"Bede, like the Vulgate, normally uses the word "gens", not the word "natio", but in his preface's final paragraph he prefers to use the latter when he reaffirms that he had written the "historia nostrae nationis", the history of our own nation. Here, then, in his preface for King Ceolwulf we see the first verbal appearance of the English "nation"... If the nationalism of intellectuals, the Rousseaus, Herders and Fichtes, precedes the existence of nations, as the modernists argue, and it is their "imagining" which brings a nation into being, then Bede is undoubtedly the first, and probably the most influential, such case. It is just that he wrote his books in the eighth, and not the nineteenth century. In his Northumbrian monastery he did indeed imagine England; he did it through intensely biblical glasses, but no less through linguistic and ecclesiastical ones, and he did it so convincingly that no dissentient imagining of his country has ever since seemed quite credible."
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Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1997), p. 38
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bede
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Bede
Bede (c. 672/673–26 May 735) was an Anglo-Saxon historian, theologian and scientific writer; often called the Venerable Bede. His best-known work, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) was completed in 731.
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