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DTSTAMP:20260416T021358Z
CREATED:20240814T211541Z
UID:ATEvent-e010ff6228e04072a6ee699704282b94
LAST-MODIFIED:20240814T211659Z
SUMMARY:Late Antiquity in Early Modernity
DTSTART:20161129T230000Z
DTEND:20161130T003000Z
DESCRIPTION:In 1776\, the English historian Edward Gibbon published th
 e first volumes of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em
 pire. Gibbon’s paradigm of “decline and fall” maintained that th
 e ancient world had swiftly and dramatically crumbled into a millenniu
 m of medieval darkness\, torn asunder by what Gibbon labeled “barbar
 ism and religion.” This temporal map did much to shape the emergent 
 discipline of Classics\, formalizing distinctions that\, over the cour
 se of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries\, would privilege a suppo
 sedly canonical Greco-Roman antiquity over other cultures and periods 
 of the past. Yet Gibbon\, whose History extended all the way to the ca
 pture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453\, hardly considered hi
 mself merely an ancient historian. Rather\, as he claimed\, his Declin
 e and Fall would do nothing less than “connect the ancient and moder
 n history of the world.” This lecture explores just what Gibbon mean
 t 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 replic
 ate or imitate? Which eras counted as truly ancient? And what purposes
  did a millennium-long “middle” period between ancient Rome and co
 ntemporary Europe serve? Retracing the history of these historical con
 cepts—and their many paradoxes—promises to shed new light on our o
 wn approaches to the ancient world and its temporal boundaries.
LOCATION:ISAW Lecture Hall
CONTACT:isaw@nyu.edu
CLASS:PUBLIC
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