Andrew B.R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media
(D.S. Brewer, 2017), 223pp.
Reviewed by Daniel Wollenberg (dwollenberg@ut.edu)
Medievalisms, Andrew Elliott argues in this important book,
are being amplified and accelerated. As a communication studies scholar,
Elliott focuses his attention on mass media and the increasingly chaotic closed
circuit networks distributing self-referential medievalisms for global
audiences. What is particularly novel here is the distinction made between
intentional medievalism and what Elliott calls banal medievalism, as well as
the communication theory approach that the book takes. Medievalism, Politics
and Mass Media transfers the spotlight of the study of medievalism from
historical, literary, and aesthetic inquiry to communication theory, studying
how new media theory can show us something important about the ways that
medievalisms today are reflections of “sources and patterns of influence and
transmission” (42). The book narrows its focus to online medievalism, and an
important point is made that mass medievalisms feed off of meme culture. The
truth-value or historical accuracy of an image is less important than the
mutual recognition and acknowledgement of an image as a medieval
representative, as a stand-in for an easily identifiable and easily understood
symbol of ignorance, or injustice, or primitiveness, or intolerance, and so on.
Mass media medievalisms do not usually refer to actual history but to blurry
notions filtered through layers of online mediums and commentaries.
Elliott argues that the medieval in political rhetoric since
9/11 reflects “a collective shift in our understanding of [medievalisms’]
function and meaning in modern political discourse” (203). Through its rapidity
and scope, mass media helps undergird the conception of an unbridgeable gap
between us and them, between past and present, recirculating ideas and images
without reflection or analysis. Popular medievalism can only be understood
through appreciating the role that mass media plays in promulgating it.
Medievalisms no longer necessarily refer to the medieval per se, instead
referring to others’ uses of a meme. They take on meaning and gain validation
via mutual identification and re-transmission.
There are eight chapters plus an introduction, with
increasing specificity as the book progresses. Although it is not officially
marked in such a way, the book is essentially divided into two parts: the
introduction and first chapters being the first part, and chapters four through
eight being the second. The introduction and first chapter define terms,
establish methodology, and offer an overview of the work; the second chapter,
with a clever pun for its title (“Getting Medieval on your RSS”), situates the
discourse within the framework of communications theory, and the third chapter
addresses big-picture issues like the Dark Ages and the myth of progress. After
the third chapter, the book moves on to its “second part,” taking something of
a chronological turn, starting with 9/11 and the War on Terror (Chapter 4) and
then moving to Al Qaeda (Chapter 5), Anders Breivik (Chapter 6), the English
Defence League (Chapter 7), and ending with Islamic State (Chapter 8). There
are a handful of helpful full-color images and the book is printed on
high-quality glossy paper.
Al Qaeda, Breivik, the EDL, and Islamic State are
well-chosen focuses of the last four chapters not only because they are all
steeped in the language and imagery of the medieval, but because their use of
mass communication so well illustrates Elliott’s central argument about the
necessity of mass communications to the spread of medievalism. The
copy-and-paste nature of Breivik’s manifesto; the meme culture of nationalist
Islamophobes like the EDL; and the manipulation of mass media and global
commercial and communications networks by Al Qaeda and Islamic State all
demonstrate how and why medievalism spreads so rapidly now. Elliott draws
together many disparate arenas of mainstream and extremist political rhetoric
and action by showing how they deploy medievalisms banally, re-processing and
circulating medieval imagery and rhetoric without actually engaging the Middle
Ages. An impressively broad range of disparate sources are handled deftly and
seemingly effortlessly, from the tweets of soccer fans and members of
Parliament, to the blog posts of white supremacists, to the manifestos of a
white terrorist like Anders Breivik and Islamic terrorists like Islamic State.
The glue binding them together is the copy-and-paste nature of their
medievalism. Identity is constructed and expressed by tropes and memes.
At the core of the book is a term Elliott coins “banal
medievalism,” which is defined as being when medievalisms are deployed without
historical intent and without reference to the Middle Ages. They do not
directly engage medieval texts or buildings or art but instead rely on an
identification with an already-knowing audience who see the medieval as a
cultural shorthand, a representative of pastness, or primitiveness, or racial
and religious solidarity, and so on. In short, Elliott approaches the medieval
as a trope, or perhaps more accurately, as memes, rather than as a discrete
period of history. In such deployments of medieval imagery and rhetoric, there
is an absence of the “authentically” medieval and thus no distinctly medieval
meanings. The Middle Ages thus have become “unconscious sites of unchallenged
heritage,” passing unobserved as a marker of easily understood and digestible
history (16).
A distinction is drawn between the “genuinely medieval” and
the “pseudo-medieval,” but I find this distinction to be somewhat problematic
(14). I wonder whether arguing for the existence or even possibility of a
“genuinely medieval” plays into extremists’ hands by opening up the possibility
that there is a singular path to getting the Middle Ages right, rather than
leaving medieval texts and documents open to – and requiring – continual
interpretation. I also wonder whether it is viable to maintain as sharp a distinction
as this book sometimes does between “regular” (scholarly, academic) medievalism
and medievalism aimed at mass audiences. There is surely an obvious difference
between archival research published in well-documented scholarship and a
“medieval” symbol on the shield of a white supremacist in Charlottesville, but
perhaps the writings and ideas of amateur enthusiasts are not, or ought not to
be, as distinct from academic work as we might assume.
Despite some of the ground here being well-trodden, especially
concerning the idea of the Middle Ages as representative of the primitive,
atavistic, and retrograde (“a catch-all term for anything one wishes to be
disassociated from,” 204), because the “medieval” and the “Dark Ages” are so
pervasive and – to use Elliott’s term, banal – it is useful to see so many
examples of medievalism used in so many different spheres, from governmental
debates to news broadcasts to hotel reviews to sports commentary. Some of the
most effective and productive moments in the book are when Elliott slows down
and really digs into the specific nuances between tweets, online comments and
reviews, and newspaper articles and blog posts. These moments can be
eye-rolling (“I think that it’s like living in the Middle Ages, where you hate
to go outside because the wolves are going to eat your grandchildren,” says a
New York Daily News reporter, p. 69); they can be comical (a negative review on
the website Trip Advisor that calls a hotel medieval for its unreliable Wi-Fi);
they can be dangerous (“I am a Christian and I think there needs to be a
Crusade soon. We need to arm ourselves and…call a Crusade and kill all of
them,” says a commenter on an extremist blog, p. 148). The book is at its best
when Elliott deconstructs the English Defence League logo and traces back the
inspirations and origins of its various parts to Wikipedia entries and Google
Image searches. Moments like this one are essential reading for both
specialists and non-specialists alike, as the book makes a very persuasive case
for the closed-circuit and self-referential nature of medievalism.
The sheer number of these examples of online medievalisms
cited by Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media is staggering. The astonishing
quantity of them cited in this book perhaps proves Elliott’s point: that the
medieval is so much a part of our discourse that most people probably don’t
even notice it anymore. Giving readers so many examples drives home that point
well and insists that we notice what is right in front of us.
Daniel Wollenberg
University of Tampa
