The writing of universal history in Early Modern Europe

VIDAL, SILVINA PAULA

The Oxford Handbook of Universal History Writing

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2025;

The Reformation and the European overseas exploration and colonization enterprises in Africa, Asia and the Americas challenged the unity and exclusivity of Western Christianity. The pluralistic pasts of non-Christian peoples and the dissemination of knowledge unavailable to the ancients, demanded new approaches to encompassing the globe. Instead of dramatic change, there was a renovation of the European tradition of universal history writing, expressed in the circulation of different historiographical models, a variety of editorial projects and competing notions of universality. Moreover, the humanist tradition, characterized by its philological and antiquarian erudition, laid the foundations for not only questioning Biblical chronology and the Christian narrative of salvation, but also for the emergence of a secular narrative of the history of humanity. Nevertheless, the absence of an alternative interpretative scheme led, in the early 18th century, to thematic additive universal histories that chose exhaustivity over unity.