Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media ─ Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century

In 2001, George Bush provoked an uproar by describing his War on Terror as a "Crusade". Ten years later, Anders Behring Breikvik launched a tragic attack on Norway, beginning with a bomb in central Oslo and culminating in a mass shooting on Utoya; it was conceived as the first wave of an Islamic Crusade against Europe, in which Breikvik saw himself as a Templar, member of a group of knights allegedly resurrected in London in 2002 by Paul Rey of the then nascent English Defence League - which would later gain notoriety by harnessing crusade rhetoric and St George as a shorthand for English national identity, just as Le Pen's National Front used Clovis and Joan of Arc as symbols of French nationalism. Though extreme examples, these cases all share a crucial detail: the framing of current political issues in terms of recognisable medieval precedents. When such loaded terms drawn from the past are used in popular culture, scholarly reactions typically question the accuracy of the representation and the suitability of the metaphor. However, the argument of this book is that we need new ways of analysing this kind of medievalism; extending far beyond the concept of anachronism or inaccuracy, references to Crusades, Templars and Vikings affect the way we understand our world. Using theories of communication to examine popular medievalism, the author investigates what effect such medieval terminology can have on a mass-mediated audience and on the understanding of the Middle Ages in general. Andrew B.R. Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lincoln.