Where the Middle Ages Begin
Nineteenth-century romanticism had a special interest in both the medieval world and primitive, untainted rural culture. As the nineteenth century progressed and turned into the early twentieth, the Danes fell more and more under the nostalgic spell, tending to look upon the Icelanders through increasingly romantic and patronizing eyes
The identity of the Low Countries was also muddied by contemporary debates about the correspondence between ‘Gallia’ and France and between ‘Germania’ and ‘Deutschland’.
Before turning to this early history there is one more aspect of the contemporary situation that I need to mention. Even in the Western world, the original homeland of natural rights thinking, there is no consensus—and sometimes overt skepticism—about the existence and grounding of such rights.
What is common to these artists is the way how they define and express their belonging to their own ethnic group. The characteristics of their ethnic identity 2 are above all else language, home territory, and history.
In his influential study on political factions in medieval Europe, Jacques Heers demonstrated the importance of factionalism in the political life of the middle ages, at the level of cities and regions as well as at the ‘national’ level.
The result has been a protracted debate on the existence and nature of pre-modern nationalism or national sentiment.1 That debate has by now ground into an entrenched stalemate. I think we can rescue the underlying historical issue from this stagnation, and the present article is intended to give a little shove to that effect.
Let us start with the concept and term ‘nation’ itself. In much modern discourse ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ have been given period-specific and pre- eminently political forms.
When one reads Medieval historiographic texts—whether written in Latin, Arabic or Romance—it appears that both the Moorish invasion and the Christian Reconquest of Spain are linked to a rape episode.
The English North is “Not London” but is “before Scotland,” a strangely liminal space between the familiar
South and those undesirables north of the River Tweed.
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