Sign conceptions in everyday culture from the Renaissance to the present

Abstract

Epochal thresholds, structures, and transitional determinations of the 'early modern era 9A new sense of the middle ages as they have been newly read and opened up in recent years under the sign of the actualization of apocalyptic thinking constitutes the essential starting point for those epochal determinations that are not satisfied with conceiving the early modern era or modernity as merely the posthistoire of the middle ages. The idea of setting modernity parallel to its allegedly so different primal and prehistory (Eco 1989b) stands out in stark contrast to those structures that suggest a paradigm of the early modern as the continuation of the historicism and positivism of the nineteenth century. Jacob Burckhardt's canonical image of a Renaissance that is more and other than the dissolution of the middle ages -nothing less than the auto-creation of modernity out of the fundamental principles of the discovery of the individual, the immanence of the world, secular communication, the actualization of antiquity's system of virtue; in short, an image of the Renaissance as genuinely self-positing -has been corrected by research conducted under the impression of a newly perceived proximity to the preformed understanding of the medieval world and its psychic life intensification of anxiety, doom, nature as threat. This research has become exemplary for the new reading of the historical context precisely because of its acontemporaneity to the positivism and historicism of the modern era: nouvelle histoire, longue duree, 'history writing as the history of the everyday' -these are the signal words. Such structural revisions are the expression of theories which for their part represent the assumptions as well as the results of concrete everyday historical processes. In addition to the analysis of the feudal order by Duby (1978), the relationship of art and society, economic history, and the relation of work, education, and imagination, one finds, for example, investigations of marriage procedures. If such approaches give evidence of a continuity of the old with the early modern Semiotica