Studies in Medievalism XXXI

Essays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims.

Essays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims.

Like its two immediate predecessors, this volume tackles the most pressing and contentious issue in medievalism studies: how the Middle Ages have been subsequently deployed for political ends. The six essays in the first section directly address that concern with regard to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges's contemporaneous responses to the 1871 Commune; the hypocrisy of the Robinhood App's invocation of their namesake; misunderstood parallels and differences between the Covid-19 pandemic and medieval plagues; Peter Gill's reworking of a major medieval Mystery play in his 2001The York Realist; celebrations of medieval monks by the American alt-right; and medieval references in twenty-first-century novels by the American neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's seven articles as they examine widely discredited alt-right claims that strong kings ruled medieval Finland; Norse medievalism in WWI British and German propaganda; post-war Black appropriation of white jousting tournaments in the Antebellum South; early American references to the Merovingian Dynasty; Rudyard Kipling's deployment of the Middle Ages to defend his beliefs; the reframing of St. Anthony by Agustina Bessa-Luís's 1973 biography of him; and post-medieval Portuguese reworkings of the Goat-Foot-Lady and other medieval legends.

I: Politics and Medievalism (Studies)
Public Medievalism: Fustel de Coulanges and the Case for "Diplomatic Negotiations" - Elizabeth Emery
Rob from the Rich: The Neomedievalism of the Robinhood Stock App - Valerie B. Johnson
Pandemic Politics: Deploying the Plague - M. J. Toswell
Peter Gill and the Queering of the York Realist - Kevin J. Harty
To be a Monkish Man: Medievalism, Monasticism, Education, and Gender in the United States' Culture Wars - Jacob Doss
Political Fictions: The "Aryan" Medievalisms of Harold A. Covington - Helen Young

II: Other Responses to Medievalism
The Ancient Finnish Kings and their Swedish Archenemy: Nationalism, Conspiracy Theories, and Alt-Right Memes in Finnish Online Medievalism - Reima Välimäki and Heta Aali
The Politics of Norse Medievalism in the British Press During the First World War - Grace Khuri
A Tournament of Black Knights - Alexandria, Virginia, 1865 - Emancipationists Mobilize the Medieval - Whitney Leeson
"Eternal Legends of the Crimes of Man": The Merovingian Dynasty in Early American Media (1720-1820) - Gregory I. Halfond
Writing, Men, Empire: Kipling's Medievalist Imagination - Richard Utz
Agustina Bessa-Luís's Reinvention of St. António: A Loving Saint without an Altar - Ana Maria Machado
Celtic Imaginary: From Medieval Dama-Pé-de-Cabra to Nineteenth-century Patriotic Versions - Angélica Varandas