Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
animistic feudal views, but equally important, so did the social world, i.e., it
was orderly and changeable rather than random or
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fixed. The telescope, and
the heliocentric world it implied, di
used rapidly through the early modern
world, leaping from Italy to China within
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five years, being used to direct
artillery there by 1635, and jumped to Japan by 1638, even before Galileo's
death (Boorstin 1983:335).
Like space, so too did the European notion of historical time undergo a
profound transformation. “Just as acceptance of the Copernican theory had
shattered the tightly knit con
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nes of the world in space, so similarly the
tendency to look at things historically led to a correspondingly vast extension
of the world in time” (Whitrow 1988:152). This process developed highly
unevenly across the face of Europe, and was most pronounced in the leading
centers of capital accumulation in Italy, where the new mercantile order drew
deeply upon a mythologized past to legitimate itself. Skipping the dreary
centuries of feudalism, northern Italian city-states often framed their of
fi
cial
historiographies as successors of Roman imperial power and sophistication.
“Renaissance Italy would be Europe's
first headquarters for exploring the
past. What Portugal was for adventurers in geography, Italy was for history.
And Florence was the Sagres” (Boorstin 1983:574). A leading example of this
transformation was Petrarch (1304-1374), the
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first to pose history in secular,
relatively scienti
first self-
consciously modern historian, Flavio Biondo, invented the tripartite frame-
work of ancient, medieval, and modern eras, one still widely used today, which
postulated a cycle of classical greatness, feudal degeneration, and modern
rebirth. History, in this light, was recast as the servant of a new order that
deliberately sought to di
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c terms. It is precisely during this moment that the
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erentiate itself from the previous era, highlighting
its novelty and ability to remake the world anew. Somewhat later, during the
Enlightenment, this linearization of time assumed the form of progress, which
went from being one of many Western views of history to being the dominant
one (Nisbet 1980), imparting to time the characteristics of continuous
improvement. Linear time, however, began with Christian eschatology in the
medieval era, but now became steadily secularized as capitalism unleashed
round upon round of social and technological innovation. Enlightenment
notions of time borrowed the future-orientation of Christianity, substituting
secular notions of social utopia for eschatological notions of the return of
Christ, locating the “future golden age not outside of history but within it”
(Loy 2001:271).
A central
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figure of Renaissance thought was René Descartes, who may be
regarded as the founder of modern ocularcentrism, i.e., the doctrine that
equates perspective with the abstract subject's mapping of space. Descartes
proposed a mechanical view of the world and an explanatory alternative to
Aristotle's centered on what has come to be known as the Cartesian cogito: a
disembodied, rational mind without distinct social or spatial roots or loca-
tion (but implicitly male and white). Cartesian rationalism was predicated on
the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of
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