The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600–1815. Lotte Jensen, ed. Heritage and Memory Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. 342 pp. €99.

To assess the significance for European states of the impressive range of activities undertaken by early-modern military engineers one has to look at two historical debates. The first is what is meant by ‘the state’ in this era. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, populist nationalisms used state structures to compete for territory with one another. They also used the coercive capacity of the state to impose a particular sense of national identity on the populations they controlled, eradicating alternative identities, and propagating myths that projected their sense of identity back to remote antiquity. The Chief End of Man was seen as the creation and extension of a centralised, interventionist state designed to defend the interests, redress the wrongs, and reinforce the identity, rightly understood, of ‘the nation’. Tempted by reductionism, historians have concentrated on a few states seen conventionally as ‘first-class powers’ and precursors of modern nation states, despite the fact that early-modern Europe was a dense network of sovereignties, some tiny; others like Venice or Bavaria never leading European powers but significant ones within specific contexts....

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Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson, eds., Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Emory University, Lovis Corinth Colloquia, 1. (Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation, 1.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xxxii, 483; 12 color plates and many black-and-white figures. €125.

Speculum ◽

10.1017/s0038713400210294 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 84 (03) ◽

pp. 799

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Identity Formation ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Late Medieval ◽

Black And White ◽

Emory University ◽

Modern Europe ◽

Lovis Corinth ◽

Modern Identity

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Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

10.1093/oso/9780198797555.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Judith Pollmann

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Memory Studies ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Primary Research ◽

The Past ◽

Social Reference ◽

Modern Europe ◽

Memory Practices ◽

Do So ◽

The Way

This book is an introduction into the way in which Europeans on the Continent and in the British Isles practised memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. In early modern Europe the past served as a main frame of moral, political, legal, religious, and social reference for people of all walks of life. Because it mattered so much, it was also hotly contested, and subject to constant reinvention. Building on both existing studies and new primary research, the first aim of this book is to account for the omnipresence, importance, and changing uses of the past among early modern Europeans. Its second aim is to situate early modern memory more clearly in the memory studies field, and to show how relevant a better knowledge of early modern memory is to students and scholars who study memory practices in modern societies. Many scholars have argued that the age of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century completely transformed the way in which Europeans experienced the past and came to think about the future. This book demonstrates that while some memory practices had indeed profoundly changed by 1800, this was not because of revolutionary rupture. Changes were gradual and did not put an end to traditional ways of thinking about the past; rather, old and new ways came to exist side by side, and, to a surprising extent, continue to do so to our own day.

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