By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together.

In the summer of 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote about a possible future project on what he called French Trauerspiel, or mourning drama. In this volume of Yale French Studies, an international team of leading scholars of early modern Europe takes its cue from that lapsed project to reread the seventeenth-century French tragic canon as Trauerspiel. These new readings draw attention to early modern French theater's reflections on chance and contingency, political compromise, the question of allegory, the philosophy of the provisional, the place of sound, and the status of the creaturely.

By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together.