I admire tremendously Newman’s methodological reflections in the Introduction and elsewhere regarding Cold War periodization. According to Newman, the baroque disappeared from scholarly discussion in the United States because the Renaissance was the “ideologically more congenial period . . . because it signified the ‘rebirth’ of a vaguely democratic ‘classicism’ with which the collegiate intelligentsia of an America triumphans could identify more easily in their new postwar role as custodians of the culture and achievements of a ‘West’ that Europe could no longer defend.” [3] To what extent has our new paradigm of early modern broken with this narrative?
With respect to early modern and the meliorism which Baroque chafes against, I think it to some extent addresses the issue, but not completely, as there is still a linkage of modernity and teleology–which maybe we want, we need, shorn of its Cold War ideologica; trappings–or maybe not?
I found the discussion on Jane Newman’s book stimulating.