This chapter grapples with the question of what has historically been admitted to the literary canon, via a consideration of comic poetry. Traditionally omitted from literary and language debates, comic poetry flourished especially in Florence, but was also produced in other centres. The chapter begins with Domenico di Giovanni, Burchiello, whose poetry satirised intellectuals and scholarly pursuits while demonstrating a virtuoso command of language, including Latinised poetic forms. It then discusses comic literature in Medici Florence, where poets including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano and Pulci refined this style, generating cultured parodies, and creating new genres such as Pulci’s mock-heroic epic, the Morgante, and allegorical and double-entendre Carnival songs. The final section considers comic poetry beyond Florence, including bilingual macaronic Latin-vernacular verse in Padua, post-Burchiello verse in Rome and Aretino’s pasquinades. The comic-burlesque mode is shown to be coterminous with more prized genres and produced by authors across the class spectrum.

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

In rejecting allegory, Martin Luther rejected far more than a verbal technique of biblical interpretation. He rejected a conception of the nature of revelation and the modes by which God communicated with humankind. He rejected William Durand’s sense of the interreferentiality of Scripture and Creation. Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Martin Bucer, Uly Anders, and Claus Hottinger all rejected an understanding of revelation as mediated through the made world. In so doing, they also rejected Durand’s sense of the made world mediating time. And in doing that, they reconceived just what worship was and what it did.

The second part of this book opens with a title page (Figure 21). In itself, a title page marks one of the many changes that lie between William Durand’s Rationale and the sixteenth century. It belongs to book markets: something that a passer-by might see in a printer’s shop and decide to purchase. Durand’s Rationale was first a manuscript; it, too, came to be printed – in 1459 – one of the earliest medieval works to be printed using moveable type. Print, as we shall see, is also very much a part of our story.

This chapter emphasises the ways in which chivalric poetry remained in dialogue with the everyday culture of the piazza as well as of élite court circles, crossing boundaries between high and low culture, publication in oral performance, writing and print, blending aspects of medieval and Renaissance worlds. Discussion focuses on the evolution of themes and techniques across the three major writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, exploring how their works continue to interact with the oral culture of the canterini. Although each of their three poems constitutes a distinct response, analysis reveals an underlying and continuous relationship with the popular and oral traditions of performed poetry that helped to shape authors’ presentations of their own poems and of the art of poetry itself.

The third chapter of Invisible Fatherland reconstructs and analyzes the symbolic decisions of the Weimar National Assembly, including the adoption of the name Reich, the compromise over the national flag and colors, and fundamentally the revision of the state’s honorary practices. The chapter shows that the flag compromise emerged from both heated debates about the imperial past and impassioned protest against the Treaty of Versailles. The revised honorary practices, on the other hand, aimed to promote equality and inclusion by removing official traditions that had excluded workers and other marginalized groups from state recognition. The chapter argues that the assembly’s symbolic choices represented works of compromise that balanced national heritage and modern state design. These constitutional decisions set the stage for the creation of a cohesive and modern republican style under the Federal Art Custodian.

This chapter concentrates on ways in which poetry established relationships with spirituality, both in conventionally ‘literary’ production and in verse works written for devotional purposes, which have often been accorded lesser aesthetic value in literary scholarship. It argues instead that there is significant common ground between verse hagiography and hagiographic passages in non-devotional poetry, especially when their shared affective strategies and invitations for reader engagement are considered. The chapter focuses on the figure of Clare of Assisi, reviewing how she is represented poetically in clerically oriented works including a Latin verse hagiography, a vernacular lauda for sung performance and in her canonisation papers, and also in key passages from Dante’s Paradiso.

Chapter 5 discusses the relationship between Christians and classical education, and the emergence of Church schools in monasteries and episcopal households. It argues that while the Church never set out to consciously replace or compete with the classical schools, nor to destroy classical literary culture, the Church neither taught classical grammar and rhetoric, nor did it expect such high educational attainments for membership or promotion within its hierarchies. At the same time, the presence of new learning and career opportunities within the clergy, and the increasing rise of asceticism or monasticism indirectly contributed to the marginalisation of traditional classical educational institutions and the disappearance of schools of grammar and rhetoric from public life by the early sixth century.

The concluding chapter reflects upon how the themes and questions explored in the book speak to familiar concerns of families, communities, and societies across time. What is the purpose of education? What do we expect of our education, and in what ways does our pursuit of knowledge and our learning define who we are? The conclusion draws together the arguments from the preceding chapters, considering in what ways the ‘fall’ of Rome meant the end of the schools of grammar and rhetoric in Gaul. Without the superstructure of the Roman empire, the socio-political culture that valued literary education disappeared, and the schools soon followed suit; it was not primarily material changes caused by the political, cultural, and religious upheavals of the fifth century that led to the decline of the schools, but rather marked changes in the attitudes and mindset towards education and learning of the emerging power brokers of post-imperial Gaul – the barbarian kingdoms and the Church.

The eighth chapter of Invisible Fatherland concludes the book with an analysis of the anthology German Unity, German Freedom, published by the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (RfH) in July 1929. Conceived as a school prize for Constitution Day, this richly illustrated and carefully bound “memorial book” (Gedenkbuch) weaves the histories of diverse and often antagonistic subcultures into a shared memory. The strength of this “anthological museum” (Barbara M. Benedict) lies in its inclusive approach. Framing this inclusivity as a strength, the volume’s editor described its multivocality as a history “rich in contradictions.” Yet, by aiming for the broadest measure of representation, the anthology also destabilized the political boundaries of Weimar democracy. This chapter thus underscores that securing liberal democracy’s greatest strength – its inclusivity and openness – depends on sustained collective commitment to the democratic project.

This chapter explores the rapid expansion of long-form narrative verse in medieval Italy, from a literary horizon dominated by lyric in the 1200s to the presence of a substantial and innovative corpus of vernacular narrative poetry by the start of the 1400s. It reviews formal and metrical innovations that supported the development of medieval Italian narrative verse, as well as analysing the themes and the conceptions of authorship that the poets articulate. The forms reviewed begin with couplet and sonnet as vehicles for narrative poetry in the later Duecento, and move on through Dante’s invention of terza rima, to Trecento terza rima and ottava rima production by poets from Boccaccio and Petrarch to Fazio degli Uberti, Frezzi and Nadal. The chapter explores the adventures in and with narrative that established long-form poetry’s important place within the emerging Italian poetic tradition across the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The fifth chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the relationship between the Weimar Republic’s symbolic legitimacy and far-right political violence. It focuses on the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by nationalist fanatics in June 1922. The chapter explores how the republican government rallied public support and reinforced the republic’s authority. Rathenau’s state funeral and pro-democratic mass rallies united Germans across class and faith in mourning and defiance. The republic’s response framed the murder as part of a broader pattern of far-right violence, implicating even the more respectable factions of the far right in extremist crimes. This framing allowed Weimar democrats to discredit their political opponents and strengthen democratic alliances. The chapter argues that Rathenau’s funeral marked a pivotal moment when a democratic symbolism of sacrifice and solidarity emerged. This moment shows how symbolic acts can fortify democratic ideals during periods of political crisis.

The image in Plate 13 is now housed in the City Museum of Münster. The museum dates it to 1491. On the back, their website informs us, is the name of an otherwise unknown painter, Seewald. The museum lists it as “Faces without Eyes,” in which the eyes of all but Christ and two others have been “carefully removed such that one can often see the wood beneath.” The online description glosses the removal of the paint designating eyes as “destructions,” evoking “the immediate association” of “iconoclasts of the Reformation period.” As the Museum’s website suggests, there is a long tradition of using the word “iconoclasm” to name a part of what happened in the sixteenth century and a rich and dense body of scholarship on “the destruction of art.” But, as the painting materializes, the word has never fit as a name for what Evangelicals did.