Late Antiquity in Early Modernity

In 1776, the English historian Edward Gibbon published the first volumes of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s paradigm of “decline and fall” maintained that the ancient world had swiftly and dramatically crumbled into a millennium of medieval darkness, torn asunder by what Gibbon labeled “barbarism and religion.” This temporal map did much to shape the emergent discipline of Classics, formalizing distinctions that, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would privilege a supposedly canonical Greco-Roman antiquity over other cultures and periods of the past. Yet Gibbon, whose History extended all the way to the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, hardly considered himself merely an ancient historian. Rather, as he claimed, his Decline and Fall would do nothing less than “connect the ancient and modern history of the world.” This lecture explores just what Gibbon meant by linking the ancient and the modern. In doing so, it examines how early modern European scholars in the centuries before Gibbon defined such categories as antiquity and modernity. When had modernity begun, and which portions of antiquity should this nascent modernity replicate or imitate? Which eras counted as truly ancient? And what purposes did a millennium-long “middle” period between ancient Rome and contemporary Europe serve? Retracing the history of these historical concepts—and their many paradoxes—promises to shed new light on our own approaches to the ancient world and its temporal boundaries.

Frederic Clark is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University (2014), his BA in History and Literature from Harvard University (2008), and an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge (2009). Clark’s research examines the cultural and intellectual history of medieval and early modern Europe, with particular focus on how visions of the ancient past were received and appropriated from the early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. His specific areas of interest include the history of the book and reading, the afterlife of Latin literature, and the history of historical thought. Prior to joining NYU, Clark was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he taught courses on book history and the Scientific Revolution.

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Reception to follow. 

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