Concept
Periodization
Overview
In historiography, periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis. This is usually done to understand current and historical processes, and the causality that might have linked those events.
Periodizations can provide a convenient segmentation of time, wherein events within the period might consist of relatively similar characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending of any 'period' is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time and over the course of history. Systems of periodization are more or less arbitrary, yet it provides a framework to help us understand them. Periodizing labels are continually challenged and redefined, but once established, period "brands" are so convenient that many are hard to change.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The _period_, or complete sentence, is usually composed of four divisions, which are called _members_, (or _colons_) that it may properly fill the ear, and be neither longer nor shorter than is requisite for that purpose. But it sometimes, or rather frequently happens, that a sentence either falls short of, or exceeds the limits of a regular period, to prevent it from fatiguing the ear on the one hand, or…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators
States what Periodization is.
Again, after a period, the whole thing is disturbed, projected outward, again it slowly comes out in the form of waves; for all motion in this universe is in the form of waves, successive rise and fall.
Swami Vivekananda, Jnâna Yoga, Part II
States what Periodization is.
In each of those periods, however, there was not only much private and public profusion, many expensive and unnecessary wars, great perversion of the annual produce from maintaining productive to maintain unproductive hands; but sometimes, in the confusion of civil discord, such absolute waste and destruction of stock, as might he supposed, not only to retard, as it certainly did, the natural accumulation of riches…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Close in meaning to Periodization; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Periodization
Related ideas
- Giorgio Vasari
- Adam and Eve
- Dark Ages (historiography)
- Post-classical history
- Historiography
- Hesiod
- Counterculture
- Byzantine Empire
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Middle Ages
- Moses
- Michelangelo
- Late Middle Ages
- Paul the Apostle
- Renaissance
- Renaissance humanism
- Golden Age
- Italian Renaissance
- Cold War
- World War II
- Causality
- Reformation
- Baroque
- Cultural history
Place in the tradition
Part of Post-classical history.