You might have expected the idea of Enlightenment to have gone out of fashion by now. Indeed you might have expected the entire pack of tacky Victorian labels for cultural periods - the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernity and so on - to have fallen into disuse long ago. They seem to belong to a world we have lost, where the whole of history was a brief, memorable tale spanning little more than a hundred generations. It was a world where history began in Homeric Greece or the Garden of Eden and marched up to the present in a few manly strides before moving to a final consummation, which might not be so far away. But does anyone believe that kind of history any more? It is over a century since historians started getting their professional act together and coming to terms with global diversities and Darwinian time-scales; and you might have thought their first priority would have been a ban on the outmoded simplicities of period thinking.

LRB 14 January 2002 | PDF Download