Claire Weeda

Gemma Blok

Johan Jacob Vincent Kuitenbrouwer

In 'Imagined Communities', first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community experience a "deep, horizontal camaraderie." Despite being strangers, members feel connected in a web of imagined experiences. Yet while Anderson's insights have been hugely influential, they remain abstract: it is difficult to imagine imagined communities. How do they evolve and how is membership constructed cognitively, socially and culturally? How do individuals and communities contribute to group formation through the act of imagining? And what is the glue that holds communities together? 'Imagining Communities' examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies. Communal bonding is analyzed, offering concrete insights on where and by whom the nation (or social group) is imagined and the role of individuals therein. Offering eleven empirical case studies, ranging from the premodern to the modern age, this volume looks at and beyond the nation and includes regional as well as transnational communities as well.

Historical Reflections on the Process of Community Formation

Imagining Communities

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer

This book examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies.

An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages.

Medicine, Power and Religion

Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 950-1250

Carole Rawcliffe

Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.

Claire Weeda

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