Shaping the Nation in Medieval Europe

This volume in The Medieval Globe book series explores a fundamental problem of European historiography within a global context: the history of medieval nations and the question of their relationship to modern nation-states. Focusing on the emerging or established societies of Christian Europe and their immediate neighbours, contributors ask: To what extent did medieval peoples, polities, and territorial principalities represent or constitute nations? When and where can we discern this occurring? And crucially, what constitutes sound evidence for the existence of medieval nations, given that all of our sources (textual and material) have been filtered through centuries of post-medieval identity- and state-formation processes? Such questions are engaged from fresh perspectives that will illuminate both medieval ideas of the nation and their later distortion by political, academic, and popular uses of the medieval past.

Éloïse Adde is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the Central European University in Vienna. Her research focuses on state-building and nations, political thought and discourse, and the rise of “individuals” and individualism in late medieval Brabant and Bohemia.