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.