Studies in Medievalism XXIX: Politics and Medievalism (Studies) ed. by Karl Fugelso (review)

The most recent volume of Studies in Medievalism offers five shorter essays on contemporary political uses of medievalism and nine longer essays on other appearances of medievalism across multiple genres. Esther Liberman Cuenca explores how failed American vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin appropriated the vilely anti-Semitic charge of blood libel from the Middle Ages to characterize herself as a victim. Sean Griffin looks at the ways both Vladimir Putin and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have manipulated the medieval life and legend of Saint 'Equal-of-the-Apostles' Prince Vladimir to justify continued Russian aggression toward Ukraine. A third misreading of the Middle Ages, Daniel Wollenberg argues, informs the embrace of the 732 Battle of Tours not only by the white supremacist Australian terrorist who murdered fifty-one people in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, but also by those who would excuse the actions of the Trump administration at the United States– Mexico border.

Linkage between Brexit and the medieval is hardly surprising, as the argument to stay or to leave is inevitably tied to what the terms 'Britain' and 'England' have meant now and in the past. Two essays in this volume discuss this linkage in very different ways. Borrowing vocabulary from Patrick J. Geary's The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2002), Andrew B. R. Elliott sees the argument over Brexit as an extension of a pan-European crisis of identity that was part of the fallout from the end of the Cold War. The defenders of Brexit do not so much celebrate their nation as instead summon up an imagined medievalist notion of 'us' versus 'them' in order to vanquish those now deemed enemies of the people. Christopher Jensen sees Brexit as backdrop for Joe Cornish's 2019 film The Kid Who Would Be King; the problem with Jensen's reading of the film is that its final admonition borders on the Pollyanna-esque. Patrick Stewart's Merlin tells the central characters that children have an abundance of inherent goodness and nobility and that the future is theirs. The film is not exactly a cutting-edge commentary for our times. Nor is Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), which Mary Behrman takes to task for erasing the Welsh elements from the Arthurian legend. Behrman may give Ritchie too much credit, though, given the dismal critical reception that his film received.

Political uses of medievalism can be found across a variety of genres, as the remaining essays in this volume show. Ali Frauman finds, not surprisingly, that the internet can be both a blessing and a curse, especially when Alternative Right online fora distort the medieval to support their beliefs by filtering discrimination towards one historically oppressed group through an ostensible celebration of another. Laura E. Cochrane argues how medievalism and political polemic inform an 1880 portrait of the child-emperor Honorius by Jean-Paul Laurens. M. J. Toswell lays the groundwork for a reconsideration of the importance that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow played in establishing American medievalism.

Victoria Yuskaitis and Laura Varnam address the influence of another historical figure, Julian of Norwich, on medievalism's legacy, though in decidedly different ways. Yuskaitis argues for an archaeological investigation of the remains of Julian's cell and belongings as a means to explicate her writings and those of her colleagues. Varnam looks for evidence of Julian in an entirely different place, the Harry Potter series, which she argues subtly promotes a Julian notion of pity.

The relationship between medievalist texts and maps informs Anna Fore Waymack and John Wyatt Greenlee's discussion of the functions of fantasy maps in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, and the authors of other fantasy medievalisms. Usha Vishnuvajjala finds evidence of manipulation of the medieval...