ABSTRACT
In the last few years, nation theory has been gaining a slow but firm foothold in medieval studies. The year 1999 saw the publication of Thorlac Turville-Petre’s England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity and Nicholas Howe’s Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, 1997 Janet Thormann’s positing of Anglo-Saxon nationalism in Anglo-Saxons and the Construction of Social Identity. Besides these published works, the last few years of conferences at MLA and Kalamazoo show an increasing number of panels on medieval literature and nationalism. While “nation” and “nationalism” are becoming marketable concepts, there exists as of yet no systematic and rigorous examination of what a medieval “nation” or medieval “nationalists” might look like. Partly to blame is the “obviousness” of the term “nation” to contemporary consciousness, as well as the emotional weight inhering to the term. A third problem lies in the slippery nature of the word “nation,” an amorphousness that lends itself to a variety of agendas. As Timothy Brennen notes:
[the ‘nation’] is both historically determined and general. As a term, it refers both to the modern nation-state and to something more ancient and nebulous — the nation — a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging. The distinction is often obscured by nationalists who seek to place their own country in an ‘immemorial past’ where it’s [sic] arbitrariness cannot be questioned. 1
