Preface

Summary

Discrimination has long played a part in postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. Virulent racists dating back to at least the nineteenth-century “Knights” of the Ku Klux Klan have often sought legitimacy by reference to medievalist forerunners, such as Sir Walter Scott and his notoriously prejudicial views of medieval “races.” From the very beginning of America’s Antebellum South, not to mention Victorian England, misogynists and (other) opponents of LBGQT+ rights have built on earlier celebrations of the most heteronormalizing conventions of Courtly Love, not least those in Scott’s extraordinarily popular Ivanhoe (1819). And to give just one more of many possible examples, antisemites since at least the eighteenth century have continuously recycled myths about medieval Jews sacrificing children and committing other atrocities.

Nor have scholarly approaches to such subjects lacked for bias. Up to the 1960s, before medievalism studies was widely recognized as a distinct field, opinions about such matters were most apparent in the ever more conspicuous absence of discussion about them. Since then, scholars have increasingly signaled their position on such issues not only in choosing to directly address such subjects but also via their language, assumptions, and titles, as with Elan Justice Pavlinich’s “A Princess of Color amid Whitewashed Medievalisms in Disney’s Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor” and Tison Pugh’s Queer Masculinity: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature.

Yet discrimination within the professional ranks of medievalism studies has perhaps never been more visible than in a recent series of Internet comments by some of the field’s leading scholars. In an August 28, 2017 post for the medieval-studies blog In the Middle, Dorothy Kim, a Brandeis professor of Asian descent, called for fellow professors of medieval and/or medievalist studies to explicitly condemn white supremacy, particularly as it relates to their area of specialty and particularly if they are white. In response, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown of the University of Chicago argued that “Richard Spencer and company […] are bringing back a fantasy that is their own making, and [that is] instantly punctured if you actually study the history of the Middle Ages.”