The exploration of collective identity in Byzantium compared to Western Europe and the Islamic world: Parallels and differences in the construction of “east” and “west”

Abstract

This article surveys the last hundred years of scholarship on individual and collective selfhood in the disciplines dedicated to the European, Byzantine, and Arabic Middle Ages. To keep the project circumscribed, it focuses on the expression of the “national” and the “individual” self through language and literature as embedded in concrete social, economic, and political circumstances. The older, bigger, and more mature field among the three (the study of the European Middle Ages) provided the other two with model questions and methods of answering them. The purpose of the paper is to identify where and why these three scholarly disciplines adopted similar approaches and conclusions, as well as where and why they did not. This is offered as a tool through which to test whether “East” and “West” are best understood as distinct civilizational blocks that can be evaluated and ranked in terms of their importance for and moral impact on world history.

Keywords

• european nationalism
• arab nationalism
• national literature
• medieval epic
• vernacular language