Medieval Past Research Articles

Addressing extremist abuses of medieval pasts: A connection-first approach to narratives of hate

“Hello, brother” were the last words of Haji-Daoud Nabi and the first words to greet the shooter who killed 51 and injured dozens more at Masjid al-Noor and the Linwood Islamic Centre on 15 March 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the aftermath of this devastating attack, the shooter’s motives came to light in the form of a seventyfour- page manifesto and the writing scrawled across his weapons. His manifesto outlined an ideological motive steeped in racism, particularly against Muslims, centering on “The Great Replacement” theory that solidified in France after originating in Serbia. Considering the fact that a maliciously selective and misrepresented reading of history motivated the Christchurch shooter to engage in a horrific act of targeted violence (i.e., a form of violence targeted at a specific person or community because of their identity), this article will propose a pedagogic approach that seeks to build collective resilience to hate within classrooms, schools, and communities. Framed within the broader literature of violence prevention at the intersection of medieval history and education, this article will: a) introduce an illustrative case study that demonstrates the manipulation of history by extremists, with the Christchurch shooting as a culminating outcome intended by the very design of this weaponization and misrepresentation of history; b) offer a pedagogic approach that spotlights the role of connection alongside correction, which nurtures resilience to hate in classrooms and schools by bridging the power of social connectedness in parallel with epistemic concerns regarding the rectification of factual errors or misrepresentations; and c) closes with a call for this pedagogic approach to expand beyond the classroom in order to strengthen the democratic ethos within which members of the public are exposed to the manipulated and fabricated versions of history that exacerbate phenomena such as polarization, Othering, and risk of radicalization.

The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past: An Introduction

'The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past' Special Collection explores how the medieval past is 'curated'—that is, collected, interpreted, and communicated—across both professional and popular society, and takes a particular interest in the ways in which medievalism impacts these acts. In this introduction to the collection, the editors discuss the questions and issues which motived the creation of the collection, and provide an overview of the articles collected.

Medieval Pasts and Eugenicist Futures: Grant Allen, Masculinity and Early English History

ABSTRACT Grant Allen was a Victorian scholar and novelist who published widely on science, literature and history. Embedded within these publications is a fascination with early England, particularly early English masculinity. Allen saw in England's origins a blueprint for the kind of white, hegemonic masculinity he wished to see reproduced not only in contemporary English society and culture but also in the eugenic makeup of the English people as well. By reaching to early English history to legitimise his own visions of imperial white masculinity, Allen weaves a fantasy of medieval male virility into the fabric of his Victorian present. This essay discusses Allen's interest in the social apparatus of gender, contemporary eugenicist discourse and the interpretive potential of an imagined medieval past and argues that Allen uses early English history to justify ongoing colonial projects and to frame white men as the rightful heirs to global power.

Образ Средневековья в трилогии Итало Кальвино «Наши предки»

The article delves into the study of the medieval past in the European historical consciousness and cultural memory after the World War II. Reception and representation of the Middle Ages are considered as constants of the development of European and universal culture. The main subject of analysis is the image of the Middle Ages constructed in the fiction of the period. The focus of the study is the trilogy “Our Ancestors” (1960) by the Italian writer, publicist, literary critic Italo Calvino (1923–1985). The image of the Middle Ages in Calvino’s novels is considered in the context of understanding the European Enlightenment and current historical and philosophical reflection. The ways of constructing the image of the Middle Ages in Calvino’s texts are revealed, also its relationship with history, literature and folklore is examined. The study of the image of the Middle Ages can be useful both for clarifying the peculiarities of historical representations of his time and for understanding the epoch itself, which gave rise to the image.

Medieval re-creation and translation in Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman’s archives: A dialogue

This dialogue brings together two archives: the Derek Jarman collection at Tate Britain and the Edwin Morgan manuscripts at the University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections. Both Jarman and Morgan were queer artists who reforged the medieval past through visual and verbal processes, including scrapbooking, collage, and translation. The dialogue also brings together two critics, Francesca Brooks and E.K. Myerson, who have been responding to these archives through a combination of traditional scholarship and creative practice. Both in their approach to the medieval past and in their multimedia, visio-verbal practices, Jarman and Morgan’s archives are generative, fluid, and expansive spaces that invite embodied, affective, and creative responses. The dialogue explores what it means to be a medievalist working in the modern archive and how our critical approaches to the medieval subjects of our research might be changed and transformed by this work.

Forging the medieval amidst loss: The Public Record Office of Ireland and Ireland’s medieval history

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) in June 1922 during the opening battle of the Irish Civil War, and with it seven centuries of records, historians and archivists have had to be creative in their search for sources for medieval Irish history. In response to this loss, they have forged a distinctive historiographical tradition using records now in English collections, as well as antiquarian transcripts and publications. Beginning with the work of Edmund Curtis in the 1920s, this tradition has sought to list, identify, and edit for publication replacement sources for records lost with the PROI for an Irish and international audience. More recently, scholars have made these collections digitally and publicly accessible worldwide with the CIRCLE and Beyond 2022 Projects at Trinity College Dublin. This article looks at how the lost records and a century of recovery efforts have shaped understandings of Ireland’s medieval past and its colonial relationship with England.

Forging the medieval on Wikipedia

AbstractWikipedia is a major source for public information. Wikipedia materials are proliferated across the Internet of Things, are reused in journalism and social media, and power search engines and digital assistants (Ribeiro et al. 2021; Miz et al. 2020). Yet Wikipedia’s impact on public understanding of the past, particularly our medieval pasts, is under-researched. This article argues for the significance of Wikipedia for medievalists in terms of how it may shape research, pedagogy, and public-facing work. We examine three case studies—articles for the ‘Black Death,’ the ‘Viking Age,’ and ‘Old English literature’—to explore how the medieval is forged, defined by us as crafted and created, ‘on-Wiki.’ We discuss what these forgings suggest about public understanding, desires, and interests, and the ideas about the past that emerge as a result. Our case studies demonstrate varied approaches to Wiki content, including citation review, readings of version histories, and pageview analysis. It is intended that this article provokes further discussion of Wikipedia as a site of medieval public history and inspires our colleagues to engage as critics, editors, teachers, or activists.

Recovering the past for the future: Racibórz after World War II

Abstract This article delves into the post-war urban planning of Racibórz (Ger. Ratibor), a mid-size city in Poland, shedding light on the socialist city’s historical roots and its adherence to socialist urbanism models. Using planning maps and other archival documents, it examines the reconstruction process that aimed at creating green spaces and quality housing, while at the same time revealing its medieval past. The article also investigates the city’s deviation from known recovery patterns and highlights a lesser known approach to creating a city with a national form and socialist content. Overall, this research offers a comprehensive exploration of a reconstruction process in a mid-size city, enriching the understanding of European post-war urban history.

Imaging the Middle Ages: Twenty-First Century Revitalizations at Santiago de Compostela

Abstract: Since the Middle Ages, Santiago de Compostela has been home to one of the most famous pilgrimage destinations in Europe. Throughout its history, its success as a pilgrimage site has most often been signaled by large-scale building projects. This essay addresses how Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (CCG), an architectural complex and cultural center overlooking Santiago de Compostela, mediates and responds to contemporary efforts toward the production and revitalization of the pilgrim experience within the city. While not as obvious as the interventions that occur along the route, the CCG is in fact a materialization of the goals of the revitalization initiative, a vision of secularized touristic pilgrimage for the twenty-first century, which is enacted through Compostela's successful image economy. The twentieth-century revitalization efforts are peculiar for the distinctive nature of their engagement with a medieval past, and the strong connections drawn between modern pilgrimage and its medieval counterpart. This article is concerned with the material evidence of competing interests in the revitalization process and specifically with how they relate to institutional interventions initiated by the regional government. The regional government's interests were often pursued in monumental form: in the late twentieth century, the Xunta operationalized a comprehensive cultural policy that was principally enacted in architecture. Examining the CCG's own past, as well as the medieval narrative of Compostela's history that it materializes, offers a new framework for understanding the role of built space in—and its relation to—the politics of pilgrimage revitalization within the twenty-first-century context.

Introduction: Medieval Cultural Heritage, Then and Now

Abstract: This volume of collected essays contains scholarship on the handling of medieval cultural heritage, broadly conceived. Societies around the world look to the Middle Ages for identity and inspiration, defining the past in light of modern concerns about cultural belonging, claims to political legitimacy, and conceptions of community. The essays in this volume explore such questions as: Who has the authority to decide on cultural heritage matters, and what happens when the heritage of one group is preferred to that of another? What happens to local communities when a site becomes a popular tourist destination or a place for memorializing the past in a way that erases the voices of a particular group of people? What are the lived consequences when claims to cultural heritage define communities along racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional, or historical lines? In bringing together a broad range of global and disciplinary perspectives, this volume aims to extend the conversation about the definition and deployment of the medieval past.

Medieval Futures and the Postwork Romance

Abstract: This essay explores speculative resources in the premodern past as displayed in some contemporary anglophone fiction, with a focus on novels by Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. Among its retrievals, speculative medievalism offers a critical vantage point on ruinous, "neofeudal" futures by fashioning a form of romance narrative centered on workers. The late-fourteenth century English poem Piers Plowman is looked to as a premodern speculative precursor and interlocutor for such versions of the medieval past.

A Century of Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. Rivers of Europe entering the land of the sons of Cain

In 1923, Arthur Kingsley Porter published his ten volumes on Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. This paper takes its anniversary as a chance to look back to how the narrative constructed around Romanesque art in Iberia, the Way to Santiago, and the impact of the Islamic frontier developed and changed under different international and nationalistic scholarship and their agendas. Hopefully, it can also serve to critically reflect on the modes of current instrumentalization of medieval past in Spain’s public sphere and on the great value of Porter’s lessons on art history.

Creating a Place: Identities Shaped by the Material Traces of the Past. Case-study of the Old Town of Užice


 The paper rests on the idea that the meanings and values of a place are flexible and changing, depending on the cultural and social values. The inhabitants of a certain place share the associations concerning it and its built elements. These shared associations or experiences create the perception of unity and shape a community. Various meanings were ascribed to the Old Town of Užice from the second half of the 14th century until 1863, when it was devastated. During the last four centuries of its existence, it presented a threat for the Christian inhabitants, so after its Turkish crew left, “the Serbs hastily destroyed the fort”. The survey conducted in 2013 showed that neither its position at the outskirts of the modern city, nor its special status gained by the administrative protection (granted in 1949) were sufficient to generate the positive attitude by the local population. By the beginning of the 21st century the Old Town was neglected and did not take part in the life of the modern settlement. With the dissolution of the former state and the abandonment of the traditions associated to the anti-Fascist struggle, Užice lost its esteem. The local authorities, dissatisfied by their position in the changed economic and political circumstances, decided to prioritize the rehabilitation of the Old Town in their strategy of the city regeneration. This meant the reconstruction of the Medieval fortress of Nikola Altomanović (14th cent.), and the Turkish period in the development of the Old Town was totally silenced. The official portals emphasize the Medieval past of the Old Town, in accordance with the modern Serbian identity, that was built and is still confirmed by the research and promotion of the Medieval history and its material traces. The narrative of the organic links between the modern nation and the Medieval heritage is fundamentally naturalized, indicating the Authorized Heritage Discourse in action, and the influence of the state and the experts on the relations a community creates towards the past. The processes that led to the reconstruction of the Old Town confirm that the relationship to spaces is not pre-defined by their physical characteristics, nor stable. The example of Užice vividly illustrates that a society always chooses which values should be emphasized, and which are the ones to be silenced or forgotten.

Remarks on Captives and Warriors in an Old Bulgarian Collection of Miracle Stories

When scholars’ efforts are focused on the ethnic, religious and social diversity in certain parts of the Byzantine commonwealth during the middle ages, the hagiographic literature stands out as a key primary source. One such source is a voluminous early tenth-century collection of miracle stories titled A Tale of the Iron Cross. Its essential role when trying to uncover data, specific information and truths about Bulgaria’s medieval past is undeniable. A number of highly informative records have been found and are well-preserved within the covers of this impressive literary work. Many of them have been used repeatedly in various scholars’ academic initiatives and undertakings. However, other Tale’s records, regardless of their unique peculiarities and immeasurable contemporary information, still remain outside of the main research work when it comes to the subject matter of captivity and warfare.

Старата столица Велики Преслав в извори и предания от периода на османското владичество (до началото на XIX в.)

The past glory of Veliki Preslav never faded away, even when the Bulgarians were deprived of their own state. Many researchers and travellers noted the importance of the town in the Bulgarian medieval past and the remembrance of its previous role was retained in the memory of the people. Most important are the records of those authors who were personally acquainted with the imposing buildings of Veliki Preslav. Some of them were looking for the origin of its ruins in Antiquity but others properly connected them with the old Bulgarian capital.

The Lives Have It: Curating the Medieval Past at English Heritage Castles

This paper outlines some of the challenges to the public curation of the medieval past at castles, as experienced in the author’s curatorial capacity at English Heritage. Echoing the work of recent scholarship on the heritage presentation of castles, this paper contends that the breadth of narratives explored on such sites has been limited to a national, male-dominated legacy. This paper outlines key stakeholders in the public curation of castles, as well as the media at the disposal of English Heritage curators, before presenting an approach which centres the historical narrative around people. It argues that, by placing people, past and present, at the centre of the public curation of medieval castles, obstacles and limitations from previous approaches can be overcome. This paper concludes with a critical reflection, outlining some ways in which these challenges have been overcome using this approach at a recent project at Warkworth Castle (Northumberland). The article emphasises the capacity of traditional curatorship interplayed with creative endeavours, to bypass obstacles to telling a compelling but also challenging public history of medieval castles.

Meanings of food in medieval Britain and Ireland: themes

ABSTRACT Food is central to our understanding of the social, economic and cultural history of the medieval past. Its study sits at the nexus of disciplines, of different classes of sources and data, and of different academic approaches, from studies of historical documentation, to the physical remains of food waste, retrieved from archaeological excavation, to the chemical analysis of human bone in isotope studies or organic residues in cooking vessels, and the contributions of anthropology and contemporary food science. Essays in the special issue focus particularly on cereals and food security; and secondly, on questions of food culture.

Editors’ Introduction: The Presence of the Medieval Past—Retellings and Social Value

Editors’ Introduction: The Presence of the Medieval Past—Retellings and Social Value

Samurai and Mongols: How a Medieval Samurai Became Chinggis Khan

Abstract: In 1924, Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867–1941), an amateur historian, published a small book, Chinggis Khan was Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Jingisu Kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune nari), which revived the old tale of the medieval samurai Yoshitsune’s escape to the territory of present Mongolia, where after unifying the Mongolian tribes he took the name of Chinggis Khan. Oyabe’s book reveals how in the interwar period the imagined medieval past and historical personalities were mobilized in the Japanese imperial expansion into the Mongolian lands. This article demonstrates how in the post–World War I years Japanese imperial boosters formulated a new rhetoric of the shared historical, cultural, political, and racial heritage with the Mongols, which ultimately justified the Japanese military plans to bring the Mongolian lands and its people, formally divided between the Qing and Romanov empires, under imperial Japan’s control.

Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum”: Firdousi’s heroes in the Victorian epoch context

The article presents the analysis of M. Arnold’s poem ”Sohrab and Rustum”, the plot of which is based on Firdousi’s epic poem “Shakhname”. The Victorian period was marked with the search for heroes – strong personalities who would lead the nation to its revival and save mankind from the “spiritual paralysis” (in T. Carlyle’s expression) as the disease of the age. Like many of his contemporaries Arnold tried to find such heroes in the Medieval past. Arnold leaves out several episodes of the Eastern text and concentrates his attention on the meeting of Rustum and his son who was born in his father’s absence and appeared to belong to the hostile camp during the war. As in Firdousi’s poem Arnold’s Sohrab supposes that he was doomed to be killed by his father. But besides destiny the guilt of the tragedy lies in the lack of trust and inner unity between father and son, upon a person’s isolation in society – one of the predominant themes of Arnold’s poetry. Sohrab’s death leads to Rustum’s spiritual transformation and to the end of the war on the whole. Contrary to Carlyle, Arnold doesn’t consider the appearance of a hero as a means of the nation’s revival. It is possible only by way of overcoming total hostility and isolation at large. So, the plot of the Medieval Eastern poet in Arnold’s interpretation appeared to be consonant with the Victorian epoch.