ABSTRACT
Benedict Anderson has pointed out to us that the conceptual relationship between empire and nation is one of “fundamental contradiction”;1 history would seem to argue that it is precisely this foundational contradiction that produces the modem nation. The internal tension between a bounded community of fixed parameters and an expansionary community of unbounded mandate is immeasurably intensified when the community identifies itself, a priori or after the fact, as one of faith. In Reformation England we may behold the modem nation in the full force of its conceptual paradox, a politically and ideologically bounded bastion for an inherently universalist and transnational religion. As apologists for the English colonial venture in Ireland and as the latterday cultural subjects of a nation that has itself been formed by multiple waves of invasion and conquest, Edmund Spenser and John Milton negotiate the concept of nation from both sides of the colonial divide.
