European Identities and the Identity of Europe
SEMINAR OVERVIEW:
The idea of Europe and what it means to be European are among the most hotly debated issues today. This seminar will consider how ‘Europe’ as a concept and ‘European’ as an identity evolved in the early modern period. Civilization rather than Christianity came to define the differences from the rest of the world and non-Europeans. The seminar will also discuss how ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’ were represented in texts and images.
SEMINAR QUESTIONS:
- What were the characteristics of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’ between c. 1450 and c. 1800?
- How were these characteristics represented in texts and images?
PRIMARY SOURCE:
Montesquieu, C.-L. de Secondat, baron de, Persian Letters, trans. M. Mauldon, with an introduction and notes by A. Kahn (1721; Oxford, 2008), Introduction, Preface and Letter 22.
Questions about the source:
- How are Europeans and Europe portrayed in The Persian Letters?
- How are non-Europeans and the rest of the world portrayed?
ESSENTIAL READING:
Pagden, Anthony, ‘Prologue: Europe and the World Around’, in Euan Cameron (ed.), Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2001), pp. 1-28.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Burke, Peter, ‘How to Write a History of Europe: Europe, Europes, Eurasia’, European Review 14/2 (2006), 233–239.
Burke, Peter, ‘Did Europe Exist before 1700?’ History of European Ideas 1 (1980), 21–29.
Duindam, Jeroen, ‘Early Modern Europe: Beyond the Strictures of Modernization and National Historiography’, European History Quarterly 40/4 (2010), 606–623.
Kläger, Florian, and Gerd Bayer, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Constructions of Europe’ in Florian Kläger and Gerd Bayer (eds), Early Modern Constructions of Europe: Literature, Culture, History (London, 2016), pp. 1-14.
Wilson, Kevin, and Jan van der Dussen (eds), The History of the Idea of Europe (London, 1995), pp. 1-45.
Wintle, Michael, ‘European Images of Europe: Historical Perspectives’ International Area Studies Review 5/1 (2002), 3-26
Wintle, Michael, ‘Renaissance Maps and the Construction of the Idea of Europe’, Journal of Historical Geography 25/2 (1999), 137-165
Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023), chapter 8, 'Europes,' pp. 35-40 - ebook (this very short piece may be helpful for different ways of thinking about Europe, even though it is not primarily about early modernity)
FURTHER READING:
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 2003)
Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Civilization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Harmondsworth, 1994)
Branch, Jordan, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 2014)
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new ed. (Princeton, NJ, 2008), Introduction.
Delanty, Gerard, ‘Conceptions of Europe: A Review of Recent Trends’, European Journal of Social Theory 6/4 (2003), 471–488.
Delanty, Gerard, Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (Basingstoke, 2013)
Greengrass, Mark, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 (London, 2014)
Hale, J. R., The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London, 1993)
Molho, Anthony, ‘A Harlequin’s Dress: Reflections on Europe’s Public Discourse’, in Anthony Molho and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images ca. 13th–ca. 18th Centuries (New York, 2007), pp. 1-17.
Perkins, Mary Anne, Christendom and European Identity: The Legacy of a Grand Narrative since 1789 (2004; rept. Berlin, 2014)
Ramada Curto, Diogo, ‘Rethinking the History of Europe: Old and New Approaches’, in Anthony Molho and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images ca. 13th–ca. 18th Centuries (New York, 2007), pp. 19–35.
Seth, Catriona, and Rotraud von Kulessa (eds), The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives (Cambridge, 2017) [A wideranging selection of contemporary texts]
Wintle, Michael J., The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography (Cambridge, 2009)
Woolf, Stuart, ‘Europe and Its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12/3 (2003), 323-337.
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES:
David Rumsey Map Collection
Web Gallery of Art [Search for ‘Europe’ and ‘Europa’]
Seth, Catriona, and Rotraud von Kulessa (eds), The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives (Cambridge, 2017) [A wideranging selection of contemporary texts]
map and discussion Link opens in a new windowof the Safavid empire
Drawings from Isfahan in the late seventeenth centuryLink opens in a new window