Many historians agree on when modernity began — it began in the 15th C. and was followed by early, middle, and late periods.  But where did modernity begin?

The regional and cultural roots of modernity first appeared in Italy and the Iberian peninsula. Those roots continued to nourish European intellectual ambitions in the same way it nourished continental exploration.

Ariosto’s Orlano Furioso, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Camoes, The Lusiads (worthy successors to the works of Homer and Virgil in the Mediterranean world, and interesting in their own right) exerted no less influence on French and German writers as they did in the so-called New World. Later writers, who grew from the rich Iberian soil — Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Santayana, for example — were attuned to the spirit of modernity while offering incisive diagnoses and critiques of their inherited traditions.  Readers in the United States often overlook the great literary works of Iberia that reach out across the Atlantic to the Americas.

In this reading pathway, we will undertake our own sailing expeditions back to discover particular regional origins of modernity and see the ways that the same hispanophone traditions grew into mature self-critique, or the ways that they recovered therapies for modern ills. See for yourself why these works might be included among the greatest in the world.