Backwards Into the Light. Cultural Modernity and the Renaissance

Abstract

This article looks at the textual practices used by humanist and Reformation writers to modernise their textual legacies from classical and Biblical antiquity. By a process which I have called “textual proclamation” these writers were able to distinguish past from future and at the same time establish continuity. The problems faced by Reformation writers working with Biblical texts regarded as eternal are briefly discussed. It is argued that this was a process of modernisation which had to respect the continuity of authority, and that thus their modernitas differs from our own modernity, though linked culturally to it.