Different Europes: The Historical Evolution of Territorial Identities and Attachments as Formative Forces in a Changing Europe

This volume adopts a multidisciplinary and novel approach to the historical evolution of identities in Europe – especially the identities that are connected with regions as pluralist, processual social constructs, serving in dialogue and/or conflict with the emerging nation-state. Here history, anthropology, human geography and cultural sciences meet to discuss how regionalizing identities of various kinds were continuously created, challenged, and redefined, how they were experienced and expressed, and to what extent they produced feelings of attachment. Spatial, social, cultural and political foundations and manifestations of identities in Europe are historical phenomena. Their changes and forms can help us to understand essential traits of European societies in time and space, including the development of differences and similarities, degrees of attachment and the dynamics of physical and mental borders. By drawing on a wide range of sources – from historiography to interviews, devotional and hagiographical texts to pamphlets, songs and architecture – as expressions of evolving identities, this volume presents an innovative approach to understanding identity formation in Europe as an historical force, using the region as a multi-layered and processual key concept.