ABSTRACT
English representatives at the Council of Constance argued their claim to equal national status whether a nation be understood as a race, relationship, and habit of unity, separate from others, or as a difference of language, which by divine and human law is the greatest and most authentic mark of a nation and the essence of it or whether it be understood, as it should be, as an equality of territory with, for instance, the Gallic nation. This chapter examines racialist or genetic ideas that are used to interpret social realities in three widely distant peripheries of medieval Europe, the Celtic northwest, the Iberian peninsula, and east-central Europe, exploring the development and application of these in relation to their evolving objective context. A fundamental problem is to confront relationships between mythic modes of mental analysis and practical human action.
