The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past

by Amy S. Kaufman

When we’re presented with multiple perspectives on history, we can determine whether someone is misusing the past or wielding history as a weapon not just by checking the facts (although that can be useful), but by examining which stories they choose to tell, the purpose behind their stories, and the effects those stories have in the present day.

This is the essence of Historiography... understanding why people write what they do... and how their biases effect their use (and misuse) of the past.

But when histories are rewritten or ignored, when common misunderstandings are manipulated, or when the past is used to promote prejudice, oppression, and complacency in the face of injustice, these are misuses.

Columbus wasn’t a maverick. He simply didn’t trust the experts.

So Columbus was the Renaissance version of an anti-masker.

It’s also the way that Braveheart mythologizes the Scottish Highlanders as “noble savages,” pure and uncorrupted, allegedly representing the essence of their nation.

Braveheart’s nationalist propaganda depends on the myth that a distinctly Scottish spirit developed in raw, uncorrupted isolation from the rest of the world. But in real life, medieval Scottish and English aristocrats held lands on both sides of the border simultaneously, the lowland Scots and the English across the border were more-or-less indistinguishable, and the highlanders were not that distinct from their cousins across the sea in Ireland.

THE SAME nationalist medievalisms that swept Europe during the nineteenth century inspired some of the worst war crimes and human rights abuses of the twentieth century.

For the vast majority of Muslims, the word jihad is simply the internal, everyday spiritual struggle to be a better person. But radicals like bin Laden seized on the term and used it to mean something violent. The Western media hasn’t helped, often further equating jihad with violence in their audience’s minds.

The white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, who erect confederate monuments, who dress up like little boys playing knight with dangerous, grown-up weapons, profess a passion for all things medieval, but they really aren’t interested in learning about history. Instead, they want to live in a fantasy world in which the most important and most powerful people look exactly like the image they see staring back at them in the mirror. And they want to rest of us to be forced to live in that world too.

Finding positive representations of people of color throughout medieval art and literature, even in places where people imagine that the only inhabitants were white, is relatively easy.

giving a person extraordinary beauty, nobility, and strength is just a backwards medieval thing, you should note that it persists in some of our most enduring popular culture. Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings has the right to rule Gondor because of his ancestry, which also gives him extraordinary longevity. Modern versions of Arthurian legend keep the medieval trope that Arthur’s noble blood allows him to pull the sword from the stone and rule England. Many of our most famous superheroes—Batman, Black Panther, Superman, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Arrow, Iron Man—are either royalty in their own realms or members of the aristocracy. The question of Rey’s parentage that consumed Star Wars fans since Episode VII’s release focused exclusively on the Jedi, and when she seemed to have been sired by nobody in particular, some fans were outraged. Fan complaints may have contributed to J.J. Abrams’s decision to reveal Rey to be a member of Jedi aristocracy in Episode IX; she spent much of that film struggling with the evil “in her blood.”

Fictional instances of violence against women are used as a shortcut to make medievalism seem authentic. But they also shape modern culture, and not just with the smug but false assurance that we are better than our past.