ERNiE now online
CORE AdminSPIN is proud to announce that the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism is now publicly online at www.romanticnationalism.net
Over the last five years SPIN has been preparing, with the help of hundreds of scholars in dozens of countries, the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (ERNiE). ERNiE is intended as a resource for the comparative-historical study of national movements, in particular in the century between Napoleon and the Paris Peace Conference.
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ERNiE foregrounds the importance of culture, both as a stimulus and as a platform for national consciousness-raising. The cultural fields covered by ERNiE range from language policies to visual arts, from folklore to the historical novel and from music and commemorative festivals to architecture and design.
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In highlighting the agency of cultural activism in national movements, ERNiE also aims to show how these cultural activities, rather than being separate phenomena in different countries, were part of, and inspired by, transnational vogues sweeping across Europe in the wake of Romanticism. While affecting different nationalities in different ways, these cultural currents also formed a transnational mode of exchange and a communicative medium for cross-border influences between national movements.
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In its organization, ERNiE is different from traditional encyclopedias. Rather than dividing its contents over an A-Z list of separate headword-entries, it aims to make connections visible - connections within and between countries, connections within and between different cutural fields and media, connections between historical actors and between the articles in the encyclopedia itself. These articles are arranged in a thematic matrix setting some 40 cultural currents off against some 50 European nationalities (cultural communities); the articles themelves are heavily hyperlinked and network-visualized in order to highlight their connectedness in these European developments, and come with an extensive repertory of online documentary materials, from writings and paintings to statues, realia and sound fragments.
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SPIN is indebted to the many colleagues who through their generous collaboration have helped make ERNiE possible and who are still helping to complete its coverage. SPIN is happy to make ERNiE available to the international research community as an open-access research resource, free of charge. More on ERNiE, including a user’s manual, on http://romanticnationalism.net.