5 Early modern Europe: historical approaches

There are different accounts of the history of early modern Europe. Every historian brings a slightly different expertise to their work. They focus their research on different areas of history such as those we’ve identified in the textbook: political, economic, cultural or religious history. Each area makes use of a particular range of source materials. Economic historians make use of numerical data, while cultural historians draw on a wide range of sources, from texts such as diaries or letters, to objects such as pottery or jewellery. Within each area historians specialise in the history of particular periods, areas or events. Even when writing a textbook where authors want to give students an overview of a period, their particular understanding will influence what they choose to include, what they skim over or treat in greater detail.

So, what picture of early modern Europe is presented in this course? The approach is that of social and cultural history. Social history, which developed in the mid-twentieth century, is a broad field of study that explores the everyday life of people, both individuals and groups, elite and poor, and the relationships between them. It overlaps with cultural history, which explores how people in the past thought about themselves and their world. So a social historian looking at the Ascension Day ceremony in Venice might explore what type of people visited the event, or how the order in which participants marched in the procession reflected their social status. A cultural historian might focus on the elements of ritual – what functions were served by enacting a marriage between a city and the sea, or what the decoration of the Doge’s barge was intended to convey