Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional Historical Division

This collection of essays draws attention to this problem and focuses attention on various possible solutions to it. It assembles a team of contributors who are all deeply concerned with the issue while representing different kinds of history and allied disciplines, some traditional and some recently appeared, and also different attitudes to the resolution of the matter. The result is not, however, a mere divergence of opinions and a hubbub of voices. Instead, it suggests that different solutions to the problem are appropriate to distinctive kinds of history-writing, and different geographical regions; while even historians studying the same area in the same period in the same way can achieve useful and complementary insights by reaching opposed conclusions over whether the traditional divisions by period are still helpful.