caa a22 4500 388053437 CHVBK 20180307125059.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199812 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/3679290 doi S0080440100011075 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/3679290 Eastwood David The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the Early-Nineteenth Century [Elektronische Daten] [David Eastwood] One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform', ‘Ages of Revolution', ‘Triumphs of Reform', and ‘Centuries of Reformation' exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.' Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation' orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture. Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1998 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Cambridge University Press 8(1998-12), 91-115 0080-4401 8<91 1998 8 RHT https://doi.org/10.2307/3679290 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/3679290 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Eastwood David NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Cambridge University Press 8(1998-12), 91-115 0080-4401 8<91 1998 8 RHT CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge