Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

Chapter 2 moves from Dante Alighieri’s contribution to the establishment of the vernacular as a language of knowledge and his critique of contemporary vernacular translation, which offer yet another perspective on the multifaceted process through which vernacular culture appropriated and, in a sense, tamed Aristotle’s authority. The chapter situates Dante’s portrayal of Aristotle within the poet’s broader reflection on language. Taking the appearance of Aristotle in the Divine Comedy as a starting point, I show that Dante’s notion of language cannot be understood without looking at his discussion of the relations between Latin and the vernacular, particularly in the Convivio. From this point of view, Dante’s harsh criticism of Taddeo Alderotti’s Italian translation of the Summa Alexandrinorum invites us to reconsider the failure of the Convivio itself, a project which did not foster the cultural revolution that Dante sought. By exploring the textual transmission of Taddeo’s translation between 1300 and 1500, the final section of the chapter enlightens its relevance to the vernacular reading communities that found forms of cultural and social legitimation in works of this kind.