Episode 11! With Ullrich Langer on religious nationalism in early modern France The Religious Nationalism Podcast

National identities based on church membership may have come more readily to Protestant countries in Europe, but Catholic kingdoms and nations also drew heavily on Christian identity.  The case of France, the subject of this episode, is an important reminder of the way that the Catholic Church was entangled in the political institutions (in this case, the monarchy) and cultural expectations that gave the French a unique identity.  The French Revolution, which eventually took an anti-clerical turn, did fundamentally reset the terms of French national identity.  But the legacy of the medieval church, the Reformation, religious wars, and the Edict of Nantes (1598) did not simply vanish after 1798.  To provide guidance on French religious nationalism, D. G. Hart (flying solo this time) interviewed Ullrich Langer, Professor of French (emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His specialties include sixteenth-century poetry and prose; Renaissance intellectual history (especially moral philosophy and political theory), and religious conflict in France during the Reformation.