philosophical values that soon spread to most of the world.
Renaissance Humanism
Between the 15th and 16th centuries, a fundamental cultural change occurred in Europe in order to understand the Modern Age, which was later baptized as the Renaissance. Its name is due to the fact that, after centuries of predominance of the religious values of the Church (traditionally identified with the concept of medieval obscurantism), there was a recovery of works, ideas and values of classical Greco-Roman culture.
This process was possible thanks to the erosion of traditional religious values. Religious faith was replaced by human reason and scholastic methods of reading ancient texts by observation, research and evaluation of empirical reality.
The intellectual paradigm of the Renaissance was known as humanism, since it stopped considering God as the measure of all things and placed the human being in his place, who came to occupy the center of human concerns (this phenomenon was called anthropocentrism).
Art and philosophy were an important part of this change. Medieval paintings, focused on the representation of the divine, gave way to representations of Greco-Roman mythological scenes, in which the human body and its actions occupied a central plane, and to new ways of understanding Christian aesthetics.
On the other hand, the dissemination of knowledge in vernacular languages became imperative. For this reason, classical works, and especially the Bible, were translated from Latin into the different European languages, an important step towards the construction of national identities and nation-states, as well as for the separation between politics and religion.
Philosophy was the great protagonist of the humanist movement. Thinkers such as Petrarch (1304-1374), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536), Thomas More (1478-1535) and Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) stood out. This movement made possible the later appearance of philosophers such as René Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) or Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), who approached the great themes of the time from a new perspective.
Rationality, freedom, free will, the formation of the individual, tolerance and curiosity were part of the values defended by humanism. Thus a new philosophical system was founded, characterized by a secular morality and ethics, which understood the human being as a being capable of providing for his own well-being.
In this way, humanism laid the foundations for the Enlightenment of the mid-18th century, a cultural movement of crucial importance in contemporary thought.
The Age of Discovery
The so-called “Age of Discovery” took place between the 15th and 17th centuries, given its name because European kingdoms began global exploration of the planet. However, the term “discovery” has been questioned for its Eurocentric bias, as it promotes the idea that the populations of pre-Columbian America and other regions only entered history by being “discovered” by Europeans, when in reality they had a long history of their own.
The Portuguese and Spanish began exploring and mapping beyond the world they knew until then, motivated by the demand for goods from the East and the desire to find new trade routes, since the Ottoman Empire controlled southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.
Portuguese navigators explored the coasts of western and southern Africa and reached India. On the other hand, Christopher Columbus was financed by the Catholic Monarchs to find an alternative route to the Indies and reached the coasts of the Caribbean, a fact that marked the so-called European discovery of America.
This produced a fundamental change in the medieval paradigm of the world, as the Europeans realized that there was a world unexplored by them, alien to the ancient books and scholastic tradition. In addition, in that world there were important resources that should be claimed before other competing empires did, which led to conquest and colonization.
Therefore, during this period the African coasts were explored and the American continent was conquered by defeating the Aztec and Inca empires and many other indigenous peoples. In addition, the first circumnavigation of the planet took place and a competition began between the nascent European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch), which established their colonies throughout the world.
In this way, the commercial axis of the world shifted from Eastern Europe to the West across the Atlantic Ocean and a process of globalization took place, that is, the first economic flow on a global scale. In addition, the seas and oceans became one of the main stages of armed struggle through naval warfare.
The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion
In the 16th century, a Christian religious movement known as the Protestant Reformation or Protestantism took place. It was initiated by the theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Germany and had representatives in other parts of Europe, such as the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564).
This movement opposed the absolute authority of the Pope over the Christians of the world and reproached the Catholic Church for having become corrupt and strayed from the fundamental Christian precepts of the Bible. Consequently, it proposed a return to primitive Christianity.
In the midst of a great scandal in Germany over the sale of indulgences by Catholic priests (i.e. the exchange of religious absolution for money), Protestantism was born with Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. In them he denounced indulgences and proposed a new Christian doctrine based on salvation by faith and personal repentance.
Luther’s theses were soon distributed massively, thanks to the recent invention of the modern printing press. Various sovereigns adhered to Protestantism as a way of appropriating ecclesiastical property and reinforcing their authority by founding national churches under their strict control (not dependent on the Pope).
The Reformation was a severe blow to the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Europe. The response was the Counter-Reformation, with which the Church introduced internal changes and dedicated itself to persecuting Protestants. At the end of the 16th century, religious wars broke out, such as those between Catholics and Huguenots (Calvinists) in the kingdoms of France and Navarre (1562-1598), which claimed the lives of millions of people.
Despite Catholic opposition and persecution by the Inquisition, the Reformation spread and today Protestantism is the second major branch of Christianity.
The Scientific Revolution
One of the central aspects of the Modern Age in Europe was the emergence of the scientific method, a philosophical and methodological concept that changed the understanding of the world forever.
The Scientific Revolution took place between the 16th and late 17th centuries. It consisted of a true explosion of new knowledge in physics, biology, astronomy, human anatomy, botany, mathematics, chemistry and other fields of knowledge. Its impact on human history was compared to that of the Neolithic revolution that produced the invention of agriculture.
This revolution was made possible by the existence of humanism, which emphasized observation to answer questions about the natural world, and especially thanks to the work of philosophers and scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). His work “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs” is considered the founding milestone of the Scientific Revolution. In it, he questioned the geocentric model that stated that the Earth was located at the center of the universe and proposed instead the heliocentric model, which maintains that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Other key names were Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), among many others.
The scientific method consists of the formulation of hypotheses with the intention of confirming or refuting them through experimentation and mathematical calculations. It represented a major philosophical change, which allowed the study of the natural world outside of what religious tradition dictated.
The end of the modern age
The end of the modern age is generally placed at the French Revolution of 1789, or at the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776, that is, at the end of the 18th century. However, in the field of Anglo-Saxon historiography this period is called the Early Modern Period, as it is considered to have many aspects of continuity with the Contemporary Age (called in English the Late Modern Period or Late Modern Age).
The French Revolution and its social ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity put an end to the Ancien Régime. It was the beginning of a process in which the bourgeois republican world imposed itself on the aristocratic order that until then prevailed in the West, as capitalism became established as a world economic system, hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, and the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class.
