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 It included between the mid-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. Furthermore, during this time the Protestant Reformation emerged.
In the modern age modern states were formed 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 located at the center of the world's political and economic scene.
For this reason, in the study of the Modern Age there is often a lot of emphasis on Western Europe, but many scholars criticize this emphasis and even the idea of a “Modern Age” because they consider them Eurocentric.
Although there is no consensus regarding 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. to the coasts of America in 1492. Its end is usually marked in the French Revolution of 1789 although some scholars opt for the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Key points
- The Modern Age was the period of universal history that fell 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 marked the emergence 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 came with 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 favored.
- It was a time of formation of the great European imperial powers with the strengthening of their monarchies, known generically as the “Ancient Regime”. These empires established colonies on other continents, which began a competition to obtain 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 colonial exploration and 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 of the world.
- It was the moment when the States modern which had a clearly delimited territory, a more or less constant population, a centralized government and a bureaucracy. An example of this was absolute monarchies.
- It was the stage in which a company grew and consolidated social class new: 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 in the hands of the monarchy and aristocracy.
- It was a phase of transformation for the Catholic Church which was challenged by the Protestant Reformation and humanism. Western culture began a path of secularization.
- It was a period in which great changes occurred in science and technology which had enormous repercussions on the work, 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 to understand the Modern Age, which was later called 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 made possible by the erosion of traditional religious values. HE replaced religious faith with human reason and scholastic methods of reading ancient texts through observation, research and evaluation of empirical reality.
He paradigm Renaissance intellectual was known as humanism since it stopped considering God as the measure of all things and placed the human being in its place, who began 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 vulgar languages became imperative. That's why, classic 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 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 Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). 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 addressed 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 that humanism defended. So A new philosophical system was founded, characterized by a moral and one ethics secular which understood the human being as a being capable of providing for his or her own well-being.
Thus, humanism laid the foundations of Illustration from the mid-18th century a cultural movement of crucial importance in contemporary thought.
The age of discovery
Between the 15th and 17th centuries the so-called “age of discovery” took place, whose name is due to the fact that European kingdoms began global exploration of the planet. In any case, the term “discovery” has been questioned for its Eurocentric bias, since it promotes the idea that the populations of pre-Columbian America and other regions only entered history when they were “discovered” by Europeans, when in reality they had a long history of its own.
The Portuguese and Spanish began exploration and mapping beyond the world they had known until then, motivated by the demand for goods from the East and by 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, since Europeans realized that there was a world unexplored by them alien to the ancient books and scholastic tradition. Furthermore, important resources could be found in that world that had to be claimed before other competing empires did so, leading to conquest and colonization.
Therefore, during this period the African coasts were explored and the American continent was conquered through the defeat of the Aztec and Inca empires and many other indigenous peoples. Besides, the first circumnavigation of the planet took place and a competition began between the nascent European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch), who established their colonies throughout the world.
In this way, the world's commercial axis moved 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. Furthermore, the seas and oceans became one of the main theaters of armed struggle through naval warfare.
The Protestant Reformation and the religious wars
In the 16th century There was a Christian religious movement known as the Protestant Reformation or Protestantism. It was started by the theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Germany and had representatives in other places in Europe, such as the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564).
This movement opposed the absolute authority of the pope on the Christians of the world and reproached the Catholic Church for having become corrupted and distanced itself from the fundamental Christian precepts of the Bible. Consequently, he proposed a return to primitive Christianity.
In the context of a major scandal in Germany over the sale of indulgences by Catholic priests (that is, the exchange of religious absolutions 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 widely distributed, thanks to the recent invention of the modern printing press. Various sovereigns adhered to Protestantism as a way of appropriating ecclesiastical assets and reinforcing their authority by founding national churches under their strict control (not dependent on the pope).
The Reformation was a serious 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 Wars of religion 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 persecutions by the Inquisition, the Reformation spread and Today Protestantism is the second great branch of Christianity.
Continue in: Protestant Reformation
The Scientific Revolution
One of the central aspects of the Modern Age in Europe was the emergence of scientific method a philosophical and methodological concept that changed the understanding of the world forever.
The Scientific Revolution It took place between the 16th century and the end of the 17th century. 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 possible thanks to 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 Nicholas 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 in its place the heliocentric model, which maintains that the Earth rotates 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 It 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 us to study the natural world outside of what religious tradition dictated.
The end of the Modern Age
The end of the Modern Age It is generally located in the french revolution from 1789 or in the United States Declaration of Independence 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 Age (early modern period), since it is considered to have many aspects of continuity with the Contemporary Age (called in English 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 Regime. 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 global economic system, hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, and the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class.
References
- Dewald, J. (2024). The Early Modern Period. Encyclopedia of European Social History. https://www.encyclopedia.com/
- Hunt, L. et al. (2016). The Making of the West. Peoples and Cultures. 5th edition. Bedford/St. Martin's.
- Tenenti, A. (2001). The Modern Age XVI-XVIII. Criticism.
- Ribot, L. (2021). The Modern Age (15th-18th centuries). Marcial Pons.
