This volume in The Medieval Globe book series explores a fundamental problem of European historiography within a global context: the history of medieval nations and the question of their relationship to modern nation-states. Focusing on the emerging or established societies of Christian Europe and their immediate neighbours, contributors ask: To what extent did medieval peoples, polities, and territorial principalities represent or constitute nations? When and where can we discern this occurring? And crucially, what constitutes sound evidence for the existence of medieval nations, given that all of our sources (textual and material) have been filtered through centuries of post-medieval identity- and state-formation processes? Such questions are engaged from fresh perspectives that will illuminate both medieval ideas of the nation and their later distortion by political, academic, and popular uses of the medieval past.

Carol Symes, "Why Europe? Why the Nation?"

Éloïse Adde, "Community, Identity, Individuals: Shaping the (Political) Nation in Premodern Europe"

Benoît Grévin, "Natio or lingua? Revisiting a Semantic Couplet (1200–1600)"

Julia Verkholantsev, "Ex linguis gentes: The Etymological Method and the Roman Theory of Lithuania’s Origins"

Daniel Ziemann, "Ethnicity and Statehood in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018): From Bulgars to Bulgarians"

Andrzej Pleszczyński, "Nature, Gender, and the Medieval Origins of the Polish Self-Stereotype"

Przemysław Wiszewski, "Between Region and Nation: Shifting Communities and Identities in Medieval Catalonia, Silesia, and Transylvania"

Cathleen Sarti, "Brothers, Cousins, and Strangers: Scandinavian Political Identities, ca. 1400–1600"

Index