What Happened to the Renaissance in the German Academy? A Report on German “Renaissance” Institutes

Where is the research on the Renaissance being done in Germany? Is it true that “European history is still firmly divided among antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era,” and that therefore “the Renaissance occupies no space of its own in the history curriculum [of German universities]” as Professor Karant-Nunn has argued? The problem, it seems, is that German historians have largely abandoned the term “Renaissance” to denote the period between the Middle Ages and the modern era, using instead the term “early modern period” (Friihe Neuzeit), a term whose perimeters are variously defined as extending from the close of the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, or to the French Revolution, or even to the end of the old Reich in 1806.