The Gothic Republic, British Liberty, and Icelandic Philologists in the Revolutions of 1848

Abstract This article argues that Gothic republican ideas of liberty – defining freedom as independence and participation in lawmaking within the ancient Gothic ‘free state’ – formed an overlooked intellectual background to debates within the Danish composite monarchy during the revolutions of 1848. Focusing on Copenhagen-based Icelandic philologists, it shows that they mobilized the new discipline of comparative-historical philology not as an instrument of nationalism, with which it is usually associated, but to reinvent the Gothic republic. Drawing on Icelandic medieval manuscripts, they constructed an Indo-European genealogy of liberty grounded in a partnership between nobility and people. They thereby recast British liberty as the modern expression of institutions originating not among the Anglo-Saxons but in an Indo-European world extending through Scandinavia to Iceland. In 1848, they translated this genealogy into a political programme reviving open-air assemblies, medieval law codes, juries, and hereditary aristocracy, while modernizing them through British constitutional models. Recovering this programme revises national narratives of 1848, reveals the continuing diversity of nineteenth-century republicanism, and shows how intellectuals on Europe’s peripheries could reshape wider ideas of liberty. Rather than disappearing into nationalism or racialized Teutonism, or necessarily assuming democratic forms, republicanism could provide an aristocratic, anti-national language of resistance to absolutism and national-liberal projects.