Defining a ?historic transition? means understanding how the complex system of intellectual, social, and material structures formed that determined the transition from a certain ?universe? to a ?new universe,? where the old explanations were radically rethought. In this book, a group of historians with specializations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and across political, religious, and social fields, attempt a reinterpretation of ?modernity? as the new ?Axial Age.?