![]() We are left with the question of what to do about misrepresentations of the Middle Ages that give cover to extremism. I will be happy to point you to it if you want more detail. A growing body of fine-tuned academic literature makes the same argument. In case you think I’m just making stuff up, or in the event that you have an interest in learning more, here some very good popular and press resources for learning more. In recent years, medieval fairs have become breeding grounds for the Alt-Right. Images like this Der Bannertrager from 1935 are examples of Hitler’s medievalizing efforts.Īnd now, according to a good deal of evidence, the Alt-Right is also discovering the malleability of the imagined medieval as a resource for their racializing, fearmongering, and violence. Both made a range of medieval and medievalizing themes central to their culture war horrors. Hitler and Mussolini, just about a century ago, took the fixation on religious unicity and national origins to extremes. (The evidence is considerably more complex, as I have illustrated in earlier posts problematize Spanishness). They tell us that it was in the medieval period that the English became English, the French became French, Spaniards forged the Spanish nation, etc. ![]() In the nineteenth-century, propagandists across Europe drew upon aspects of the medieval past, real or imagined, in order to confirm nationalities. Early modern Catholics decried the Protestant Reformation for its abandonment of supposed medieval communal solidarities built upon a unitary moral order (the imagined “Catholic Middle Ages” is an anti-Protestant myth that does not fit the evidence of 1000 years of dynamism and change). ![]() I don’t want to be obtuse, so I’ll make my meaning more deliberately: Medieval fairs are ripe spaces for conservatives anxious to confront the present by inventing a mythologized past.Ĭonservatives have always had a special fondness for the medieval. These fantasies, while they have very little connection to the reality of the past, get put to the work of building and confirming nefarious identities in the present. Joking and pedantry aside, what I call ‘the dress-up problem’ is serious one: historical and historicizing make-believe of the medieval fair kind feeds some very dark fantasies. ![]()
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