Searching for Early Modern Truth

Today, the notion of ‘truth’ seems more elusive than ever. A twentieth-century loss of confidence has been followed by a twenty-first century onslaught, ushering in what some have characterized as an era of ‘post-truth’. Others seek to salvage truth, as notably seen in the institutionalization of ‘fact-checking’. To deepen the understanding of the current crisis, it can be helpful to consider past regimes of truth and their historical transformations. The early modern period was another era in which intellectual, technological, social, and political developments converged to challenge and transform contemporary understandings of truth and its cognate notions. Some historians, indeed, have located in this period the rise of the modern fact.

This Option Paper will explore some of the diverse yet interrelated ways by which early modern Europeans sought what was – or what they understood to be – the truth. Most famously, experimental methods and global artefacts transformed traditions of observing and explaining the natural world, while developments in philology and diplomatics led to new discoveries – and doubts – about history and the human past. But questions of truth were never just an academic pursuit. In the realm of law, they decided the fate of individuals, most infamously when inquisitors peered into souls in trials of heresy and witchcraft. On an even more everyday level, the dramatic expansion of commercial and communicational networks created new challenges in the interpretation of information from distant lands, continents, and cultures. The study of early modern truth thus not only uncovers a crucial stage in the history of knowledge, but also helps to illuminate and bring together a range of fundamental cultural, social, and political practices.