The myth of nations : the medieval origins of Europe
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Bibliographic Information
The myth of nations : the medieval origins of Europe
Princeton University Press, c2002
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Note
Bibliography: p. 185-187
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Modern-day Europeans by the millions proudly trace back their national identities to the Celts, Franks, Gauls, Goths, Huns, or Serbs--or some combination of the various peoples who inhabited, traversed, or pillaged their continent more than a thousand years ago. According to Patrick Geary, this is historical nonsense. The idea that national character is fixed for all time in a simpler, distant past is groundless, he argues in this unflinching reconsideration of European nationhood. Few of the peoples that many Europeans honor as sharing their sense of "nation" had comparably homogeneous identities; even the Huns, he points out, were firmly united only under Attila's ten-year reign. Geary dismantles the nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born. Through rigorous analysis set in lucid prose, he contrasts the myths with the actual history of Europe's transformation between the fourth and ninth centuries--the period of grand migrations that nationalists hold dear. The nationalist sentiments today increasingly taken for granted in Europe emerged, he argues, only in the nineteenth century. Ironically, this phenomenon was kept alive not just by responsive populatio
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Crisis of European Identity 1 Chapter One: A Poisoned Landscape: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century 15 Chapter Two: Imagining Peoples in Antiquity 41 Chapter Three: Barbarians and Other Romans 63 Chapter Four: New Barbarians and New Romans 93 Chapter Five: The Last Barbarians? 120 Chapter Six: Toward New European Peoples 151 Notes 175 Suggestion for Further Reading 185 Index 189
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