For scores of thousands of years most humans thought of the world as the centre of the universe, and themselves as the centre of that centre, rather as an infant does. But given that in Europe on either side of a point just 400 years ago this view spectacularly changed, it becomes of moment to consider the question of why and how that happened. One answer – the right but unhelpful one – is of course: all history leading to that point. But the key part of this right answer is that the change was essentially one of theory, involving a ninety-degree shift in perspective that brought an entirely new picture of the world – our picture, today’s picture – into view; and it was a change that happened with remarkable swiftness. There was a tipping point, and a following cascade effect, in a way that is familiar in many human affairs. But this was no ordinary tipping point.
Some speak and write now about this revolution in thought as if it were an inevitable event, one whose central features have become commonplaces of our own way of thinking. But that is to miss the significance of what was at stake for those who made the change and for those many more who were presented with it, sometimes alarmingly and uncomfortably. Other moments of change have been claimed by other traditions of thought, usually religious ones – an exodus of a people from slavery, a revelation on a mountain top, the birth of a saviour, the recitation of a prophet – but these events or supposed events are all of a piece with the infancy of the human mind. Better candidates might be the genius of the classical era and the grown-up state of parts of the world under the Romans or, in China, the Tang dynasty. But the history of the way the world has come to look to ordinarily educated and thoughtful people, and why it looks that way, was one thing before the seventeenth century, and utterly different after it.
And this change carried dramatic implications for a great deal else, given that the arrangements of society, morality, education, indeed the daily lives of millions, were controlled by the pre-modern mind-set in ways that for thousands of years kept the fundamentals of human existence and outlook the same. In the 400 years since the revolution occurred, the world has altered more than in all its history beforehand. That is the measure of the thing: that is why the period under consideration is the epoch in human affairs.
If this seems an exaggerated claim, consider the following two examples. In 1606 Macbeth was staged for the first time. Shakespeare was able to rely on the beliefs of his audience in the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, where the premiere took place, to portray the killing of a king as subversive of nature’s order, to such an extent that horses ate each other and owls fell upon falcons in mid-air and killed them. In 1649, a single generation later, a king was publicly killed, executed in Whitehall in London before a great crowd. Perhaps some of the same audience at the first staging of Macbeth were present at the beheading of Charles I. The idea of the sacred nature of kingship as premised in Macbeth had been rejected, by the time of the Civil War, in favour of new ideas about the nature and exercise of political authority, and although it was a further generation before those ideas were fully translated into the practicalities of a permanent settlement (in England at least – at the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when Parliament deposed a king and installed a replacement of its own choice), the difference was already palpable.
That is an example of one kind of change of outlook in one country, though it was a consequential one for much of the world, given the globalising spread of the emerging political ideology thus represented. An even more far-reaching change is illustrated by the following example, drawn from sunnier climes.
In 1615 Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite friar, sent the Vatican’s Cardinal Bellarmino a memorandum arguing that Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe was consistent with scripture. Bellarmino, with chilling irony, replied that ‘If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of the universe, that the Earth is in the third heaven, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary.’ Earlier in his letter Bellarmino had reminded Foscarini:
As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers. Now if your Reverence will read, not merely the Fathers, but modern commentators on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will discover that all agree in interpreting them literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth with immense speed, and that the Earth is very distant from the heavens, at the centre of the universe, and motionless. Consider, then in your prudence, whether the Church can tolerate that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a manner contrary to that of the holy Fathers and of all modern commentators, both Latin and Greek.
Bellarmino’s warning – ‘in your prudence’ – could not have been much more explicit. Sixteen years before this exchange of letters, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome for – among other things – advocating the Copernican view; sixteen years after this exchange of letters Galileo was arrested and put on trial for the same reason. If he had not recanted he would have been put to death. In the interim, in 1619, Giulio Vanini was burned at the stake in Toulouse for asserting a naturalistic conception of the world. It was mortally dangerous to espouse such views openly.
But now consider the publication in 1686 – just over fifty years after the trial of Galileo – of the delightful and impressive Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Cartesian philosopher and author of genius. Under the guise of conversations enjoyed during a series of evening walks with an aristocratic lady who remains anonymous, Fontenelle introduces and explains the nature of the universe as conceived by the seventeenth century’s ‘new philosophy’, contrasting it to the geocentric view it displaced and drawing out the implications for humankind’s self-understanding. The account he gives of the Copernican view was intended as a preface to his argument that because all stars are suns, it is likely that there are many planets revolving about them, bearing life – a view which in recent years has been given the support not just of statistics but of actual observation of planetary systems other than our own and planets like our own.
‘The universe’, Fontenelle wrote,
is but a watch on a larger scale; all its motions depend on determined laws and the mutual relations of its parts . . . It is now known with certainty . . . that Venus and Mercury turn round the sun, and not round the earth; on this subject the ancient system is absolutely exploded . . . At the appearance of a certain German named Copernicus, astronomy became simplified; he destroyed all the unnecessary circles, and crushed to pieces the crystalline firmaments. Animated with philosophic enthusiasm, he dislodged the earth from the central situation which had been assigned it and in its room placed the sun, who is more worthy of such a mark of distinction. The planets were no longer supposed to perform their revolutions round the earth, and enclose it in the centre of their orbits . . . They all turn around the sun; the earth itself not excepted.
Had Fontenelle lived seventy years earlier, at the date of Bellarmino’s letter to Foscarini, or fifty years earlier at the time of Galileo’s arrest, he could not have published these views freely, without a thought of punishment or proscription. Fifty years is a short time in human history, but not always in human affairs. In those fifty years the world had moved far forward indeed.
One could multiply examples of the contrast between the world-view held by almost everyone at the beginning of the seventeenth century – and the risks attached to thinking differently – and the world-view that was generally accepted at least among educated people by the end of the century – together with the complete disappearance of those risks. A case might be made for saying that almost every century in recorded history is interesting for the ideas it produced, but as regards the seventeenth century in Europe – without question an age of genius – this is therefore particularly so.
It is or should be a puzzle that this explosion of genius occurred in a century so tumultuous – a time of wars, civil strife and the continuation of post-Reformation religious agonies disruptive and destructive to an unparalleled degree in Europe’s history to that point. How does one account for the flowering of genius in the midst of such conflict? Does the tumult of the century in some way explain its genius and those changes, or cause them, or might there have been even greater innovation if it had been a time of peace? Is it merely a mystery that the epoch in human history occurred in such circumstances, or might it be – depressingly alas, when one considers the implications – that it takes disaster to move humanity on that far that fast?
It is not just from our perspective that the seventeenth century appears as a revolutionary time. As the example of Fontenelle shows, it presented itself as such to its own inhabitants. Consider the excitement of Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend William Crabtree on 24 November 1639 when, shut in the latter’s attic, they made a spectacular scientific observation: a transit of Venus – that is, the visible passage of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. Horrocks had worked out the date of the transit by studying Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables of planetary motion, published twelve years earlier. It was a classic case of testing a theory by observation. Imagine the feelings of the two amateurs as they waited for iterated proof of Copernicus’ system – and by significant implication, of a universe far different from its portrayal in traditional belief. They saw what they expected to see, and yet could hardly credit that they were seeing it: the black dot of Venus inching its way across the brilliant image of the sun projected onto a card in Crabtree’s attic. Horrocks described his friend as standing ‘rapt in contemplation’ for a long time, unable to move, ‘scarcely trusting his senses, through excess of joy’. The emotion he and Crabtree felt is one well known to science: the exhilaration of seeing empirical confirmation of theory.1
Horrocks and Crabtree knew of course that they were not making a discovery. Copernicus’ work and Galileo’s telescopes had between them already refuted the claim in Psalm 104 verse 5, cited by Bellarmino to Foscarini, that the earth had been ‘set on its foundations, so that it should never be moved’. What was new was that Horrocks and Crabtree were interpreting what they witnessed – a planet travelling on an inner orbit between the earth and the sun – according to an account of the universe’s structure radically different from predecessor accounts; and with it a completely different set of implications for everything else humanity thought, hoped and wished to believe.
Just how radical this difference is becomes clear only when we remember in more detail the view thus being upended. Humankind’s admiration for the stars and the heavenly ‘wanderers’ (their Greek name is the source of the word ‘planets’)2 which then numbered seven – sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – is of great antiquity. The earliest evidence for systematic astronomy is the 25,000-year-old Ishango bone found at the source of the Nile, incised with markings corresponding to the phases of the moon. Babylonian star charts 22,000 years later were copiously detailed, recording the efforts of many centuries of sky-gazing and meticulous annotation. The Mesopotamian charts were detailed because they formed the basis of astrological divination, but when Thales in the sixth century BCE, and half a millennium after him the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, used the information contained in those charts, it was for purposes of nascently genuine science rather than prophecy. Like Horrocks so many centuries later, Thales used the data to make a prediction, in his case of a solar eclipse which occurred on 28 May 585 BCE, visible in Asia Minor.3 It was an event that so terrified the opposed Median and Lydian armies, on that day engaged in the Battle of the River Halys, that they put down their weapons – so Herodotus tells us – and agreed a truce.4 They thought the gods were sending them a minatory message. Thales thought that the moon was passing between the sun and that bit of the world, casting a shadow. Thales’ way of thinking has (almost) come to prevail.
A further 2,500 years later the work of Copernicus and Kepler began the truly great modern revolution in human self-understanding by definitively removing the earth from the centre of the universe, and arranging the planets correctly – first in their proper order round the sun, then in the elliptical pattern of their orbits. Darwin three centuries after them completed the adjustment in man’s ego-geography by displacing him from the summit of creation. What a change, therefore, took place in the period between Copernicus and Darwin! – moving humankind both from the centre of the universe AND from the summit of creation to a little rock in the outer suburbs of an ordinary galaxy among billions of galaxies, and to a place at the back of the queue in the biological crowd on that rock. This is a stupendous reorientation. It is true that even today some hundreds of millions have not yet quite grasped this shift of view, still less its implications; but what is now restricted to religious fundamentalists and ignorance was once official orthodoxy, and that is the measure of the difference.
When Horrocks and Crabtree watched the dot of Venus crawl across the sun’s face, the telescope had already been invented, but it was not, as noted, a telescope they relied on. In using Kepler’s calculations they were relying on the only two instruments that human beings possessed from the very beginnings of evolution: the naked eye, humanity’s first astronomical instrument, and reason, humanity’s first and still greatest scientific tool – and the tool which, in the seventeenth century, people were once again able to use free from the limiting and too often dangerous imposition of religious orthodoxy. ‘Orthodoxy’ means ‘correct belief’: humanity’s problem was then, as among some it still is now, its tendency to think that the more antique a belief, the more true it is.5
To emphasise how dramatic this change of perspective is, think of the far-reaching effects of what the seventeenth century thought-revolution made possible in the way of our contemporary scientific world-view. This is best appreciated by noting two examples of what would have been impossible to think – impossible even to begin to imagine – in the limited anthropocentric picture inherited from the remote history of humanity’s ignorances – ignorances which had produced creation stories and legendary belief systems in large numbers.
The first example is an event in our solar system known as the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’. Nearly 4 billion years ago the inner solar system was subjected to an immense hailstorm of meteors and asteroids. So many collided with the moon that they melted its surface. Mercury was especially badly hit; vast craters like the Caloris Basin were ringed by volcanoes after the impact, and shock waves raised strangely shaped hills on the planet’s far side. Given that the earth also lay in the path of this cataclysmic shower of debris falling into the sun, it too suffered. More than 1,700 craters of diameter greater than twenty kilometres were formed on the moon by the Late Heavy Bombardment, so it is calculated that, given the earth’s larger size, more than ten times as many giant craters were formed here. Deep sediments in Canada and Greenland contain an abundance of extraterrestrial isotopes, which give empirical support to the Bombardment hypothesis; and moreover the fact that, according to the fossil record, life began soon after the Bombardment suggests either that an earlier emergence of life was obliterated by it and had to start over, or that life was brought to our planet by the huge rocks that collided with it.
This fascinating hypothesis is wholly unreachable from a world-view predicated on a recent – according to orthodoxy, 6,000 years ago – magical creation event which makes the universe a tiny human-being-centred place. That was the world-view not merely believed but obligatorily believed (on pain of death, at the extreme) at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The second example is even more dramatic in its implications. It is the discovery of exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own. Fontenelle was able to hypothesise their existence on rational grounds, reviving ideas held speculatively in antiquity by Epicurus, Metrodorus, Zeno of Eleusis, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Democritus, the Pythagoreans and a number of others. But the actual discovery of the first exoplanet was made in 1992 by the Polish-American astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan while measuring the rotation of a pulsar. Slight but regular variations in the timing of its pulses led him to deduce that it was being pulled backwards and forwards by the presence of three planets in orbit round it.
Exoplanets in a system more like our own were then discovered by astronomers at the Geneva Observatory, again by measurement of perturbations to a star caused by the gravitational pull of a large Jupiter-sized body orbiting it. To understand how such perturbations are detected, one must note that it is not quite accurate to say that our solar system’s planets orbit the sun, but that all the denizens of our solar system, including the sun itself, orbit the system’s centre of mass – which happens to lie within the sun because it is so much more massive than anything near it. This helps astronomers to know what to look for in other stars, namely, a quivering motion or oscillation detectable by spectrographic analysis. These perturbations have to be such that they are not likely to be caused by the presence of another star forming a binary system (in which planets are rather unlikely to be found because a figure-of-eight orbit would have a tendency to be unstable, leading to the planet’s eventual ejection from the system; but some observations suggest that there could indeed be such systems if the planet’s orbit lay outside the mutual orbit of the two stars).6
Using this technique the Geneva astronomers discovered, within eighteen months of Wolszczan’s observations, a massive planet whirling round the star 51 Pegasi at the dizzying rate of once every four days. The star 51 Pegasi is a neighbour of ours, lying only forty-five light years from earth. To find earth-size planets, very much smaller than Jupiter with perhaps undetectably lesser gravitational effects on their stars, the search is on for ‘winking’ stars, slightly dimmed by the passage of the planet before its face – a transit, such as Crabtree and Horrocks observed. The most earth-like planet that had been detected when the first draft of these pages was written was COROT-Exo-7b (so named because seen by the French space satellite Corot), a bit bigger than earth, orbiting its sun every twenty hours and therefore very close to it – so close that its surface almost certainly consists of molten lava boiling at over 1,000 degrees centigrade. But as these pages were being readied for press there came news of Kepler 452b, a planet very like our own orbiting a sun very like our own at about the same distance, with an orbital period of 385 days. This ‘Earth 2.0’ is 1,400 light years distant, and joins other planets observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope to suggest that we can expect to detect many planets in ‘Goldilocks Zones’ – circumstellar habitable zones: zones ‘just right’ for life – around the statistically many other stars likely to have them.
The realisation that there are other worlds, that the universe is stupendously larger and more complex than pre-modern pictures of it were capable of suggesting, required a major intellectual revolution. The word ‘revolution’ scarcely does the point justice. It was a revolution in thought across the whole range of enquiries – and it required a liberation of the mind, a giving of permission by the mind to itself to think differently without fear and preconception.
This revolution occurred in the longer period encompassing the seventeenth century – that is, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; between the Reformation and Copernicus in the former period and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the latter period. And here we repeat the puzzle about how it was able to happen. The question of what made that revolution possible, and then what made it actual, is all the more intriguing because of the circumstances in which it occurred. The Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, when the intellectual revolution was getting fully under way, experienced the bloodiest period in its history before the twentieth century. The German-speaking states of central Europe were in as devastated a condition in 1648, the year of the official end of the Thirty Years War, as Germany was at the end of the Second World War in 1945. The impact and expense of this huge war, together with the century-long rumbling of civil wars and of bilateral wars between Spain and France, England and the Netherlands, France and the Netherlands – to name just a few – was enormous. One can ask again: how can it be that the flowering of genius that produced the modern world should occur not just during but – perhaps – in part because of that?
As this question shows, it is very apt to describe the seventeenth century as a period of ‘world-changing instability’.7 The reference is not just to the political and military upheavals of the continent and its western islands, but even more significantly to the period’s mental – not just intellectual – turmoil, in the sense that the mind-set resulting from the changes wrought by enquiry turned the world-view of the period’s inhabitants upside down. This is the point made by the astronomical examples cited above. But the change of mind-set was not reserved to intellectuals. One can ask again about the audience in 1606 when Macbeth was first staged, and the crowd in Whitehall witnessing the execution of Charles I in 1649: what change of unconscious metaphysical outlook during those forty-three years made the Whitehall crowd not believe, as the Macbeth-viewing audience were expected by Shakespeare to believe or half believe at least – that the killing of a king would upset a divinely instituted order of things?
Given that the key to these changes lies in the minds of its leading figures, the focus of attention has to be the nature of the seventeenth-century intellectual milieu. The educated part of the Europe of the day is often and tellingly described as a republic of letters, implying a supranational, non-denominational, informally collegial structure, made possible by the exchanges – mainly by means of letters – among learned and inquisitive men and women (yes: and women; it was a moment of opportunity for some women) with common interests and a similarity of outlook. Ideas and techniques were freely passed around, rendered intelligible by a shared background in such matters as knowledge of the classical languages, philosophy and theology. It was by no means an idyllic arrangement, buoyed aloft on fraternal affection and co-operation; the difference in faith outlooks and opinion often resulted in disputes, sometimes serious enough to cause riots and even murder; the republic was constantly embroiled in controversy.8 But this itself was a source of new ideas, as well as of lively exchanges of information and influence.
In the pages that follow I sample this intellectual world, not comprehensively but selectively, to illustrate how it was that a time of genius and a time of tumult could be the same time after all.
The hunger to extract insight from history, and in particular from the story of ideas in history, explains why we are so ready – perhaps too ready – to apply labels to epochs or the movements in them: ‘Renaissance’, ‘Reformation’, ‘Enlightenment’. We do it as a convenient summary of the major trends which characterise them and which influenced subsequent periods, and in this respect they are helpful. But it is also helpful to remember the obvious point that such labellings are a post facto matter. Not everyone living in a given period might have noticed, or valued, those features of their time which turn out to shape and direct following times in ways that we emphasise in hindsight. Did the thinkers and artists of sixteenth-century Florence know that they lived in what later generations came to signify by that large, multiple, over-inclusive term ‘the Renaissance’? The answer is both Yes (in a sense) and No – and it is in the self-consciousness and unselfconsciousness of experience in the time itself that we find what explains it.
For of course – and this really is the interesting thing – some contemporaries of these events indeed recognised their significance. Examples are Petrarch and Kant, each of whom coined labels for his own era and in Petrarch’s case its predecessor. To the time preceding his own Petrarch gave the name ‘the Middle Ages’ to mark it as an intermission between classical antiquity and his own time’s rediscovery of classical civilisation’s interests and values. Kant in the eighteenth century used the term ‘Enlightenment’ –Aufklärung – to convey his time’s distinctive aspirations. He did not regard his age as an enlightened one but as one in which, as he put it, enlightenment was beginning to dawn – and which would see the full arrival of morning if only people would dare to know by casting off historically imposed constraints on their beliefs and personal autonomy.9
But of course we also know that labels and neat periodisations are as distorting as they are informative, that they can and too often do give rise to caricature, that history is a messier business than we are apt to think. Yet still we allow ourselves the labels: and we do so because we are looking for themes, for threads, for movements and currents, that have explanatory utility, and which themselves provide the several kinds of enlightenment that enquiry promises.
If we permit ourselves the use of some of these familiar labels for the moment, to give a rough positioning to what follows, we notice that in the extraordinary century between the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the only label that sticks with some generality is ‘the late northern Renaissance’ – and this as applied mainly to the century’s first half. This description does some work, as capturing the efflorescence of art, literature and science in northern Europe that we associate with the age of Shakespeare and Molière, Galileo and Newton. But the ‘northern Renaissance’ was also just then maturing into something else, something more equivocal and complex, in which north and west Europe were to take the lead. For that reason the period surely requires its own distinguishing label, for when one looks at the conjunction of genius and turmoil that characterise it, and the distance travelled by the European mind (as much literally as figuratively) during the course of it, one is amazed that it is not more vividly recognised as the stand-out epoch of the 2,000 years before the twentieth century, this latter being the only century that compares with it.
The seventeenth century’s physical, as opposed to intellectual, conflicts were world-changing in their own right. It is estimated that one in every three German-speaking people died prematurely as a consequence of the Thirty Years War alone. Its destructive effect weakened the central and southern states of Europe so much that it was in some cases the next – even the next but one – century before they recovered fully.
In England the Civil War prepared the way for dramatic changes that influenced not just that country but large swathes of the world in the centuries to follow, because key aspects of the eventual settlement of institutions in England were exported with its globalising empire.
It is a too-little-regarded fact that the hitherto incessant effort of the Ottoman Empire to extend its dominion further into Europe was at last definitively halted at the raising of the siege of Vienna in 1686 and the defeat of the Ottoman armies at the Battle of Zenta in 1697. But for most of the seventeenth century beforehand it was a threat, exerting pressure on an overstretched and complicated Holy Roman Empire equally pressed on all borders and racked with internal problems.
In fact the century had scarcely a year without war somewhere from Scandinavia to Poland, from Russia to Turkey, from Crete to Italy, from Spain to the Netherlands, from England to Ireland – and even to the eastern margins of North America where native Americans resisted the English invasion of their land (the Powhatan Wars). And all this was in addition to the century’s devastation of German lands from the Rhine to regions beyond the Elbe and Danube. France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, England, Turkey, the Holy Roman Empire and most of the German principalities were in an almost constant state of arms, and periodically fighting by land or sea, throughout the century.
Looking back now one might be surprised to see which countries were the big players then, and the nature of their influence. They were the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Sweden, and the entity known as the Holy Roman Empire. The Thirty Years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, a bad compromise that disposed Europe to a new and sometimes terrible history of problems which continue to this day; but that treaty did not stop the fighting. How can the politics and conflicts of this period not be of vital interest to understanding ourselves now?
Yet against this background of destruction and upheaval, there was a luxuriance of genius of a kind that would make any stretch of history boast. Consider – and here we are just mentioning some of many – in literature there were Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pepys, Racine, Molière, Corneille, Cyrano de Bergerac, Scarron, Malherbe, La Fontaine, Alcoforado, Grimmelshausen, Gryphius, von Lohenstein; in philosophy Descartes, Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Malebranche, Bayle; in science Mersenne, Pascal, Galileo, Gassendi, Huygens, Kepler, van Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Wren, Boyle, Roche, Newton, Tradescant, Lyte; in art – but here space fails: I began with Poussin, Caravaggio, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Hals, Terbrugghen, Ruysdael, Avercamp, Lievens, Cuyp, Jan Steen, Vermeer, Hobbema, but then realised while typing these names that the list of superb artists in just one country, the Netherlands in its Golden Age, stretches too far ahead: over 700 individual artists of this place and period are represented in major gallery collections, and I had not even begun properly to list the contributions from elsewhere. In music, it is true, the major names – Vivaldi, J. S. Bach, Handel – were still young when the seventeenth century ended, but there were Buxtehude, Monteverdi, Purcell, Wilbye and others: the century was not wholly silent.
This litany of names glorious in their contributions to art, literature, thought, politics and science by themselves tell us little about an age whose ebullience of creativity was something much more besides. The Italian cities of the high Renaissance had been theatres of great creativity too: but the difference is that seventeenth-century creativity, in both reflecting and motivating a remarkable change in the way people saw themselves and the world, thereby definitively redirected the course of world events. Think of France or England in the 1590s; compare them to how they were in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The contrast is far greater than for all periods before or afterwards. The claim that I think might be made about the audience at Macbeth in 1606 and the crowds at the execution of Charles I in 1649 is that the former consisted of pre-moderns, the latter of moderns or at any rate those who were fast inventing the modern: and this is a change discernible even by the middle of the seventeenth century.