Complainte de louis xvi biographies

1Language is a major determinant of national identity. If this continues to hold true today, it was even more apparent in the late Middle Ages, when the emergence of fledgling nation-states paralleled the development of their vernaculars. Historians never cease to point out that the medieval idea of nationhood was different from our modern notion1. Nonetheless, as I will show here, at least two French medieval writers employed the term ‘nation’ with a meaning approximating the one given by the OED: «an extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory». In part one of this study, I will treat the use of the terms ‘nation françoise’ by Christine de Pizan and ‘nation’ and ‘France’ by Primat, the original author-compiler of the late thirteenth-century Grandes Chron