“I let my spirit wander there in happiness and contentment”: Immediate Time & Early Modern History

Instants have often eluded scholarly attention. In history, a field traditionally focused on radical breaks and structural changes rather than continuities and recurrences, what I call immediate time rubs against what usually gets centered in historical accounts: grand formations and major transformations. Slivers of time merit our gaze, because they focalize a scale that is profoundly human. Weaving such instants into our conception of the past is a step toward imagining a history centered on how people inhabited time in ways that need yet to be fully excavated.
In fact, early modernity was an era when the momentary generated considerable interest. Various media—memoirs, anthologies, treatises, etc. as well as images or music—directed attention to temporal immediacy. Whether such moments involved groups or tended to the self, they often conjured up the possibility of respites from the demands, urgencies, and precarities in people’s lives.

Helmut Puff is the Elizabeth Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His teaching and research focus on central European history, culture, and literature in the late medieval and early modern periods. He specializes in the history of sexuality, media history, Reformation history, and visual studies. He is the author of Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (de Gruyter, 2014), and The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting (2023).  

Please register for the seminar for distribution of a text draft in advance (email to c.hess@cas.au.dk).