The Emergence of Modernity and the New World

Abstract

This chapter discusses about modernity. The exact point at which this modernity began has long been disputed, its purported heralds ranging from Petrarch, the "first modern man", who portrays man as the subject of experience, the agent of all knowledge, and the center of one's own thoughts. The chapter argues that our modern age was made possible not by one figure but by one traumatic event: the discovery of the New Worlds, which a German aristocrat, Martin Waldseemuller, called "America." It highlights the tangle of elements underneath the epoch-making, decisive phenomenon of modernity: the discovery of the "new world" and its relationship to the "old world." The chapter discusses that the discoveries of New Worlds by the likes of Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Vasco de Gama came out of the intellectual challenges and ways of thinking articulated by the Florentine Quattrocento. Keywords:Columbus; modernity; new world; old world; Petrarch