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3 results

  • 8 - The Reformation and National Identity

  • from Part ii - Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia, Matthew D'Auria, University of East Anglia, Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
    Published online:
    27 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 163-185

  • Summary

    “Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified.