Origins of Modern Europe; Medieval National Consciousness


Book Description

This Book Covers Various Topics Concerning Modern European History. In Spite Of The Author S Artistically Simple Writing Style The Treatment Given To Various Topics Is Indepth And Scholarly.Besides The Incidents And Episodes Addressing To Important Historical Figures, Movements, Struggles, Dreams And Aspirations Of Common Man Are Also Highlighted In This Book. All The Events Dealt With Are, In Fact, Forming A Sequence Targeting Towards Contemporary Socio-Political Scenario. The Present Book Would Be Of Great Use To Research Scholars, Students And Teachers Interested In European History. It Would Definitely Fill The Gap In The Literature Concerning Modern Europe.




Medieval Europeans


Book Description

A team of leading scholars in the fields of Medieval Literature and History examine the origins of European ethnic groups which subsequently developed into the nations of Europe. The contributors look at evidence for the existence of an ethnic consciousness among the dominant European groups; this later formed the basis of nation states. The reconstruction and invention of the past by medieval writers in search of ethnic origins for their own particular political or tribal groups is also studied from a literary and historical point of view.




The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States


Book Description

An assessment of the role of the Middle Ages in national historiography and in modern conceptions of national identity, looking at relatively young nations, and regions which claim national traditions but were slow to achieve, or regain, separate statehood. Examples range from Ireland and Iceland through Austria and Italy to Finland and Greece.




The Origins of Nationalism


Book Description

In this wide-ranging work, Caspar Hirschi offers new perspectives on the origins of nationalism and the formation of European nations. Based on extensive study of written and visual sources dating from the ancient to the early modern period, the author re-integrates the history of pre-modern Europe into the study of nationalism, describing it as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of the legacy of Roman imperialism in the Middle Ages. Hirschi identifies the earliest nationalists among Renaissance humanists, exploring their public roles and ambitions to offer new insight into the history of political scholarship in Europe and arguing that their adoption of ancient role models produced massive contradictions between their self-image and political function. This book demonstrates that only through understanding the development of the politics, scholarship and art of pre-modern Europe can we fully grasp the global power of nationalism in a modern political context.




'And so began the Irish Nation'


Book Description

Nationalism is a particularly slippery subject to define and understand, particularly when applied to early modern Europe. In this collection of essays, Brendan Bradshaw provides an insight into how concepts of ’nationalism’ and ’national identity’ can be understood and applied to pre-modern Ireland. Drawing upon a selection of his most provocative and pioneering essays, together with three entirely new pieces, the limits and contexts of Irish nationalism are explored and its impact on both early modern society and later generations, examined. The collection reflects especially upon the emergence of national consciousness in Ireland during a calamitous period when the late-medieval, undeveloped sense of a collective identity became suffused with patriotic sentiment and acquired a political edge bound up with notions of national sovereignty and representative self-government. The volume opens with a discussion of the historical methods employed, and an extended introductory essay tracing the history of national consciousness in Ireland from its first beginnings as recorded in the poetry of the early Christian Church to its early-modern flowering, which provides the context for the case studies addressed in the subsequent chapters. These range across a wealth of subjects, including comparisons of Tudor Wales and Ireland, Irish reactions to the ’Westward Enterprise’, the Ulster Rising of 1641, the Elizabethans and the Irish, and the two sieges of Limerick. The volume concludes with a transcription and discussion of ’A Treatise for the Reformation of Ireland, 1554-5’. The result of a lifetime’s study, this volume offers a rich and rewarding journey through a turbulent yet fascinating period of Irish history, not only illuminating political and religious developments within Ireland, but also how these affected events across the British Isles and beyond.




National Thought in Europe


Book Description

Ranging widely across countries and centuries, National Thought in Europe critically analyzes the growth of nationalism from its beginnings in medieval ethnic prejudice to the romantic era’s belief in a national soul. A fertile pan-European exchange of ideas, often rooted in literature, led to a notion of a nation’s cultural individuality that transformed the map of Europe. By looking deeply at the cultural contexts of nationalism, Joep Leerssen not only helps readers understand the continent’s past, but he also provides a surprising perspective on contemporary European identity politics.




Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

An examination of a fundamental aspect of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.







The Historical Construction of National Consciousness


Book Description

A long essay entitled Three Historical Regions of Europe, appearing first in a samizdat volume in Budapest in 1980, instantly put its author into the forefront of the transnational debate on Central Europe, alongside such intellectual luminaries as Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz. The present volume offers English-language readers a rich selection of the depth and breadth of the legacy of Jenő Szűcs (1928–1988). The selection documents Szűcs’s seminal contribution to many contemporary debates in historical anthropology, nationalism studies, and conceptual history. It contains his key texts on the history of national consciousness and patterns of collective identity, as well as medieval and early modern political thought. The works published here, most of them previously unavailable in English, provide a sophisticated analysis of a wide range of subjects from the myths of origins of Hungarians before Christianization to the political and religious ideology of the Dózsa peasant uprising in 1514, the medieval roots of civil society, or the revival of ethnic nationalism during the communist era. The volume, with an introduction by the editors locating Szűcs in a transnational context, offers a unique insight into the complex and sensitive debate on national identity in post-1945 East Central Europe.




Past Sense — Studies in Medieval and Early Modern European History


Book Description

The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.