![]() ![]() ![]() I do not question the importance of the printed word in consolidating languages and standardising their forms however, the ‘old sacred languages’ that Anderson puts forward – Latin, Greek and Hebrew – were perhaps not as sacred as he presumes. Anderson argues that: ‘In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralised, and territorialised.’ For Anderson, it was this process that led to the modern self‐conceived nations. Imagined national communities emerged with print‐capitalism and the mass publication of texts in vernaculars. The emergence of capitalism purportedly resulted in a radical break with the medieval past. The first problematic assertion is that prior to modernity the medieval period's sacred languages and scripts provided the basis for universal religious communities. ![]() Although the term has caught the imagination of many researchers, the concept of the ‘imagined community’ is based on a number of questionable premises. It is rare to find an analysis of nationalism that does not invoke Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, first published in 1983 and then reprinted in 1991. ![]()
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