2024-03-26 13:21:42
Early modern literature
When Europe experienced its first globalization
Status: 28.03.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
The parrot is the latest craze: Veronese fresco, around 1560
Quelle: Hulton Fine Art Collection / Mondadori via Getty Images
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Fear of Islam, religious wars and exotic things from all over the world: The cultural scientist Marina Münkler knows why the 16th century and its conflicts are so close to us. Do we need a “Holy League” again?
Parrots, for example. Individual species were certainly known in Europe since ancient times, but they only became a status symbol for noble families in the 16th century – as imported goods from the New World. For proof, visit the Palladio Villa Barbaro in Veneto, where the exotic bird strolls around on a balustrade, painted by the famous Veronese, who knew how to stage it in its pseudo-architecture alongside the landlady, nanny and puppy.
The owner of the villa was a special maritime representative of the Maritime Republic of Venice, an important player in world trade at the time. Veronese and other renowned painters of the era were also commissioned to capture the naval battle of Lepanto in their pictures. In 1571, the “Holy League”, a kind of Christian EU led by the Spanish, triumphed over the Ottomans. The volume of paintings about the top event of the era is just one of the media with which Marina Münkler, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture at the TU Dresdensuccessfully sets its sights on “the dramatic 16th century”.
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Pamphlets about the New World and reports from kidnapped Christians who reported on the Ottomans are also topics in Münkler’s book. “The Dawn of the New Era” is one of the non-fiction pearls of the season because it can do a lot beyond all the anniversaries and trite updates. First of all, it looks at an era that often only appears in isolation in the context of traditional epoch narratives: either as the age of the Reformation with Luther or as the Italian Renaissance, either as the age of seafarers and discoveries or as humanism.
Early modern times is a dazzling umbrella term that leaves it unclear how globally and locally intertwined many phenomena were in contemporary times, global histories like from Wolfgang Reinhard or last Wolfgang Behringer want to take this into account, but they quickly become very obese if, like Heinz Schilling in “1517”, they don’t just want to shine a spotlight on a single year.
Münkler takes the middle path. Although or precisely because she is not a classical historian, her historical work opens up an era that seems predestined for her access, because the early modern period lived not least from dramatic eyewitness reports and stories. Münkler made a name for herself by analyzing stories about foreigners (such as Marco Polo), before she recently published several non-fiction debate books together with her husband, the political scientist Herfried Münkler.
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Marina Münkler’s 16th Century expressly does not want to consider Michelangelo, Dürer or Machiavelli again, but rather three fundamental lines of conflict of the time: the conquest of the new world, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the religious wars caused by religious divisions in Europe. All three conflicts begin before and end after the 16th century, as Münkler himself emphasizes.
The strength of her book unfolds in the chapters in which she presents and comments on texts from contemporary witnesses on the three conflicts. For example, Amerigo Vespucci, to whom the double continent of America owes its name and who is almost considered an impostor because we don’t know whether he was in the New World four times or just once. In any case, he caused a sensation with his letter “Mundus Novus,” which was distributed as a pamphlet throughout Europe. Similarly, Münkler illustrates the “fear of the Turks” discourse of the 16th century; after all, the Ottomans advanced to the gates of Vienna in 1529. Reports like those of the Genoese Giovanni Antonio Menavino, who was kidnapped on the Mediterranean as a twelve-year-old boy and became a seraglio in Constantinople, are impressive in their double coding as education about and propaganda against Islam.
Anyone who has the leisure for more than 500 pages and wants to learn something about the interconnection of military, commercial, religious and media history will find an illuminating portrait of the early modern period in Marina Münkler’s book.
Marina Münkler: Dawn of the new era. The dramatic 16th century. Rowohlt Berlin, 544 pages, 34 euros
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