AN IMPORTANT SIDE ISSUE: PERIODIZATION
Was there a musical “Renaissance”? Was this it? To ask such questions, of course, is to answer them. If
there were no problems with the term, there would be no questions to ask. The short answer to questions
like these is always (because it can only be) yes and no. A fair sorting of the issues is the best we can do
or hope for, one that will address not only the immediate case but also the question of periodization as
broadly as it can be framed.
The “yes” part of the answer addresses the broad question. Artificial conceptual structures are
necessary for the processing of any sort of empirical information. Without them, we would have no way of
relating observations to one another or assigning them any sort of relative weight. All we would be able
to perceive would be the daily dribble of existence multiplied by weeks and years and centuries. That is
the very antithesis of history.
On a more mundane level, we need subdivisions of some kind in our conceptualization of history
because subdivisions provide handles by which we can grip the part of the story that interests us at the
moment without having to contend at all times with the whole. Without such conceptual subdivisions,
which when applied to chronology we call “periods,” we would have no way of delimiting fields of
research, or of cutting up a book like this into chapters, or of organizing scholarly conferences, or (say it
softly) of recruiting faculties of instruction at colleges and universities.
There is always the attendant risk that artificial conceptual subdivisions, hardened into mental habits,
become conceptual walls or blinders. And there is also the related risk that traits originally grouped
together for convenience will begin to look as though they are inherent (or immanent, “in-dwelling,” to
use the philosopher’s term for it) in the material being sorted rather than the product of a creative act on
the part of the sorter. When we allow ourselves to be convinced that traits we have adopted as aids in
identifying and delimiting the “medieval” or “Renaissance” phases of history are in some sense inherent
qualities of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance—or worse, that they express the “spirit” of the Middle
Ages or the Renaissance—we have fallen victim to a fallacy.
That fallacy is called the fallacy of “essentialism.” When an idea or a style trait has been unwittingly
defined not just as a convenient classifying device but as something essentially “medieval” or essentially
“Renaissance,” we are then equipped (or rather, fated) to identify it outside as well as inside the