Annotation
One semestr course, 1/1, 6 credits
Annotation:
The seminar offers an alternative interpretation of the making of modern Europe (16th to 19th century). Its main goal lies in enriching the interest in complex historical processes – birth of the modern state, respectively modernization, modern education and sciences, process coming from the social disciplining to secularization, birth of the civil society, industrialization, democratization etc. – by more particular aspects of an early modern and modern everyday life, mentalities, and intellectual and social practices. The course is concerned with fields seemingly absent in complex histories of the European civilization that should make possible to see “roots” of modern Europe from a fresh perspective. By using methods of new culture history and other conceptual frameworks influenced by the linguistic turn and symbolic anthropology, the seminar concentrates on (early) modern collective and individual identity formations.
• Introduction. Transition between late medieval and early modern period
• Central place of religion, Christian rites de passage and the social framework and hierarchy of European ancien regime/s
• Meeting and creating the „Savage“; perception of Indians and Black Africans; Slavery and the origins of the concept of freedom in European culture
• Transformation of the early modern knowledge (structures and medias), education systems and reforms
• „Culture hegemony“, court and urban elites versus popular culture
• Enlightenment and Revolution´s impact on culture and education, beginning of the civil society, new forms of sociability
• Concept of toleration (religious, human rights, deliberative democracy)
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• Defining the self: social and cultural conditions for creating local, regional and national identities
• Discovering the other: travelling and exploring in the 18th and 19th centuries
• Absolutism versus Liberalism, Secession versus Unification: political trends in Europe between French Revolution and WWI
• Modernization, Industrial revolution and the transformation of the landscapes and cityscapes
• The Fin de Siècle: social change in the long 19th century
• Final discussion and conclusion
Reading material available via moodle (e-lecturing)