Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages
In an excellent article, ‘Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought,’ Ernst H. Kantorowicz has recently called attention to the importance of the concept of patria in the rise of the national monarchy and state in the later Middle Ages. No correction is needed, nor, perhaps, any addition. But since he modestly admits that he did not mean to exhaust the subject and does not examine the two laws, and since I had begun to note occasional remarks in the canonists and legists about the patria in association with theories of public law and the state, I wish to add some illustrations of the legal thought on the subject in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. These illustrations will supplement, moreover, the essay by Halvdan Koht on nationalism in the Middle Ages.