The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant Andrew B.R. Elliott amy s. kaufman and paul b. sturtevant, The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. viii, 198. isbn: 978–1–487–58784–0. $21.95. Kaufman and Sturtevant are both well known to readers of Arthuriana: Sturtevant has offered insights on film drawn from empirical data collection and is editor of The Public Medievalist, while Kaufman's publication record includes some of the most nuanced and careful readings of medievalism published to date. In The Devil's Historians, Kaufman and Sturtevant have joined forces to deliver a timely and thoughtful exploration of some key misunderstandings about medievalism. Like many of their recent publications, this book is also aimed squarely at the public understanding of the Middle Ages—though there is a great deal of useful content here for scholars, too. At under 160 pages and with a cover price substantially lower than that of the average academic book, it is clear that the authors, and the University of Toronto Press, are determined to remove barriers in reaching that public. Likewise, the deliberately clear prose, the lively style, and the careful avoidance of unnecessary jargon all contribute to what is an eminently readable book. Kaufman and Sturtevant take as their focus the (often highly politicized) misuse of the Middle Ages and offer their book as, among other things, a corrective to some of those misappropriations. Where others (myself included) have done so from the relative safety of the academy, this work deliberately aims at non-academic or undergraduate audiences for an important reason: 'because of the rising tide of white supremacy and its tendency to adopt medieval symbolism, scholars have felt [End Page 88] more urgently that they shouldn't just speak to each other about these issues: they should also be speaking to the public' (p. 93). The book's real strengths lie in the authors' ability to write engaging narratives, properly storyboarded to maintain attention. For instance, in Chapter Five, 'Knights in Shining Armor and Damsels in Distress,' they focus on a pervasive belief in fixed gender identities in the Middle Ages, hijacked by those in the modern era through metaphors of knights, kings and princesses, damsels and chivalry, chastity, purity, and our old friend, sin. Rather than starting off with an in-depth reading of the Roman de Silence, as might seem natural to most of us, the authors invert their chapter on gender to repudiate notions of chivalry in the present, destabilizing the medievalism, breaking it off from its roots, before excavating down to show where the pernicious weeds of modern chauvinism-masked-as-chivalry came from. Eventually, they arrive back at Silence, giving the reader a preformed sense of why the medieval text is so important for understanding gender fluidity. It is in this inverted format that the book acts at its most powerful, in both its subtlety and its attention to audience. To cite another example, there is a deftness and a shrewdness, but also a gritted-teeth determination, in discussing evangelistic Christian purity balls in a chapter on ISIS entitled 'Medievalism and Religious Extremism.' The really savage—and totally correct—point is both obvious and nuanced. On the surface, of course, Randy Wilson's purity balls—a 'medieval-themed prom at which daughters pledge their virginity to their fathers'—are an ideologically repugnant expression of the underlying misogyny of the Biblical Patriarchy movement (pp. 129–32). Of course, the US-based Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is extremist, as an organization built around deep-seated Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, which even the Vatican refuses to classify as Catholic (p. 133). And yet, by splicing these radical fringe movements along with ISIS and the Hindu nationalist Hindutva movement, the book deftly recalibrates the center, removing the us/them, west/rest orientalism which pervades much political commentary. The indisputably obvious result is that they are all extremists in a way that scholarly analysis would take chapters to explain. Throughout, the book challenges the perceived dominance of foundational myths about...