Across the nineteenth century European history, philology, archaeology, art, and architecture turned from a common classical vocabulary and ideology to images of pasts and origins drawn primarily from the Middle Ages. The result was a paradox, as scholars and artists, schooled in the same pan-European vocabularies and methodologies nevertheless sought to discover through them unique and, frequently, oppositional national identities. These essays, edited by Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay, focus on this all-European phenomenon with a special focus on Scandinavia and East-Central Europe, bearing witness to the inextricable links between cultural and scientific engagement, the search for national identity, and political agendas in the long nineteenth century that made the search for archaic origins an entangled history.
Patrick J. Geary is Professor of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published numerous books and essays on medieval social and cultural history including The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).
Gábor Klaniczay is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest. He has published numerous books and essays on the historical anthropology of Christianity, including Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge, 2002).
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
MEDIEVALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY
National Origin Narratives in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Walter Pohl
The Uses and Abuses of Barbarian Invasions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ian N. Wood
Oehlenschlaeger and Ibsen: National Revival in Drama and History in Denmark and Norway c. 1800-1860, Sverre Bagge
Romantic Historiography as a Sociology of Liberty: Joachim Lelewel and His Contemporaries, Maciej Janowski
A Cross-Country Foxhunt: Claiming Reynard for the National Literatures of Nineteenth-Century Europe, Joep T. Leerssen
Restoration from Notre-Dame de Paris to Gaston Paris, R. Howard Bloch
The Czech Linguistic Turn: Origins of Modern Czech Philology 1780-1880, PavlÃna Rychterová
MEDIEVALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES IN NATIONAL DISCOURSES
These essays are intended both for modern historians, medievalists, and scholars of nationalism as well as for a wider public interested in understanding the origins of modern nationalist ideology.