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

In The Devil's Historians, Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant seek to address how political actors on the right—fascists, white supremacists, religious extremists—misrepresent, misuse, and weaponize medieval history to advance their ideologies. Both its introduction and subsequent chapters “debunk” “myths” (p. 12) about the Middle Ages perpetuated in culture and political discourse. The introductory section counteracts perceptions regarding, for instance, medieval illiteracy, lack of individuality, and heteropatriarchy. The remainder of the book offers chapters on the relationship of Medieval Studies to histories of nationalism; the use of the Crusades in anti-Muslim warmongering; the preoccupation of American hate groups with the Middle Ages; gender and chivalry; and ways that idealizing a chimerical pure history can fuel religious extremism in many faiths. In its demonstrations of the misprision of the Middle Ages, The Devil's Historians consistently undergirds contemporary events, such as the 2018 Tree of Life and 2019 Aotearoa massacres and Brexit, with a medieval archive. Its chapters also trace a useful cultural history of political medievalism, with examples including Sir Walter Scott, Punch, Wagner, and The Birth of a Nation.For The Devil's Historians, transforming a wide audience's understanding of the Middle Ages represents a form of antiracist political education. It hopes for a future of “progressive medievalisms” for and by “those who want to make the world more inclusive” (p. 160). But in espousing a fundamentally liberal position, The Devil's Historians ultimately supports the white supremacy it aims to critique and undermines liberatory transformation in the world. The Devil's Historians has every right to adopt a liberal position in its political project, but its self-presentation as opposing racism and neofascism requires greater clarity about its position's limits and alternatives. Perhaps The Devil's Historians implicitly advocates incremental or reformist technique, which would comport with its progressive stance. But if so, it would, again, need to gesture toward a history of debate about the efficacy and limits of such practices. Formally, the book accomplishes something crucial by drawing Medieval Studies into an activist imperative. Its position, however, casts into relief how much further we must go.In its use of terms like patriotism, multiculturalism, and diversity, The Devil's Historians weaves into itself the counterinsurgency of liberalism and neoliberalism. While the authors recognize a continuum between “patriotism” and “nationalism,” they grant the former “neutral” associations—“simple as pride in one's country” (p. 29)—and they describe medievalism as something that could appear “charmingly patriotic” (p. 55). But what to the slave is the Fourth of July? Some would view opposition to patriotism to be just as necessary as opposition to nationalism in targeting white supremacy, but the book's perspective does not allow it to confront this possibility. “Multiculturalism” (p. 65) designates a positive quality: interaction among cultures. “Diversity” operates similarly (pp. 25, 75, 102). But as Jodi Melamed observes, neoliberal institutions coopt terms like multiculturalism and diversity to preserve the status quo. Sierra Lomuto warns that this risk exists in Global Middle Ages fields: admiring the medieval world for its globality or “diversity” does not undo what Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul identify as the colonial ideologies that shape approaches to premodernity. Geraldine Heng recognizes that celebrating multiculturalism—in the Middle Ages and now—effectively contains the threat that difference poses. In The Devil's Historians, diversity and multiculturalism obstruct challenge to the status quo in further ways. The authors establish different kinds of medieval diversity by arguing that international Viking trade ensured that northern Europe was not a “pure” white place and that many European nobles (“French, Spanish, English, and German”) intermarried (pp. 48–51). But we might also ask how, at various levels of material life, such interactions pave the way for capitalist, imperialist systems that consolidate the power of whiteness. Reading the authors’ account made me recall Malcolm X's “Message to the Grassroots” that all in the global struggle for freedom must keep sight of European nations’ shared white imperialist and colonizing history and present. Asserting premodern spaces as multicultural obscures opportunities to identify their early role in global oppression. The authors acknowledge the visible medieval engines of “spiritual condition . . . diagnosed by looking at a person's body,” “geographical determinism,” and overtly racist representational practices (pp. 99–101). But naming these phenomena as “bias” (p. 99), or “prejudices” that some and not others felt (pp. 101–102), does not adequately elucidate racialized power imbalance as a system.Relatedly, the book's use of the term “racists” damages emancipatory projects because it foregrounds the racism in individual people to the concealment of structures, a strategy Sara Ahmed has discussed. A section dealing with medieval knighthood and the KKK asks: “What draws modern racists so strongly to the medieval past?” (p. 81). This question implies that racists are a discrete group of people that does not include the authors, their readers, or, for that matter, me. The titular “devil” performs similar work. Framing the inquiry around racists rather than systemic racism, a “retrograde and horrific” (p. 27) epiphenomenon and not something that implicates us all, demobilizes liberatory work. The book depends on this strategy because it posits opposing racism as “changing minds and hearts” (pp. 94–95), a liberal humanist preoccupation with the individual's capacity to recognize “connections with other human beings that can stretch across time” (p. 149). Such tactics obscure what structurally divides us; they also countermand the possibility of taking action in solidarity with others to target oppressive power structures without the requirement to feel personal sympathy with one another.The Devil's Historians reflects a dynamic whereby the liberal values that overtly condemn oppression in fact structurally undermine resistance to that oppression. For this reason, I have concerns about how this book will shape visions of political action and possibility in Medieval Studies and beyond. Identifying interactions between medievalist scholarly practices and the anticapitalist, decolonial, abolitionist work that the end of white supremacy requires is a long, difficult undertaking. Finding ourselves in a(nother) moment of reexamination and instability in our field's history, medievalists should take the opportunity to resist immediately reinscribing the liberalism that characterizes most academia in favor of a sustained exploration of more interventionist alternatives. A Medieval Studies that opposed white supremacy would have to fight for eliminating upper-level university administrators, protecting all workers in universities and their proximate communities, eradicating carceral power (from abolishing cops to reenvisioning pedagogy), and creating free access to education and the conditions that make learning possible. The Devil's Historians’ discursive approach to antiracism does not equip its readers to investigate their capacities for the direct action that these aims demand.Privileging dialogue (the story of Derek Black pp. 94–95) furthermore prevents The Devil's Historians from responding analytically to the broader tactical landscape required to combat the white supremacist structures—in their many manifestations—that the book criticizes. The authors trace relations among race, class, and the status of the worker to locate “roots” of modern racism. Medieval romance, for instance, ties elite social status to whiteness through the latter's indication of the lack of obligation to perform labor (pp. 97–98). The authors also explicate chivalry's implicitly violent nature, particularly toward nonelite women, “peasants,” and “common people” (pp. 105–107). These sections, unlike others, do not recuperate the Middle Ages but debunk idealized conceptions of medieval romance and chivalry, describing them instead as foundationally oppressive in terms of race, class, and gender. Thus, the KKK's self-declaration as chivalric is apt. But how does this reading help us to understand nondiscursive resistance, particularly given the invocation of workers and work? How do medieval conceptions of labor through race, class, gender, and response to violent power inflect recent global histories of labor justice as well as justifications of defensive violence in related political action? The book's liberal nonmilitancy blocks this analytic trajectory. Contemporary direct action is not outside the book's purview: it discusses Charlottesville 2017 and Berkeley 2018 (pp. 88–89, 95). But it cannot present these events with tactical comprehensiveness because its framework does not accommodate non-state-sanctioned action beyond conversation. The book describes neofascist action while neglecting to acknowledge the work of antifascist counterprotesters in both cities, particularly their refusal to cede space to fascists/cops in Berkeley. Disregarding antifascist practice, The Devil's Historians fails to elucidate both events’ full political lesson. It rhetorically endorses antifascism while hindering access to strategies of antifascist action.The Devil's Historians crucially encourages its audience to engage as activists. I hope that other books will offer will offer other forms of that engagement, building, for instance, upon the work of Carissa Harris, which deepens our alignments with modern embodied resistance by exploring medieval responses to violent power through intersections of gender, race, and class. Books that at once situate themselves as medievalist and adopt a political objective need to address what, specific to our work as medievalists, can move us beyond academia's liberalism to a further sphere. For this is an essential part of the liberation from the white supremacy that lives in us all, not just in the devil we don't know.