Wollenberg,
Daniel, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (Leeds: Arc Humanities
Press, 2018)
Reviewed by Andrew Elliott (aelliott@lincoln.ac.uk)
For a short volume
of only 91 pages, Daniel Wollenberg’s Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics
has managed to cover a surprisingly wide, and singularly impressive, range of
examples and ideas. The quality and range of the book stands as a testament
both to Wollenberg’s clarity of expression as well as to the value and growing
confidence of the ARC Humanities Press’s Past Imperfect series. Perhaps even
more impressive is that Wollenberg’s study of political medievalism has done so
with a range of different audiences in mind, offering at least two levels of
reading. On one level, he introduces a complex interdisciplinary issue in an
informative and substantive way to a reader unfamiliar with political
medievalism, or indeed medievalism as a whole. Such a feat is often
underappreciated, but here it is obvious the extent to which such an accessible
introductory text is only made possible by a genuine scholarly talent and
profound understanding of the topic.
On the second
level, the short text uses its three introductory case studies to weave a
broader, more nuanced critique of the ways in which the medieval
imagery/imaginary links to a broader discursive strategy aimed at fellow
scholars in the field. For those who are more versed in the discussions of
political medievalism, this second level is also profound, thoughtful and well
written, and makes a new contribution to the growing literature on uses of the
medieval past outside of the university campus.
Those familiar
with Wollenberg’s other works will of course know him as an astute historian of
philosophy and historical thought, which is in part what allows him to navigate
between these two audiences with ease. Here, too, he follows through three
short case studies with perspicacity and tenacity through a range of contexts
and uses. The result is a small book filled with big ideas, which engages with
complex and slippery notions of white identity, vituperative History wars, and
the often contradictory stakes in the medieval past to which the players of
today’s political dramas variously lay claim.
The book’s
complexity and deftness is well illustrated by the taut and careful structure
which governs, and in many ways regulates, the flow of arguments. Consider, for
instance, the palindrome of the book’s introduction and postscript: whether
intentionally or not, Wollenberg uses a kind of structural chiasmus in order to
make a broader rhetorical point. He begins with the account of a
self-proclaimed French ‘patriot’ and his sad suicide at the altar of Notre Dame
in Paris, in support of a Far-Right anti-immigration platform. Wollenberg’s
discussion of that gesture’s futility leads him into the complex nexus of
ideological exchanges between politicians and their voter bases in Europe, and
the parallels with US politics, up to and including Donald Trump. It then
discusses the ways in which Trump’s co-option of the medieval has both built on
earlier instances of political medievalism (as illustrated by Bruce Holsinger),
as well as taking a scarcely-veiled brand of white nationalism and white
supremacism into the mainstream.
The remainder of
the book mines the ways in which contemporary politics, particularly US
politics, makes use of a very specific set of assumptions about the Middle
Ages, and the interactions between these ahistorical uses and other political
uses of the past. However, after this discussion, the postscript (which acts as
a second conclusion) demonstrates that same transition in reverse, pointing to
the ways in which the mainstream of extremism, white nationalism and the
so-called alt-right in the USA has impacted on European populism in turn. The
subtle point brought out by this structural mirroring is that these are not
isolated cases, taking place in hermetically-sealed, ideological vacuums, but a
broader trend by and through which fringe groups are able to call on and to
each other by, say, the ‘rediscovery’ of the medieval origins of whiteness, as
Chapter Two demonstrates. A secondary point to emerge from the bookending is
its emphasis on the fundamental fluidity of non-scholarly medievalism, and the
extent to which political medievalism leaves behind the traditional territory
of neomedievalism. These are not one-to-one correlations with the medieval
past. Instead, the political medievalisms studied by Wollenberg are part of an
extremely complex discourse in which history becomes what is useful and
expedient. As Wollenberg puts it, in this mode, “the past is in the eye of its
beholder”; when two accounts come into conflict, “for both camps, the problem
is the bad history of their opponents.”[1]
Given such a
complex project, Wollenberg does not always manage to strike the perfect pitch.
Chapter Two’s discussion of Anders Behring Breivik, for instance, takes a lot
of knowledge for granted to connect the dots. Beginning with a brief discussion
of Breivik’s murder of unarmed teenagers, the discussion moves rapidly from
Breivik into “Generation Identity”, and within ten pages Wollenberg has linked
both factors to broader far-right youth movements in the USA, all of whom exploit
the medieval past for a range of reasons, albeit with broadly similar rhetoric.
Wollenberg knows this perfectly well, as his exceptionally insightful article
on Breivik makes clear, but in his goal to cover the breadth and to show how
far the rabbit hole of medievalism goes, the specifics become—for me at least—a
little hard to follow when some of the threads are not made clear.
Nevertheless,
given the range and ability of this book, Medieval Imagery in Today’s
Politics represents a lively, authoritative, thorough, persuasive, and
insightful study of the ways in which the medieval has come to be exploited in
the service of modern political movements. It builds beautifully on other
debates by Shichtman and Finke, D’Arcens, Holsinger, Perry and through The
Public Medievalist’s series on race and racism, debates to which I myself
have also made a contribution. More than this, however, it moves the discussion
onwards to show both how horrifyingly natural the co-option of the past has
become for contemporary politics, and why as medievalists and medievalismists
we should care about it. As Wollenberg concludes in the last line of his book,
“anyone who seriously studies the Middle Ages should be vigilant.” (90) This
book offers a great illustration why these debates matter.
Andrew B.R. Elliott
University of Lincoln
