- What was the Modern Age?
- Characteristics of the Modern Age
- Renaissance humanism
- The Age of Discovery
- The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion
- The Scientific Revolution
- The end of the Modern Age
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 (and in some contexts, as Modernity) is known as the third period in which the history of the humanity, and that includes the period between the middle of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century, that is, between the end of the medieval and the start of the contemporaneity.
The Modern Age was a time of gigantic changes in the political, social, economic, cultural and scientific fields, which laid the foundations of the world as we know it today. It marked a departure from the religious obscurantism that reigned in the West during the Middle Ages.
Previously the powers Europeans had had a minor historical role compared to the great eastern empires, but with the Modern Age Europe is located at the center of the world's political, artistic and economic scene. From this point of view, this period can be understood as the great modern boom of Europe.
For this reason, the study of the Modern Age tends to place a lot of emphasis on the West, and more than anything on Western Europe. For this reason, it is common that in certain academic and study fields of history, this periodization is rejected as “Eurocentric”.
Similarly, there is no strict consensus as to when modernity formally began, so two possible events are often taken as the kickoff for the entire epoch: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 (which ended the Empire). Byzantine) or the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of America in 1492.
Characteristics of the Modern Age
In very general terms, we can characterize the Modern Age as follows:
- It was a period of profound changes in the culture Y society Westerners, whose first impulse was given in the Renaissance and the Scientific revolution. Thus, the medieval tradition was broken and the new values of reason and science.
- It was the period of formation of the great European imperial powers, with the strengthening of their monarchies in the so-called Old Regime. These empires established colonies in the other continents, initiating a competition for the accumulation of resources known as the mercantilism. From these foundations later the capitalism.
- In turn, the state nation or nation states, with a territory clearly delimited, population more or less constant and a government specific, that is, modern states were born.
- Together with them, a new social class: the bourgeoisie, in whose hands was throughout the Modern Age the economic power, but not the political power, exercised by the aristocracy through the absolutist monarchies.
- Colonial expansion into America (war of conquest through), Africa, Oceania and later towards Asia, allowed the diffusion of modern ideas and European languages throughout the world. This also spelled the end of the pre-Columbian American empires.
- The religion Christian lost much of her power over the West, partly as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Western culture began its secular path.
- In this period there were great changes in the science and the technology, which had a huge impact on the work, military and philosophical life of the West. In addition, faith in progress was established, communication and reason, new philosophical values that soon dominated the world.
Renaissance humanism
The art of the Modern Age took up figures from Greco-Roman mythology.
Between the 15th and 16th centuries, a fundamental cultural change took place in Europe to understand the Modern Age, and which was later baptized as the Renaissance. Its name is due to the fact that, after centuries of medieval obscurantism, European culture was reborn, recovering and revaluing its classical Greco-Latin roots.
This process had a profound impact on art and philosophy. On the other hand, it was made possible by the erosion of traditional religious values, which replaced religious faith with human reason, and the scholastic methods of reading of ancient texts, by the observation, the research and the evaluation of reality empirical.
This new paradigm cultural was known as the humanism, since it removed God from the center of human concerns and placed the human being himself instead (anthropocentrism).
The art and the philosophy they echoed this change. The paintings medieval, centered 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 the esthetic Christian.
Similarly, the dissemination of knowledge in vulgar languages became imperative. For this reason, the bible was translated from Latin into the different European languages, an important step towards the construction of the identities nationals and nation-states, as well as for the separation between politics and religion.
Philosophy was the great protagonist of the humanist movement. Names like René Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), David Hume (1711-1776) or Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), they faced the great issues of the time, which required the creation of an entirely new philosophical perspective, devoid of medieval gringo.
Thus, rationality, Liberty, free will, the formation of the individual, the tolerance and curiosity were part of the values that humanism defended. Thus was founded a new philosophical system, characterized by a moral and one ethics secular, who understood the human being as a being capable of seeking their own well-being.
Humanism was taken up again in the middle of the 18th century by the Illustration, a cultural movement of crucial importance in contemporary thought.
The Age of Discovery
Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, the beginnings of the Modern Age, the so-called Age of Discoveries is located, whose name is due to the fact that the European kingdoms were thrown into the seas and they began the global exploration of the planet.
Motivated by the need for goods from the East and in the mood to find new trade routes, the Spanish, Portuguese and British (mainly) began to explore and mapping of the known world and its limits.
As a result of the surprising discovery of Christopher Columbus, who, pursuing a path to the Indies, found an entire continent to colonize and exploit, a fundamental change took place in the medieval paradigm of the world, which took it for granted in its entirety.
In other words, Europeans realized that there could be an unexplored world, alien to ancient books and medieval scholastic tradition. In addition, in this unknown world, important resources could be found to be claimed before their neighbors and competitors did.
Thus, during this period the African coasts were explored, the American continent was "discovered" and conquered, defeating its original empires (the aztecs and the incas, among many other native peoples). Thus the first circumnavigation of the planet took place and a competition began between the nascent European empires, which would establish their colonies throughout the world.
In this way, the commercial axis of the world moved from eastern Europe to the west and the first world unit was established, that is, the first world economic flow. In addition, it turned the sea into one of the great scenes of armed struggle: naval warfare.
The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion
In the 16th century there was a European religious movement known as Protestantism. It was led by the theologians Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), of German and French origin respectively.
This movement was against the absolute authority of the Pope on the Christians of the world and reproached the Catholic Church to have corrupted and moved away from the fundamental Christian precepts of the Bible. Consequently, he proposed a return to early Christianity.
In the framework of a great scandal in Germany over the sale of indulgences of Catholic priests (that is, the exchange of religious absolutions for money), Protestantism was born with the ninety-five theses of Luther. In them he proposed a new Christian doctrine.
Luther's theses were soon massively distributed, aided by the invention of the printing press. This movement was taken advantage of by various local authorities, who saw in it the opportunity to break free from the political-religious yoke of the Pope, and found their own national churches.
The reform was a severe blow to the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Europe. The reformers had to confront Europe politically and militarily at the end of the 16th century, especially in France and the Kingdom of Navarre. There the so-called Wars of Religion between Catholics and Calvinist Huguenots took place, which throughout their 36 years of conflict (1562-1598) claimed the lives of between 2 and 3 million people.
Despite Catholic opposition and persecution by the Inquisition, its growth continued and Protestantism today is the second great branch of Christianity.
The Scientific Revolution
One of the central aspects of the Modern Age was the emergence of science and scientific method, a philosophical and methodological concept that changed the world forever.
The Scientific Revolution took place between the 16th century and the end of the 17th. It consisted of a veritable explosion of new knowledge in physical, biology, astronomy, anatomy human, math, chemistry and other fields of knowledge. Its impact on human history is only comparable to the Neolithic Revolution that produced the invention of the farming.
This revolution was possible thanks to the existence of humanism, but also to the genius of philosophers and scientists of the stature of Nicolás Copernicus (1473-1543). His work "On the movement of the celestial spheres" is considered the founding milestone of the Scientific Revolution. In it he contradicted the geocentric model of the traditional universe and proposed instead a heliocentric model, in which the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around.
Other key names were those of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), among many others.
In addition to promoting the development of knowledge on the natural world, this revolution brought a unique and novel method, from which to differentiate legitimate, verifiable, verifiable knowledge from interpretations and subjectivities: the scientific method.
The scientific method represented a major philosophical change, which gave humanity a way to create and legitimize its own knowledge, regardless of what the religious tradition dictated. We still reap the fruits of such a change today.
The end of the Modern Age
The end of the Modern Age is located in the American Independence in 1776 or in the French Revolution of 1789, that is to say, at the end of century XVIII. In the realm of Anglo-Saxon historiography, however, it is thought that it is not over yet, but encompasses both the early Modern Age (Early modern period) and the Contemporary Age (Contemporary period) that we live in the present.
The French Revolution and its social ideals equality, freedom and fraternity not only put an end to the Old Regime. Furthermore, it was the beginning of a process in which the bourgeois republican world seized control of the West from the aristocracy, as the capitalism it was established as an economic system and the bourgeoisie as the dominant social class.
In this context historical, in the nineteenth century, the decolonization of the world and the Industrial Revolution, starting the capitalist contemporaneity.