At the Margin of Community

Germans in Pre-Hussite Bohemia

Bibliographic Data

ID11005266
AuthorsLeonard E Scales (corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume9
Pages327-352
Publication date1999-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Royal Historical Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0080-4401 • E-ISSN: 1474-0648
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3679408
OpenAlexW2162057861
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited22

Arguably, the single most important dimension in the existence of any community, medieval or modern, is its members' shared conviction that it exists, and that its existence represents a significant bond between them. The central and later Middle Ages have been viewed as a period of particular importance for the growth of such self-consciousness - and for its growth, particularly among those large political communities which Susan Reynolds suggests we call ‘regnal’, and which many medievalists appear happy to refer to as ‘national’. As Reynolds showed, communities of this sort evolved legitimising mythologies which overlay existing structures of government with notions of ancient and primal ethnic solidarity, and thus placed such communities, imaginatively, outside the normal processes of contingency and change. Challenging questions therefore arise if we call to mind the many new political formations which were established during this period, which saw the extension into neighbouring regions, by both violent and peaceful means, of the political and social forms characteristic of continental western Europe. The new settlements had not only to be organised and defended physically, but also explained and justified. A vocabulary of argument thus evolved to account for their existence and to illuminate their relationships with existing political and social structures. In formulating this vocabulary, however, writers were con-fronted by the strong impulse in medieval thought to lay upon all significant communities a veneer of timelessness, or at least of antiquity. How this obstacle was overcome for particular new communities doubtless has many specific answers. But an obstacle it must surely have been, and the study of how — or whether — it was surmounted in any given instance is thus inherently worth while

Aesthetics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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