From universal to local: German identity in Nicholas of Cusa’s Catholic Concordance

Abstract

AbstractNicholas of Cusa’s Catholic Concordance stands as a landmark of fifteenth‐century political thought. Modern scholarship has devoted much attention to Nicholas’s argument about consent in Book Two, but he also develops one of the earliest expressions of German identity. This has not received attention in historical and literary scholarship. Nicholas grounds his conceptualization of a German people and land in the political and ecclesiological debates of his day while tying it to the importance that history plays in defining a people. He establishes a new type of history for them told in terms not of Roman imperial history but of the Germans. His work foreshadows the efforts of German writers in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who composed for the first time histories of Germany devoted to the Germans from their mythical origins to contemporary times and written in their own common language, German.