This chapter explores the origins and early development of the sonnet, from its invention in Sicily at the court of Frederick II and across its evolution among the Tuscan poets up to the late-Duecento stilnovo. Far from being ‘closed’ or monadic, sonnets often appeared in dialogic exchanges (tenzoni) between multiple authors. Focusing on the theme of love, the chapter explores how sonnets were used between the 1220s and 1290s to explore philosophical, moralistic and affective aspects of a dominant medieval literary theme, in poems by Giacomo da Lentini, Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, and their various poetic correspondents. Close readings demonstrate how sonnets could be used to showcase rhetorical ability across a range of styles and registers, asserting authorial individuality via formal as well as thematic means, and generating either closed or dialogic meanings in different material and textual contexts.

The fourth chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the work of the Federal Art Custodian (Reichskunstwart). Led by art historian and Werkbund member Edwin Redslob, this government office played a pivotal role in shaping the Weimar Republic’s modern and functional representational style. Redslob’s responsibilities included designing federal service flags, seals, coins, and postage stamps, orchestrating nationwide festivities, and reimagining the architecture of railway stations, canals, post offices, and customhouses. His ambitious redesign of the republic’s official symbolism challenges the notion that Weimar democracy was deliberately anti-ritualist. Instead, his work demonstrates that Weimar republicans clearly recognized the importance of symbolically legitimating the nascent democratic state. While Redslob embraced modern design principles, he also wrestled with how to preserve elements of the Kaiserreich’s heritage. This tension in the republic’s official symbolism continues to resonate with contemporary debates about cultural heritage and the politics of memory.

This chapter discusses the means by which poetry reached its audiences in the period 1450-1600, covering verse produced in classical languages and in different forms of Italian vernacular. The advent of print in the mid-1400s provided authors and readers with a new medium for accessing and sharing poetry, without diminishing the importance of manuscript diffusion, or of oral recitation in live performance, whether in elite, domestic or popular settings. As the chapter shows, the three media were exploited simultaneously by contemporary writers, with thoughtful attention to the appeal, benefits and limitations of the different possibilities for engaging with patrons and public afforded by each means. It discusses the advantages of oral, manuscript or print transmission in relation to questions of prestige, reputation and financial gain or loss, with reflection on the multiple agents involved in putting poetry into circulation, from writers and performers to editors, printers and vendors.

On an upper floor of the Tridentine Diocesan Museum in a series of darkened rooms the walls are lined with glass cases. Inside them are vestments. It is yet one more measure of our great distance from William Durand. Chasubles, copes, surplices, and dalmatics are displayed as fragile matter: behind glass in cases controlled for temperature, moisture, and light. Chasubles are arranged in chronological order along one wall; copes, surplices, and dalmatics, fewer in number, are in other cases. It is not merely that all are separated from the persons who, Durand’s word, used them – as they would have been when those persons were not celebrating a Mass. Nor is it that they are fixed in place and separated from one another. We come closer when we recognize that all have been removed from their place, the place of worship, but that, too, still is only part of their transformation. All are kept permanently physically and spatially isolated both from those persons and also from the place with which they had so complexly participated in the meaning of the Mass. They have become objects, their intricate embroidery now the focus of our gaze.

This chapter explores the mechanics of commentary and the processes of canonisation for two of the ‘crowns’ of Italian literature, Dante and Petrarch, from Boccaccio’s foundational editorial work in the mid-Trecento upto the mid-Quattrocento. Both these authors’ works were extensively copied and discussed in various media over this period, and the chapter explores topics such as the early Dante commentary tradition, interlocutors such as Boccaccio and Bruni, and the material dimensions of their commentarial traditions in manuscript and print. Commentary and canonisation are shown to be historically contingent and constantly evolving concepts. Dante and Petrarch are increasingly discussed in direct relation to each other as time goes on, culminating in Bembo’s definitive canonisation of Petrarch as the vernacular poet par excellence. Throughout, the chapter considers how agents and readers materially construct and authorise interpretation, and how this intersects with wider cultural debates around the legitimacy and value of the vernacular.

This chapter discusses the information design of early Italian lyric as it is produced and transmitted in multiple media formats, including manuscript, early print and the twenty-first-century digital artefact. Storey critiques the distinct methodological approaches of authorial textual genetics, traditional Italian literary philology and largely Anglo-American material-textual theory in the context of producing a digital textual edition of Petrarch’s partially authorial manuscript MS Vaticano Latino 3195 for the Petrarchive at Indiana University. He stresses throughout the desirability of acknowledging and recording the individual stages in a text’s life, including but not limited to authorial manuscripts. The chapter stresses the function of visual cognition in the apprehension of meaning from the designed page, a feature of reading which has been prioritised in the visual display of the individual leaves of the manuscript in the Petrarchive, and which facilitates apprehension of the shapes of the individual verse types on the page.

Sometime around 1593, William Claxton (d. 1597) gathered memories of Durham cathedral in a scroll. Although he titled it Discription or Breef Declaracion of all the Auncyent Monuments, Rytes and Customs Belonging or Beinge within the Monasticall Church of Durham before the Suppression, it has come to be known as The Rites of Durham, reflecting its primary interest for scholars. It is one of the earliest testimonies to the conceptual shift Evangelicals effected. Individuals remembered specific altars, windows, chapels – discrete things. The “church” had become a box containing objects and dead bodies, within which the faithful gathered. It was no longer a place of worship. It was no longer a made world. In Part II, we turn to the acts that sundered. Here let me simply underline, Evangelicals did not simply recast altarpieces and eternal lamps as mere matter, “objects.” They tore apart the fabric of what Durand and medieval European Christians understood ecclesia to be. Far more than altar or vestment, the word – ecclesia, iglesia, église, Kirche, kerk, kirk, church – altered irrevocably in its content in the sixteenth century.

The second chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines how the Weimar National Assembly asserted and projected its political legitimacy while addressing broader struggles over gender, class, and heritage. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from key political speeches and figures to the spatial arrangements of furniture and decorative choices, the chapter outlines the republic’s emergent symbolic order and emotional tone. In this context, the mediated presence of female delegates in the national assembly revealed the challenge of creating a more inclusive political order in a society still deeply shaped by tradition. The assembly’s negotiation of competing visions of community reflects the difficulty of establishing an open and inclusive democratic order in the aftermath of war and defeat.

The sixth chapter of Invisible Fatherland builds on the analysis of Rathenau’s assassination by examining the wide range of eulogies and obituaries published in its aftermath. These texts served as memory sites, in Pierre Nora’s sense, where Rathenau’s life and death were appraised alongside broader questions about the state and nation. While the many expressions of solidarity revealed gaps and contradictions in the republican imaginary, they also demonstrate that Rathenau’s death gave new momentum to the republican cause. Four weeks after the murder, the federal parliament passed the “Law for the Protection of the Republic” with the required two-third majority. Shortly after, President Friedrich Ebert declared Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied the German national anthem, reclaiming a liberal democratic tradition that had been monopolized by German nationalists. The proclamation coincided with the republic’s Constitution Day on August 11, which is the focus of the following chapter.

The introduction of Invisible Fatherland lays the historiographical and conceptual groundwork for the book’s empirical chapters. The literature review traces the shift in Weimar studies from teleological narratives of inevitable collapse to a more balanced view of the first German democracy. Drawing on Jan-Werner Müller and Jürgen Habermas, the author clarifies the concept of constitutional patriotism by distinguishing it from civic and ethnic nationalism. She critiques the homogenizing tendencies of Weimar political thought, particularly Rudolf Smend’s influential theory of symbolic integration, for limiting our understanding of the republic’s original and innovative political culture. Finally, the introduction engages the work of scholars such as David Kertzer, Michael Walzer, and William Reddy to prepare for an empirical study of the republic’s symbolic style and emotional tone. Altogether, the introduction establishes an analytical framework for recovering Weimar’s constitutional patriotism and its relevance to contemporary debates on democratic resilience.

This chapter consider a selection of authors usually known for their contributions to the visual arts rather than their writing. Framed via the long-standing simile ‘ut pictura poesis’ [as is painting, so is poetry], it provides not only a critical reflection on the relationships between the ‘sister arts’, but also a historicised overview of the poetic writings of a number of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italian artists, including Raphael’s father Giovanni Santi. The chapter explores Michelangelo as poet, then Raphael’s work, first addressing the relationship between the verbal and the visual in drafts of poems that appeared alongside sketches for his frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura, and then his visual depictions of poetry in the Parnassus fresco and the figure of Poetry in that room. The comparison of written word and visual image illuminates the dialogue between word and image during the Italian Renaissance, and within the works of a single artist.

This chapter considers the status and achievements of Giovanni Boccaccio as lyric poet, problematising the historiographical biases which have historically relegated him to third place among the tre corone and reassessing the breadth of his poetic experimentation in the vernacular and in Latin. The first section surveys the polycentric and partial editorial and transmission history of his Rime, while the second considers those poems which reprocess and recombine the words of other texts, i.e. the Argomenti to Dante’s Commedia and the Amorosa visione’s acrostic sonnets. The third section considers lyrics which are embedded in other texts, such as the Decameron’s songs, and the chapter concludes with his Latin poetry, including his Carmina and Buccolicum carmen, which demonstrate his equal facility in Latin composition. Boccaccio’s lyrics are shown to be woven throughout his vast corpus, while his relentless experiments in poetic form provide an under-recognised model for subsequent generations of poets.

Preparing the ground for a broadly contextualize study of Weimar constitutional patriotism, the first chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the symbolic forms and practices of the German Kaiserreich from its foundation in 1871 through World War I to the November Revolution of 1918. The analysis highlights the progressive nationalization of imperial symbols and their ability to resonate beyond social, political, and regional divides. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of the return of German troops to Berlin at the end of the war. The official welcome parades in the German capital, marked by symbolic openness and ambiguity, reveal the tension between imperial continuity and revolutionary transformation. By focusing on the emerging republic’s shifting symbolic order during this liminal moment between war and peace, the chapter illuminates the persistence of imperial legacies alongside the possibilities for new, democratic forms of political belonging.

The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.