MILLENARIANISM AND THE NATION

With the death in 1270 of Boniface of Savoy, England's last foreign archbishop, a nascent nationalism increased hostility toward foreigners. A corresponding intolerance within the nation led to the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. In the early modern period, the emerging nation-state grew up with the Protestant Reformation as the Tudor monarch declared his independence from the Holy Roman Empire, whose external authority he renounced. In an influential study on the nation-state, Anthony Giddens observes that, unlike the premodern nation, the modern state (“a bordered power-container”) has definite boundaries so that the foe is designated an outsider. The distinction between permeable frontiers and recognized borders, however, breaks down in the case of early modern England's corporate identity, which is marked geopolitically, temporally, religiously, and culturally. English national self-fashioning involved both policing what was outside of the pale and acts of internal colonization whereby the core introduced policies aimed at institutionalizing the existing stratification system. The definition and identity of the nation in fact lie then as now in its foreign relations as well as in its rhetoric and management of cultural, political, and religious difference.

Since the 1980s, the mimetic creation of the nation, though conventionally regarded as a modern concept, has generated an impressive amount of scholarship on early modern England. Building on the influential concept of the imagined community, Richard Helgerson, Linda Gregerson, Claire McEachern, Paul Stevens, and Raymond D. Tumbleson, among others, have mapped out the materially and discursively produced forms of nationhood.