The latter half of Kohn's chapter on the Renaissance and Reformation is all about the nation he believes is the biggest player in the spread of modern nationalism: England.
His focus on the island nation of northwestern Europe is quite useful for me. It gives me things to argue against with my case for Beowulf as a kind of national poem of Anglo-Saxon Britain.
His spending so much space on England and its progression through the various nationalisms he presents is also helpful because of the definitions of those nationalisms that he provides. Right now it looks like an Old Testament nationalism (seeing a people as set apart by a divine destiny) comes closest to what I think is expressed in Beowulf and other major Anglo-Saxon writings. There's definitely a note of a Germanic sense of superiority in there, too, though not enough to completely crush the Celtic culture the Anglo-Saxons found when they came to Britain's bright shores.
One thing that's becoming clearer the more I read of Kohn is that he uses a lot of quotations. I mean, to the point where there's easily a 70/30 split between quotations and original prose in some paragraphs. It's neat to see history in its makers' words, though.
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