Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century 184384463X, 9781843844631

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M E D I E VA L I S M

M E D I E VA L I S M

ANDREW B.R. ELLIOT T is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln. CO V E R D E S I G N : S I M O N LO X L E Y

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

Politics and Mass Media Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century

ANDREW B.R. ELLIOTT

Though extreme examples, these cases all share a crucial detail: the framing of current political issues in terms of recognisable medieval precedents. In the widespread use of medievalism across social- and mass-media channels, it is clear that such political medievalisms are not intended as a specific reference to a historical precedent, but as a use of the past for modern concerns. The argument of this book is that we need new ways of analysing this kind of medievalism; extending far beyond the concept of anachronism or inaccuracy, references to Crusades, Templars and Vikings affect the way we understand our world. Using theories of communication and media studies to examine popular medievalism, the author investigates what effect such medieval terminology can have on a mass-mediated audience and on the understanding of the Middle Ages in general.

Politics and Mass Media

In 2001, George Bush provoked global uproar by describing the nascent War on Terror as a ‘Crusade’. His comments, however, were welcomed by Al-Qaeda, who had long been describing Western powers in precisely the same terms, as modern Crusaders once again invading the Middle East. Ten years later in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik launched a tragic attack in Norway, killing 77 unarmed civilians, mostly teenagers. Breivik saw himself as a Templar Knight, a member of a group of knights allegedly resurrected in London in 2002 by one ‘Lionheart’. Later investigations suggested that the blogger, Lionheart, might have had links to the right-wing, anti-Muslim, English Defence League and other so-called ‘counterjihad’ blogging networks decrying an Islamic invasion of Europe.

ANDREW B.R. ELLIOTT

Volume X

Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media

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ISSN 2043–8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252–0001 USA

Dr Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews Fife  KY16 9AL UK

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK

Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book

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Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century

Andrew B. R. Elliott

D. S. BREWER

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© Andrew B. R. Elliott 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Andrew B. R. Elliott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2017 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 463 1 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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To Kevin J. Harty

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Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction

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1 Not Dead Yet: The Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century

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2 Getting Medieval on Your RSS: Medievalism and the Mass Media

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3 “Let’s not go back to the Middle Ages”: Medievalism, the Dark Ages and the Myth of Progress

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4 “This crusade, this War on Terror, is gonna take a while”: The Bush Doctrine, the Crusades and Neomedievalism

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5 “They have announced explicitly that this is a Crusader war”: Al Qaeda and Holy War

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6 “The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ”: Anders Behring Breivik and the Templar Knights

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7 “God bless the EDL, the new Templar Knights”: The EDL, the Far Right and the Crusaders

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8 “These women-raping, Muslim-murdering, medieval monsters”: IS, the Middle Ages and the Mass Media

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Bibliography

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Index

215

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Figures 1 Marriage equality demonstration: Joan of Arc. Wikipedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marriage_equality_ demonstration_Paris_2013_01_27_31.jpg), under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

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2 Medieval Reactions. Author generated through screen capture. Original image reproduced with kind permission from the Royal Library of the Netherlands

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3 Medieval Facepalm. Author generated from original image by Nachosan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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4 Saladin on Syrian banknote. Image reproduced with permission, courtesy of Armen Hovsepian

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5 EDL logo in hoc signo vinces. By Spitfire1 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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6 EDL Jihad meme. Author-generated screen capture. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/481322278895553403/, also listed under https://www.pinterest.com/bigandnasty18/knights-templars/ 168 7 Medieval IS on Twitter. Author-generated screen capture

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The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions

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Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my students, past and present, for challenging me every day. An important part of the job of a lecturer in film and media is to teach the canonical communication studies theories; for one who started his academic career as a medievalist, this has often proved difficult for me. However, I am fortunate enough to have some amazing students who, daily, force me to think through how media change and how we must think up new theories because of these changes. Such challenges not only keep me on my toes but also started me on the path that would ultimately lead to this book, because I had to think how the media deal with the medieval. I would also like to thank the welcoming faculty and students at the University of Moorhead, Minnesota, where I delivered an early version of the theory outlined in this book, and to those who offered critiques and ideas after my talk. To them I apologise for my garbling of Icelandic names. I also presented a section of Chapter 7 at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 2015. I am grateful to my co-panellists and audience who asked the helpful kind of awkward questions which made me plug gaps in my thinking. Likewise, a version of the chapter on ISIS was presented to colleagues at Lincoln who offered equally valuable criticism and new ideas. I owe an ongoing debt of gratitude to my indefatigable Head of School, Sarah Barrow, and my former director of research, Ann Gray, who both helped me to get that ‘difficult second book’ off the ground while coping with the demands placed on an early career researcher. In an academic environment in which those at an early stage of their career find the goalposts shifting almost daily in response to the whims of education secretaries, budget cuts and endless three-letter acronyms, I have been immensely lucky to have two such calm, patient and accomplished scholars to help me figure it all out. Sarah was also unfeasibly tolerant of my tendency to disappear off to talks and conferences at awkward moments when I was supposed to be teaching, and both of them tirelessly supported my various funding bids related to this project. I would also like to thank Krista Cowman for helping me with bids, with the practical arrangements for my research leave in which I wrote much of this book, for encouraging me to pursue the project and for allowing me the freedom to teach in the School of History, where I think I learnt much more than my students ever did. My colleagues Nigel Morris, Grethe Mitchell, Dave Boothroyd and Brian Winston all helped me, chatted through ideas and prevented me from saying some of the more obviously nonsensical things about media theory. If I continue to say those nonsensical things, they are not responsible.

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As with any project that occupies a number of years, there are a great number of people with whom I discussed the project at length, who recommended books, articles and ideas and who often bought me wine. These include my Medieval Studies colleagues at Lincoln, including Joanna Huntington, Jamie Wood, Philippa Hoskin and my expert on friendship, Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo. Other colleagues who helped me think things through include Caroline Edwards, Ruth Charnock, Amy Burge and Finn Pollard. Professor Jeffrey Richards has also been a continual support and a fount of all knowledge about all periods and all subjects. Paul Sturtevant was helpful and direct in his criticism, and I am grateful to have been able to discuss all manner of things with him, from al Qaeda to barbecues. Caroline Palmer and Rob Kinsey at Boydell and Brewer have been the most fantastic editors one could ask for, helping on a range of topics from Facebook to font sizes, and with the former offering the blunt, but helpful, advice to ‘stop fretting and write the damn thing’ (this needs to be a T-shirt). I would also like to thank those who have recommended specific areas of study and sent through their own papers and publications with such generosity. I am sure I will miss some names here, but particular thanks are due to Daniel Wollenberg, whose insightful ideas and scholarship were an enormous help, as was his expertise on Breivik’s manifesto. I am fortunate to profit from his knowledge, since he was patient enough to read closely where I could bear only to skim what is an awful, hateful and largely incoherent mess. Flora Ward was also very kind in sending through a conference paper on Franco’s fascism. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri patiently explained to me how and in what ways medievalism in political rhetoric was not the exclusive preserve of the right wing, and Bruce Holsinger was kind enough to take the time to answer some of my queries on the subject of Bush’s crusades and medievalism, even though at that stage they were somewhat woolly and only half-formed. Kirsty Hamilton translated Pegida’s manifesto from German for me for nothing, for which I am immensely grateful, and Roar Lishaugen translated key passages from Norwegian to English relating to Breivik. Riccardo Facchini did the same for Italian medievalism, even if he did keep sending me new material right up until I submitted the manuscript. I am indebted to all of these, and many more. As usual, my gratitude, respect and unpaid cocktail bills go to the master-medievalists in whose various lengthy shadows I continue to walk. These include Marty Shichtman and Laurie Finke (for not making me go head-to-head with their book this time), Louise D’Arcens, David Matthews, Susan Aronstein, Richard Utz, Elizabeth Sklar, Don Hoffman, Amy Kaufman and, as always, Kevin J. Harty. They have all, whether knowingly or not, helped to make this into a better book by discussing the ideas within it, and by blazing the trail with their excellent scholarship to allow me and others to step out into new territory with impudence, exuberance and a wholly misplaced and unwarranted self-confidence. My final thanks go to my family, friends and my patient wife, Sara. To her I can now, at last, promise that guests will no longer have to sleep in a room surrounded by books on terrorism and far-right propaganda. I cannot promise that our internet history will be so easily erased.

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  Introduction

O

n 1 May 2012, less than one week before French voters were due to return to the polls for a second round of voting for the presidential elections, the Front National – France’s extreme right party made famous by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and now fronted by his daughter, Marine – led its customary Labour Day march through the streets of Paris. At the end of the march Marine Le Pen delivered a passionate speech in the shadow of the statue of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides, and solemnly laid a wreath at the statue’s feet in her honour. Though those outside France might struggle to see the relevance of a medieval heroine for presidential hopefuls across the political divide, the Maid of Orléans had by this point already emerged as something of “a surprise player” in the 2012 election campaigns.1 Indeed, such political uses of medieval history are not at all new or unusual. Joan of Arc has frequently been appropriated as a symbol of French nationality, identity and unity, or as “someone to be invoked in film (and elsewhere) to lend legitimacy to various causes in times of war”, as Kevin J. Harty describes her legacy.2 Over the years, Joan of Arc has found herself used by an astonishing variety of often contradictory causes. The statue itself was erected in 1875 after the defeat of France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, but almost immediately in 1878 found itself used as a focal point for anticlerical demonstrations. It has since been used by both London and Vichy as a symbol of resistance against invaders, and at other times by Catholics against Protestants, by republicans against monarchists, monarchists against republicans and, nowadays, by nationalists against almost any minority group that they seek to exclude. Le Pen’s attempt to reclaim this legacy, in fact, came as a direct response to Nicolas Sarkozy’s jibe during the 2007 elections, in which he suggested that “Joan of Arc is 1 ‘France Proclaims 600th Anniversary of Joan of Arc’, The Telegraph, 6 January 2012, [accessed 14 December 2013]; see also Henry Samuel, ‘Sarkozy and Le Pen Trade Blows over Joan of Arc’s Legacy’, The Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2012, p. 16. 2 Kevin J. Harty, ‘Warrior not Warmonger: Screen Joans during World War I’, in Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Dorsey Armstrong, Ann W. Astell and Howell Chickering (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), pp. 132–41, p. 132. See also ‘France Proclaims 600th Anniversary of Joan of Arc’ and Samuel, ‘Sarkozy and Le Pen Trade Blows over Joan of Arc’s Legacy’, p. 16.

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Introduction

France. […] How could we have let the extreme right confiscate her for so long?”3 Capitalising on the statue’s symbolic capital to underscore a point about immigration, in their annual marches and various speeches the Front National regularly play on the historical significance of the Middle Ages to underpin their message that genuine ‘Frenchness’ has something to do with medieval origins.4 Like JeanMarie Le Pen’s 1995 use of Clovis as a marker of national identity, under Marine Le Pen’s attempts to extend the party’s appeal to mainstream voters the Front National habitually uses a mythical medieval past to disguise their overtly racist and exclusionary sentiments under the respectable cloak of an ostensibly inclusive sense of historical belonging. Despite eventually losing the 2012 election, each year Marine Le Pen repeats her annual pilgrimage to the statue, and each year she reasserts the Front National’s right of ownership of the heroine and her legacy.5 She has been joined by other, somewhat unlikely, voices such as Brigitte Bardot who, in 2014, voiced her support for the FN, calling Le Pen a “modern Joan of Arc”.6 In her pilgrimage the following year, Marine Le Pen once again explicitly declared that the statue stood as a symbol of white French national identity, in a speech claiming that “to remember Joan of Arc is to remind ourselves who we are and where we come from”.7 The episode, and the ongoing and furious disputes over a medieval French heroine, serves to demonstrate one of the central themes of this book: that elements, ideas, events, icons and symbols are increasingly expropriated from the Middle Ages to serve as ideological weapons in the present day, regardless of what we in the academy might think about it. It is interesting to note, by way of example, that the ownership of Joan’s legacy is also furiously contested in debates around same-sex marriage. Such, for instance, was the case when France’s Women’s Rights Minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, was invited to speak in the Catholic-run Joan of Arc commemorations in May 2013, prompting a number of the event’s supporters to condemn her as an “agent of Satan” on the grounds of her progressive opinions and support for same-sex marriage.8 3 ‘Jeanne d’Arc … c’est la France […] Comment avons-nous pu laisser Jeanne d’Arc confisquée par l’extrême-droite pendant si longtemps?’ (my translation). Reported in National Post, 5 January 2012. 4 Pierre Berge, L’affaire Clovis (Paris: Plon, 1996); Susan J. Terrio, ‘Crucible of the Millennium? The Clovis Affair in Contemporary France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41.03 (1999), pp. 438–57; Pascal Perrineau, Le symptôme Le Pen: Radiographie des électeurs du Front national (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 5 For a good overview of other ways in which Joan’s legacy has been used, see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The section on pp. xviii–xix specifically discusses Le Pen’s reclamation of her memory. 6 David Chazan, ‘Bardot: Le Pen Is the New Joan of Arc’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 August 2014, p. 17. 7 ‘Discours de Marine Le Pen (Vendredi 1er Mai 2015)’, Front National [accessed 7 December 2015]. ‘Se souvenir de Jeanne d’Arc c’est se rappeler qui nous sommes et d’où nous venons’ (my translation). 8 ‘“Hands Off Joan of Arc”, French Catholics Tell Socialist Women’s Minister’, 24 May 2013, [accessed 8 December 2015].

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Figure 1  Joan of Arc finds herself being used to support a range of modern political positions, this time sharing a kiss with Marianne, the French symbol of Freedom and Liberty in a demonstration for same-sex marriage equality in Paris on 27 January 2013.

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The following year, Joan found herself used in a 2014 demonstration for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Paris, as well as by the Front National in the same year arguing for its continued criminalisation. Then, once again, 2015 saw yet more controversy, when a 17-year old chosen to ‘play’ Joan in Orléans’ annual re-enactment was linked to extreme right ‘Manif pour tous’ (anti-gay marriage) protests in an ostensibly apolitical celebration of a city’s heritage.9 The first point to observe in these varied uses of the Maid of Orléans is that it was only in exceptional cases that there were any earnest attempts to invoke the medieval past in any historical sense. Instead, the debates are really about how we use – and who owns – the memory of that past. The episode also goes some way to demonstrating a second thesis which emerges from the first: that such a reuse of the past in the mass media does not recall the past in the present, but often rejects the past altogether in the service of a shared cultural repository of symbols. This focus on the present in the recirculation of medieval ideas occurs because, as I will show, in an era of rolling news channels and social media, the various and contradictory uses to which the Middle Ages are put serve to flatten out the meaning of these expropriations, with the effect that the past comes to mean not only one thing but many contradictory things all at once. As such, the Middle Ages in popular memory become a usable (and useful) past, offering a wealth of ready-made meanings which are generated not by looking backwards into the past but by looking sideways at other mediated instances of these symbols. Medieval historians often object, with good reason, to these kinds of popular (mis)uses of their specialist period. Such misuses distort the past. They speak to a general ignorance of our medieval forebears. They get things wrong. In egregious circumstances, they can even bring about a sinister subtext for the period in itself, which can in turn prompt further distortions and misconceptions of the past. This is not mere academic pedantry, however. History matters. It matters not only as an educational subject that forms part of a desire to create an informed and educated populace in a general sense but also when it forms any kind of background knowledge of who we are, where we came from and, by extension, where we are going. History matters because when the past is viewed through a teleological lens – that is, when we assert that the events of the medieval period play an essential part in shaping our present – history can also play an unwitting and reluctant part in the creation of a general sense of our collective past, fundamentally altering the present. My argument over the course of this book, however, is not specifically about inaccuracies in, or the misrepresentation of, the Middle Ages; it is rather about instances such as the FN’s use of Joan of Arc, in which there is no attempt at historicity whatsoever. The examples explored in this book are, accordingly, those in which the Middle Ages have be used without any historical intention at all, and my arguments concentrate on how such medievalisms have repercussions far beyond the university campus. This is not, then, a book about medieval history, though it is hoped that it might 9 See, for example, [accessed 8 December 2015].

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offer something of use to medievalist colleagues. Instead, much of the discussion will be centred on issues surrounding the excision and remediation of medieval ideas and concepts in a post-medieval era: in particular, I will focus on political uses of the medieval past through predominantly online networks in the twentyfirst century, examining social media and news reporting in particular, as well as the more traditional mainstream media (television, radio, newspapers) featuring political discussion. My chief concern in writing this book has not been to dismiss or berate inaccuracies in our understanding of those medieval concepts, nor to complain about their reuse in a context not designed to contain their multiple, varying and complex meanings. Instead, the main focus is to examine how and why ideas, events, facts and concepts that emerged or were prevalent during the Middle Ages have been reused in modern mass and social media, why they are still useful for us and to what purpose they are used. Thus, I argue, the ways in which the Middle Ages are used in modern political rhetoric might well be of interest to academic historians, but they have a perhaps far more important public impact in the media, where they often underpin the ways in which we understand our world and our interaction with others in it. The secondary point of this book relates to their mediation: after all, it was not only that a medieval heroine was used for her symbolic capital by both the FN and Sarkozy, but that such symbolism was widely reported through the mass media. In this case, we are faced with two separate processes. The first has to do with popular culture’s (in)capacity to represent history or the past with undisputed authority or its ability to communicate nuance, and to do so in a way that accommodates the various contradictions or subtleties of historical inquiry. The second process relates to issues pertaining both to journalism and media studies, questions about the media’s influence on the ways in which audiences understand the world around them. Putting those two issues together, then, we see that when a medieval reference such as Joan of Arc is invoked and subsequently reported widely across the world’s media to a host of different and disparate cultures we are dealing with a representation of what is already a representation. As Amy Kaufman memorably termed it, we are dealing with “medievalism doubled back upon itself ”.10 It scarcely needs to be mentioned, of course, that such retransmissions also occur in popular, fictional depictions of the Middle Ages in film, television, comic books, video games, books, plays, operas and so on. Although there is probably a strong degree of cross-fertilisation between the two, I do not intend to explore such depictions in the current study for the simple reason that these fictional depictions have been, and continue to be, studied exhaustively elsewhere, including in my own previous work, and to try to take them on here would result in too reductive an approach or too superficial an analysis. Moreover, where these kinds of fictional depictions tend to wear their medievalisms openly on their sleeves, my interest in this specific study is on those cases where the medieval finds itself exploited, like Joan of Arc, for political ends, to make a rhetorical point or to support an unquestionably modern ideological position. 10 Amy S. Kaufman, ‘Medieval Unmoored’, Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s) (2010), pp. 1–11, p. 1.

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Introduction

The central two arguments outlined above, then, come to form the central thesis of this book, which is that the Middle Ages as a whole frequently finds itself a “surprise player” used throughout political discussion by the modern media in order to become a site of identity, a point of identification or an ideological weapon that is then reused across other media. Central to this transformation are three phases: historical expropriation, intercultural retransmission and ideological modification. The first of these, expropriation, is the predominant mode of medievalism, the mode through which and in which medieval objects and concepts are invoked in the post-medieval period. This kind of expropriation might involve a statue (in the case of Joan of Arc), a commemoration (in the case of Clovis), a series of events (a crusade) or even a vaguely conceived idea (a dark age). However, it may even draw on a much more mystical and intangible symbol, such as the Knights Templar, who find themselves cropping up in a range of unexpected places, from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code to Ubisoft’s video game franchise Assassin’s Creed and, with more serious consequences, in the Islamophobic rhetoric of the self-titled ‘counterjihad’ groups discussed in Chapter 7. The second phase is repetition and retransmission. It is this phase which permits a crucial separation between the kinds of ideological neomedievalism to be discussed in this book and other, more benign, instances of expropriation such as Renaissance fairs, mystery plays or replicas of Excalibur or the Holy Grail on sale through eBay. The repetition of these symbols is what ‘flattens out’ the meaning and allows new meanings and significance to be established. For example, once having been expropriated and extirpated from history, Joan of Arc could be used to further the anti-immigration agenda of the Front National, which is entirely unconnected to her, in the same way as Richard the Lionheart can be hijacked by one of the founders of the English Defence League to mean something wholly unconnected to medieval kingship or English nationality (see Chapter 7). In the case of Anders Behring Breivik (see Chapter 6), the right-wing terrorist who launched a deadly attack in Oslo in 2011, it was his understanding of the Templar Knights, drawn from a process of reformulation, modification and retransmission, that underpinned much of his understanding of the Crusades as an attempt to resist Islamic expansion, as witnessed by his lengthy manifesto and its reliance on medievalism – however much he might not have understood it. The third phase, I argue, is to couple this new medievalism with a modern ideology, a process which we might term assimilation, translation or modification. It is here that the struggle over ideologies becomes most powerful, since the media’s cross-fertilisation has by this point divested the medievalism of its original meanings and context-dependent significance, making it ripe to be grafted onto modern concerns. This threefold process is, for instance, witnessed most memorably through the use of the crusades by both George Bush and Osama bin Laden alike, as will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. In each case, though for very different purposes, the cultural symbolism of the Crusades was excised from its original meaning, retransmitted through the mass media in a new form, and ultimately became the subject of a dispute not over their original meaning but over their new significance as an ideological weapon. So when bin Laden calls on his fellow Muslims to resist a

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Crusader invasion of the Holy Land, he is referring to an established tradition which has, through relentless repetition, assimilated the modern armed incursions into the Middle East with twentieth- and twenty-first-century “crusades”. Likewise, it is precisely because the term was already in use that Bush’s famous description of the War on Terror as a Crusade had such enormous political and ideological resonance, as Bruce Holsinger has powerfully demonstrated.11 To be sure, it is scarcely anything new to see the past reused in the service of a wider (and often pernicious or extremist) ideology. As Umberto Eco famously observed, “modern ages have revisited the Middle Ages from the moment when, according to historical handbooks, they came to an end”.12 Already in 1580, Tasso’s sprawling epic Gerusalemma Liberata sought to mythologise and glorify the Crusades of a century earlier in the context of continued unrest in – and renewed attempts at the conquest of – the Holy Land. By the mid-seventeenth century Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen’s painting of a Crusaders’ attack on the port of Damietta depicted the Crusaders as brave warriors of the rightful God, importing white European rationalism to a brutal and barbaric – in short, a medieval – world. Later the Bourbon king Louis Philippe (1830–48) would install a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, literally repainting the crusaders as glorious conquerors of the backward and savage Moors, in an unspoken but no less powerful attempt to garner support for his own conquest of Algeria.13 Thus, the instinct for modern political commentators to invoke the Crusades in discussions of the Iraq invasion of 2003 is in itself part of a long tradition of expropriation, retransmission and ideological modification. What is new in the case of Bush’s comments, Joan of Arc’s legacy or the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 is the way that these medievalisms are communicated through a chaotically demotic mass media network. Unlike literature, art or opera, mediated medievalisms are no longer rarefied high-cultural products crafted by those in the privileged position as a ‘producer’ or cultural gatekeeper and offered up to a powerful literate élite. Instead, a march to a statue, the launch of an antiMuslim blog or the creation of a medieval meme all represent a participatory form of popular culture which has been fundamentally – and powerfully – democratised, created and promulgated by anyone with the basic software, capacity and skills to do so.14 Breivik could have written his 1,500-page manifesto on a home computer using free software such as OpenOffice, converted it to PDF using Adobe Acrobat, and sent it out to as many contacts as he could through Facebook and free email servers. 11 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). 12 Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), pp. 61–72 (p. 65). 13 For an interesting overview of the mythologising of the Crusades with relation to the modern use of the term to describe Middle-Eastern conflict, see John Tolan, ‘Time to Forget the Crusades’, Al Jazeera, 2008 [accessed 15 January 2013]. 14 For more on participatory culture, see Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays on Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), and The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).

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Introduction

The English Defence League posts dozens of memes per day to its social media pages, memes that can be created for free and distributed rapidly to a ready-made network of followers. Even al Qaeda, a rootless terrorist network perceived as hiding out in the caves of Afghanistan for the better part of a decade, were able to harness a virtual army of cyberjihadists using Twitter hashtags to connect with followers, sympathisers and curious parties. Furthermore, without wishing to succumb entirely to Web 2.0 triumphalism (as discussed in Chapter 7, the internet is by no means as open and universal as many assume),15 for many the barriers to entry in this new media landscape are lower than ever. To create and send a tweet it is no longer even necessary to have a stable 3G or Wi-Fi connection (the preserve, after all, of a culturally free and economically well-off demographic), which is what makes Twitter the favoured communication tool of the Arab spring, G8 protesters and Islamic State jihadists alike.16 Social media networks are fundamentally open, and they rely on such openness and freedom through sharing for their power. As such they are both demotic and – in principle, at least – democratic, meaning that the mechanisms for carrying messages to large audiences are no longer exclusively the preserve of the rich and powerful, but are instead democratised and placed visibly before the largest public possible. The demotic nature of modern media culture also revolutionises the ways in which we assess audiences. Shifting from the idea of seeing audiences as one indistinguishable mass, today’s online communications have instant information gleaned from cookies and tracking software which feeds back in a constant loop to determine which audiences are watching which content, how, how often, and what they do afterwards. As such, audiences no longer exist in any real sense, but comprise ad hoc communities of viewers. Success in online content is measured not by critical approval but by numbers of ‘eyeballs’. Powerful opinion leaders rely not on the truth of a story but on its ‘stickiness’ and ‘spreadability’,17 and the success of a given media text lies in its ability to be reported widely across a range of mass media and filtered through to a wider public while flattening the details as little as possible. Rather than buying ink by the barrel, powerful opinion leaders need only a sizeable following on social media, as the Kardashians, Katie Hopkins or Donald Trump demonstrate. In such a brave new world, the ability to summon up and change the meaning of the past is removed from the hands of an educated and powerful élite and handed 15 For a powerful argument against the idea of a wholly democratic media landscape, see James Curran, Media and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2011). Perhaps the best argument against the triumphalist rhetoric of Web 2.0 and the concomitant perception that the “Internet Changes Everything” can be found in James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet (London: Routledge, 2012). 16 Jytte Klausen, ‘Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 38.1 (2015), pp. 1–22 (p. 1). 17 These terms come from Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York & London: New York University Press, 2013); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992).

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Introduction

9

over to the users of those media. History thus becomes transformed from something learned at school18 into something on casual offer to viewers of television and films, visitors to museums, galleries and exhibitions, audiences of radio broadcasts or downloadable podcasts, readers of historical novels, newspaper supplements, museum brochures and players of video games. History, in its online formation, is a hobby, a pastime, and something to be played with or ‘Liked’ on Facebook. In such an information-rich society, or ‘network society’ as Henry Jenkins and Manuel Castells term it,19 the use of history in popular culture is consequently not a top-down process of carefully controlled and organised chronology leading neatly from the past to the present, but a loosely affiliated and vast array of ideas linked not by teleology but by hyperlinks. In this modern, tapas-style history, facts from the past can be selected at will and loosely corralled into almost anything we wish them to be. The 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, for example, has seen historical evidence drawn from the past to support both sides of the debate, and in some cases the same idea (William Wallace, for example) used by both sides. Likewise, the Tea Party movement across the USA demonstrates the endless possibilities which a cherry-picked reading of the Constitution can offer. As Jill Lepore demonstrates in The Whites of Their Eyes, in these new History Wars the same document can find itself being used as ammunition for both sides of the dispute.20 The significance of this open-source style of history for my current purposes becomes clear when considering how such deracinated historical ideas can be coupled to an open-access media apparatus. It is for this reason, for instance, that Bush’s unscripted reference to the Crusades was to have such enormous resonance, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. Whatever the Bush administration’s collective responsibility for the continued fragility of the Middle East, it is clear that Bush’s specific choice of words might in itself be forgiven as a lapsus made by a leader under pressure, emerging from a highly stressful weekend emergency summit, and was perhaps little more than an unfortunate and ill-judged ad lib, unscripted by policy- or speechwriters. Nevertheless, the reasons for its impact are twofold, in that it had both reach and longevity. First, the message was far-reaching because Bush’s comments were widely mediated, repeatedly broadcast by a range of media channels to a mass audience far beyond the borders of the United States. Moreover, in a world in which blogs and social media posts can remediate the international news, this ‘reach’ is amplified in ways that are hard to measure (as discussed in Chapter 2). Second, its impact was lasting not because of the historical accuracy of his words but because those terms contained a degree of what can be termed ‘resonance’ with its contemporary audience (I discuss this more in Chapter 5). Given its recirculation through the media, 18 For a fascinating discussion of how education policy can equally change perceptions of the present, see David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). 19 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 20 Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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Introduction

the term ‘crusades’ could connect both with a given style of neoconservatism promulgated by the Bush administration21 and with a fractious and hotly disputed global geopolitics. Accordingly, this book will examine mediated political medievalisms using a range of examples of medievalism widely reported across a range of media. The book is arranged into eight chapters: Chapters 1 and 2 illustrate the essential theory at work, and are followed by six case studies of individual medievalisms. The first chapter argues that the Middle Ages, in the sense of a popularly held idea of the past, do not always lie behind us in the past, but continue to exist alongside us and continually rupture the fabric of the present. Chapter 2 moves on to discuss the ways in which such ruptures are frequently brought to the surface by a complex variety of mass media mechanisms, which use such medievalisms not as historical references but as handy popular-cultural references. Thus, I argue that it is not on historical accuracy that our attention should be focused but rather on how such media mechanisms work. With regards to these media strategies themselves, my analysis will be brief and necessarily simplified. Anyone with any familiarity with media and communications theories will know that from the outset it is impossible to talk about any one theory in particular without having to state a series of codas, definitions, caveats and justifications, let alone to talk about media theory in the singular, as though there was only one agreed-upon relationship between sender, message and receiver of that message.22 In part this is naturally so because of the complexity of processes by which we consume media. However, there is also the issue of so-called ‘new’ media, which have radically changed traditional ideas about who is a sender and who is a receiver of a given message, forcing a re-evaluation of early communication theories. In this complex environment there is scarcely scope within this book to offer any introductions to the vast literature (and, inevitably, scholarly disagreement) on communication media theories. Instead, I would direct interested readers to the numerous excellent primers on the topic.23 21 See Andrew Fiala, ‘Crusades, Just Wars, and the Bush Doctrine’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 19.2 (2007), pp. 165–72; Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror; John Bice, A 21st Century Rationalist in Medieval America: Essays on Religion, Science, Morality, and the Bush Administration (Laingsburg, MI: Chelydra Bay Press, 2007); Mel Gurtov, Superpower on Crusade: The Bush Doctrine in US Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO & London: Lynne Reiner, 2006). 22 Indeed, to media scholars, my continued reliance on terms such as ‘sender’, ‘message’ and ‘receiver’ already unmasks me as hopelessly out of date in media theory debates. 23 See especially Stuart Price, Media Studies, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1998); Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 3rd edn (London: Sage, 1994). For studies of how popular-cultural landscapes can affect the reading of media references, see Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 5th edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2012); John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 2006) and Understanding Popular Culture (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2010); Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

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11

Chapters 3 to 8 apply the theoretical ideas to specific case studies. Beginning with a more general use of the Middle Ages as a catch-all term for darkness, primitiveness and barbarity, Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which the media deploy terms such as ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘medieval’ to capitalise on a rich semantic field and its underlying myth of progress. Chapter 4 examines Bush’s use of the term ‘crusade’ to describe the nascent War on Terror, and its broader meaning in the mass media to foment the idea of a clash of civilisations, waged perhaps as much on the evening news and the morning front pages as it was in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Chapter 5 moves on to examine a less widely discussed aspect of Bush’s ‘crusade doctrine’: namely the extent to which al Qaeda had already been using a range of medievalisms for almost a decade and had thus already developed their own robust blend of politically charged medievalism. Chapter 6 examines the appropriation of the Templar Knights as part of the counterjihad movement by the Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik in particular, and so-called counterjihadist bloggers such as ‘Lionheart’ in general. Chapter 7 continues the idea of medievalism as an anchor of national identity by looking at the use of the Middle Ages by the Far Right through the lens of the English Defence League and the broader online ‘counterjihad’ movement. By way of a conclusion, Chapter 8 offers a final application of the theory to (at the time of writing) a very recent phenomenon, the rise of Islamic State, and the ways in which their purported ‘Caliphate’ continues al Qaeda’s rhetorical medievalism while invoking a nostalgic sense of religious purity. Given the extent to which the medieval is inextricably intertwined with the modern, this book is not concerned only with medievalism as a process of representation, since this has been expertly covered in a number of other works, including Marcus Bull’s Thinking Medieval, Angela Weisl’s The Persistence of Medievalism and Michael Alexander’s Medievalism, all of which I refer to in the following pages.24 Neither is this study exclusively concerned with the prevalence of the medieval in popular culture since these, too, have been covered by experts – too numerous to list here – in their respective fields, from film, television, literature, music and art to tourist sites and museums. Nor is it even exclusively the political implications of medievalism, which have been detailed by Bruce Holsinger’s Neomedievalism and Neoconservatism, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri’s Medioevo Militante and Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch’s International Medievalism and Popular Culture, alongside a number of journal articles exploring individual instances of political uses of the period.25 My concern is, instead, with an area which has not yet been covered in substantial depth, since it requires familiarity with a range of other theoretical practices: specifically, with the reuse of those medievalisms across the media. 24 Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 25 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror; Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri, Medioevo militante: la politica di oggi alle prese con barbari e crociati (Torino: Einaudi, 2011); International Medievalism and Popular Culture, ed. Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014).

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Introduction

The question underpinning this book, at its simplest, is what happens to the Middle Ages when they are used in modern media without reference to the Middle Ages – a process I term here, as we shall see below, ‘banal’ medievalism.26 The questions motivating this book are thus concerned with how such banal medievalism affects communication when its users are not really consciously thinking about it. If, as discussed above, the Middle Ages exist alongside us to serve modern functions that are subsequently remediated to a range of audiences, then what kinds of influence might this kind of banal medievalism exert on an unsuspecting populace? While much discussion of medievalism has focused on the appropriateness of representations of the Middle Ages, put in its simplest terms, my question in this book is a different one: what happens when such medievalisms are deliberately inappropriate?

26 My use of the term ‘banal medievalism’ will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 1. It is a deliberate borrowing from Michael Billig’s term ‘banal nationalism’, which seeks to explore the uses and instances of nationalism wherein the flag is waved not as part of a conscious project of national identity but as a seemingly benign celebration of a certain patriotic identity. See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

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1 Not Dead Yet: The Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century

I

We are at present witnessing […] a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination. Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, p. 63

n a study of medieval literature and culture, Paul Zumthor once wrote that the “Middle Ages besiege and provoke us on all sides”.1 Looking at the ever-growing field of medievalism studies and the degree to which medieval themes recur in the cinema, television, radio, theatre and art, as well as newer media including video games, comic books and social media, Zumthor’s claim certainly seems to be no less true now than it was back in 1980 – perhaps even more so. What has perhaps changed, however, is the expansion of the Middle Ages into popular culture, coupled with the explosion of user-generated content on social media in an era of so-called Web 2.0, and its overflow back into mainstream and mass media. As Elizabeth Sklar and Donald Hoffman demonstrated with King Arthur in popular culture,2 the extent to which the medieval has filtered through into everyday, quotidian refractions of the past means that medievalisms in the modern world are no longer limited (if ever they were) to ‘producerly’ reincarnations of the past. Instead, as “receptive vessel[s] waiting to be filled by the aspirations, anxieties and desires of any individual group that chooses to appropriate it”,3 popular-cultural medievalisms often find themselves expropriated from any historical context and inserted into a modern setting without any historical intent. It is for this reason that medievalisms can be found in everyday exchanges on social media as much as at the cinema and the theatre. In their online form they rely not on a specialised set of interpretive practices to unpack them but only on a knowledge of their new meaning as defined by their context in popular-cultural discourse. Medievalisms 1 ‘le Moyen Âge de tous côtés nous assiège et nous provoque’ (my translation). Paul Zumthor, Parler Du Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 120. 2 King Arthur in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). 3 Elizabeth S. Sklar, ‘Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend’, in King Arthur in Popular Culture, pp. 9–23 (p. 9).

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can thus be found in a range of unexpected contexts, in media discourse about current affairs as much as media products such as films or television. They are found in adverts for nail polishes, clothing and even car parks, and can be summoned up at will in a range of surprising situations.4 In short, these kinds of unintentional medievalism, unconnected from any deliberate historical meaning, have infiltrated the architecture and fabric of modern life. They besiege and provoke us on all sides. Thus, Zumthor’s argument in fact has relevance for our study of medievalism far beyond the usual channels through which the past-as-present is studied, since it ably sums up a modern world in which the Middle Ages sit alongside us. If the medieval is to be found as much in Facebook users’ dismissal of Islamic jihadists as medieval, or Twitter comments that football is going back to the Dark Ages, then it no longer seems appropriate to rely on traditional criticism to understand them. Instead, it becomes necessary to examine not only how medievalisms dredge up the past but also the ways in which they are ‘remediated’ through mass and social media networks, and what effect such remediations have on their meanings. Perhaps one of the most powerful ramifications of mediated medievalism is the temporal conflation that such a melange of medieval and modern entails. The persistence of the medieval in contemporary popular discourse means that the Middle Ages do not so much lie behind us as a strictly historical past, but periodically burst through the surface of modernity in unexpected ways. These medievalisms – unintentional as they are – form part of a process which is no longer anachronism in stricto sensu, since it deliberately points to no specific time in particular, but rather a kind of ‘synchronism’ in its indiscriminate use of multiple historical events, ideas or periods in tandem with one another. Where medievalisms make no attempt to connect with the past, any kind of neat separation between the Middle Ages and modernity thus becomes little more than a convenient fiction designed to compartmentalise our past into discrete and manageable categories. The reality is a hazy conflation of overlapping eras, in which relics of the past find themselves mixed up with those of the present day, wherein the Gothic medieval is consumed happily alongside the genuinely medieval. Furthermore, both are consumed indiscriminately alongside the pseudo-medieval, which often has nothing to do with the Middle Ages at all. Such a conflation of temporal planes is of course not a particularly new phenomenon, though perhaps it is an accelerated one in the new world of digital media. A walk around almost any European city makes explicit the extent to which physical spaces often reflect a haphazard and awkward conflation of the medieval and the modern. Even from the structural layout of the city, various timeframes work together with – or in diametrical opposition to – one another, often producing haphazard architectural mixtures with buildings of markedly different styles nestled together. In this melange, the Georgian, the Victorian, the medieval and the ultramodern can all be found lumped together indiscriminately, each jostling for space with the neo-Tudor, mock-Georgian and Gothic. The buildings themselves might 4 I have discussed these popular cultural medievalisms and their dependence on indexical meaning in ‘Arthurian Fragments, Arthurian Mosaics’, Arthuriana, 25.4 (2016), pp. 14–24.

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belong to streets loosely arranged into medieval quarters and post-medieval expansions or reconstructions. In Edinburgh, for example, one might easily experience two different city centres, by either heading south from the rail station towards the narrow and twisting medieval lanes of Cockburn Street and the evocatively named Fleshmarket Close, Advocate’s Close or Candlemaker Row or else by walking to the north, onto the broad, sweeping boulevards of Princes Street, George Street or St Andrews Square, which served as inspirations for – and, confusingly, replicas of – Haussman’s Parisian boulevards, the latter being a project which was itself designed to consign the Middle Ages to the oubliettes of history. Yet such temporal divisions are not always so clearly defined. Exeter’s bombardment in the Second World War and hasty reconstruction, for example, leaves a haphazard layout of streets in which broad, rectilinear roads such as the High Street are periodically intersected by the narrow, cobbled lanes of Gandy Street or Bowgate. Likewise, in York, the medieval city walls gird a small city centre arranged around the River Ouse, providing a network of streets arranged in part around the rectilinear streets demanded by both the railway and transport infrastructure, but which gives way in the centre to the ramshackle, narrow streets of the Shambles and the Snickelways which perpetuate (and now celebrate) the city’s mixed heritage over the centuries. In Lincoln, the city in which this book was written, one may walk out of the eleventh-century Norman base of Lincoln Cathedral (which did not achieve its final state until the late fifteenth century), and walk downhill through medieval and modern streets all the way to a marina dating back to pre-Roman settlements, only to find a brand new university on the other side of it. Indeed, the University of Lincoln’s graduation ceremony is itself built upon synchronistic foundations, in which two medieval institutions (Church and University) are reprised by a university barely two decades old. As such, far from operating according to strict temporal delineations, the very layouts of many European cities stand as living reminders of uneasy confrontations of medieval and modern, and, in the case of the neo-Gothic, the conflation of the genuinely medieval alongside the replicas and follies of Victorian medievalism. (Still) Living in a New Middle Ages The medieval foundations of these modern cities thus adopt a dualism with regard to their histories, in which the medieval buildings draw their meanings from their modern function. While a cathedral declares its medieval origins from the outside, its modern meaning is communicated through its functional value to contemporary worshippers and tourists (visitors and sightseers, not pilgrims and worshippers). Mediated medievalisms function in the same way, not by direct quotation of the medieval context (which would rely on an understanding, however rudimentary, of their medieval meaning) but instead by relying on their significance and function to the modern audience. They become quotidian and unnoticed, working as accidental signifiers of a medieval past, signifiers which sit awkwardly alongside those from other ages. Just like the medieval structures of our metaphorical towns and

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cities, they sit alongside, underneath, around and in-between the modern edifices, largely ignored by passers-by except when abruptly shocked into recognising their historical value. As unintentional references to the past, such medievalisms are not designed to act in the service of historians and academic medievalists, but instead serve a particular function in holding up a commonly accepted idea about the past which can then be used to critique the present. In some cases, this kind of medievalism uses the Middle Ages as a kind of straw man, a constructed medievalism of barbarity, cruelty, violence and ignorance which is then pilloried precisely for its lack of modernity. In this mode, they become a safely hypothetical Middle Ages that can be compared unfavourably with the modern era in order to further an equally hypothetical ‘myth of progress’, as I discuss in Chapter 3. Having been extracted from their historical context, these medievalisms are free to be reused in a range of capacities and for a range of functions. In their elasticity, they create new kinds of medievalisms that both draw on, and simultaneously create, a repository – what Pierre Sorlin, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, calls our “historical capital”5 – to which we refer in our daily discourse and which is used to anchor our ideas about identities and traditions, both forming and informing our sense of Self (and, by extension, our perception of Other). The Middle Ages in the twenty-firstcentury media landscape thus become unconscious sites of unchallenged heritage and, ultimately, unchallenged reference points in our collective imagination. The politically mediated Middle Ages (like those of Joan of Arc, William Wallace and Bush’s Crusaders) operate in a somewhat different capacity to the kind of Middle Ages most frequently examined through film, television, video games and other popular artistic endeavours. Where the Middle Ages of popular culture are frequently located behind us in time, however knowingly, the mediated Middle Ages of political discourse sit obstinately alongside us in the present, acting as a convenient cultural shorthand – and it is perhaps for this reason that they often pass unchallenged into the popular and political lexicon. In this way, just as the material remains of the Middle Ages sit alongside the concrete pillars of modernity, so too does the reuse of the Middle Ages in the media create a parallel medievalism which becomes not only a reference point for vague ideas about identity and nation but a series of arbitrary focal points that evoke history, memory and, by extension, legitimacy. Clearly, such medievalisms cannot be measured or assessed in terms of representation (and its concomitant issues of accuracy or misrepresentation), but rather rely only on their function in the modern media, and the effect of this kind of discourse on other media representations in a complex media environment. It is for this reason that I have termed the kinds of medievalisms under examination in the following pages ‘banal medievalism’, using a term borrowed from Michael Billig. Where, for Billig, banal nationalism is the use of a collective memory in which “remembering is simultaneously a collective forgetting”,6 so too is the unconscious use of the medieval past to define the present an act of half-remembering but also of 5 Pierre Sorlin, ‘How to Look at an “Historical” Film’, in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 25–49 (p. 38). 6 Billig, Banal Nationalism, p. 38.

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half-forgetting. Billig suggests that “these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’ in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition.”7 Substituting the word ‘nationalism’ with ‘medievalism’ thus renders Billig’s central thesis alarmingly appropriate for my present concerns. In the examples given above, as well as the various examples explored in more depth in later chapters, the medieval is not ‘removed from everyday life’, but ‘flagged in the lives of our citizenry’; medievalism is not intermittent but, as I will show in Chapter 2, functions as an endemic condition made more powerful by the fact that it passes unobserved in most cases. In this respect, my use of the term ‘banal’ significantly brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s searching questions about the ways in which seemingly banal everyday repetition can in fact mask politically sensitive, ideologically perverse or odious ideas under the guise of an ostensibly innocuous banality. Arendt’s use of the term, after all, emerges in her study of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she famously (and contentiously) argued that Eichmann’s evil was manifested not in the radical kind of evil embodied by Hitler, but in the more everyday failure or absence of imagination, thinking and self-awareness embodied by Adolf Eichmann.8 My use of the term banal in this sense is thus clearly informed by a similar kind of amalgamation of serious ideological issues into everyday discourse. Of course, there is no suggestion that, as a corollary of using banal medievalism, its users are to be considered war criminals or culpable of crimes against humanity: this is not my point. Rather, following Arendt and Billig, my suggestion is that even the most unpleasant or extremist ideology can be rendered banal by being shrouded within medievalism, used in an unthinking capacity without direct reference to the Middle Ages. This might be in the use of terms such as ‘crusade’ (a common enough term in English) or ‘jihad’ (markedly less so), or by referring to Templars and medieval attitudes. It is certainly the case with the Front National’s use of Joan of Arc: by pointing to a medieval ancestry as a declaration of French identity, France’s extreme right are still basing identity on racial exclusion of non-White, non-Christian French citizens, but the celebratory medievalism serves as a conveniently banal mask to cover such extremism. In all cases, as I will show, even when the so-called Islamic State consciously tries to recall a medieval Caliphate, these medievalisms are nevertheless banal in the sense that they mask a poisonous distortion of history for presentist concerns. Their concerns, like al Qaeda before them, are not historical, but ideological: they engage, therefore, not with history but use the past as a kind of buffet from which they can select the most palatable morsels. The quotidian nature of these medievalisms thus infuses the present with a past which has been extirpated from its context, but which can often serve as an ironic reinforcement of the present. Such is the case, for example, with the British rightwing tabloid newspaper, The Daily Express, which uses an image of a crusading Ibid., p. 6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). 7

8

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knight in its masthead. The Crusader is an image that is placed prominently at the top of a newspaper which sells hundreds of thousands of copies daily. In most cases, of course, such medievalism is not flagged at all, but passes unnoticed as an unintentional, banal, historical reference point of little consequence. Insisting on the representational accuracy of the masthead would be to miss the point. What matters is its functional capacity of indexically pointing to the medieval past as a means of legitimising itself. Such a functional capacity, however, is occasionally made explicit. In these circumstances its banal medievalism is explicitly foregrounded in support of a modern cause, in which case the banal symbol is once again made overtly and conspicuously meaningful not as history but as a means of using the past to point to the present. One such instance comes in the newspaper’s ‘crusade’, launched in 2010, to encourage Britain to leave the European Union.9 Relying on the common association between knights and crusades, the article launching the crusade explicitly linked their masthead knight to the campaign, pledging that, from that day forward, their crusader masthead would stand for their attempt to leave the European Union by calling for a referendum on the subject. As the article claims, “the famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed people right across Europe”.10 Despite the deliberate connection between the knight and the choice to term their campaign a ‘crusade’, in this situation the medievalism is nevertheless banal. It refers not to a specific historicity but to a general sense of Britain’s heritage as an independent nation, which has nothing to do with the Middle Ages at all (the traditionally European character of Britain’s medieval history might, in fact, suggest quite a different tale of the benefits of European integration).11 The Daily Express campaign thus neatly demonstrates the threefold process of banal medievalism outlined in the introduction: first, the crusader is divorced from its historical context; second, it is remediated daily to forge an association between the image and the newspaper’s brand identity; third, the dehistoricised knight-ascrusader is then yoked to a modern ideological meaning, so that each new transmission of the symbol is a repetition of the modern, and not the medieval, meaning. It is telling that, in the weeks before the UK did indeed hold its fateful referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, the Daily Express once again printed 9 ‘Get Britain out of Europe’, Express.co.uk, 25 November 2010, [accessed 2 November 2012]. This book went to press in the immediate aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016, amid controversy over the legality and mandate of the UK-wide referendum which was won by an extraordinarily narrow margin. Though of course the dubious claims to ‘sovereignty’ and national identity in these debates have much to contribute to the discussion of political medievalism, I have decided not to attempt to incorporate them into the present work since it is simply too uncertain and too recent to be able to analyse dispassionately. 10 ‘Get Britain out of Europe’. Also see [accessed 10 August 2016]. 11 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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its 2011 front cover, featuring a crusading knight standing on the cliffs of Dover demanding “our country back”, and offered it as a window sticker given away free inside its Saturday Magazine on 16 April 2016. The power of the Express’s banal medievalism is thus reliant not on the past but on the absence of that past, and derives its persuasive power not from historicity and representation but from its widespread retransmission across the mass media – which was possible only once the medieval reference had been removed. Banal medievalism is not intended to conjure up the medieval past or return us to that period (at least not in the way that films and television series sometimes try to recreate a faithful medieval world and ‘transport’ viewers to it) but instead it is designed to underscore a point in the present, which thus transports the medieval into our own world. Alexandra Service describes precisely this situation in an elegant paradox when she observes that “the past is an increasingly inescapable part of day-to-day life”.12 As the following chapters argue, through such banal medievalisms the Middle Ages are indicated daily and flagged in the lives of everyone by referring to struggles as crusades, by describing attitudes as medieval or by referring to ignorance as belonging to the Dark Ages. Three specific examples might serve here to indicate in more depth the extent to which banal medievalism is reliant on the media-as-carrier and not on its historical context. The first comes in the form of one of the more surprising social media successes relating to the Middle Ages, namely Brantley L. Bryant’s immensely enjoyable Twitter alter ego @LeVostreGC, a modern, virtual avatar of Geoffrey Chaucer. Freely mixing the modern with the medieval – frequently in order to subvert both – Bryant’s humorous tweets garner enormous followings (some 46,500 as of late 2015) by a range of audiences including medievalists, enthusiastic amateurs and those with seemingly no other affiliation with the Middle Ages but who, presumably, simply enjoy the incongruity of Chaucer’s wry commentaries on modern life. One such tweet, from May 2015, runs as follows: Ich have of the eyen of the tigere, a fightere, Ich daunse thurgh the fyre, For Ich am a champioun, And eftsoon thou shalt hear me roaren.13

As many of his followers instantly recognised, the tweet refashions the lyrics to pop singer Katy Perry’s song ‘Roar’ in Middle English, resulting in a deliberate anachronism which manages to poke gentle fun at both the lyrical absurdity of the modern pop industry and the seemingly incongruous setting of medieval poetry. With 95 retweets and 103 likes from the account’s followers, it is likely that the tweet will have been read – if not retweeted again – by a wide secondary audience, many of whom will have no connection to Bryant/Chaucer. The joke works because of its incongruity, and the surprising contact between two separate timeframes creates an ultimately ‘spreadable’ medievalism, though of course there may well be many in that secondary audience unable to understand the Middle English of Bryant’s 12 Alexandra Service, ‘Popular Vikings: Constructions of Viking Identity in Twentieth-Century Britain’ (unpublished DPhil, University of York, 1998), p. 224. 13 The tweet was published at 9.03 p.m. on 30 May 2015. It can be found at: [accessed 17 September 2015].

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account, or else who are unfamiliar with Perry, and who will thus miss the joke. Significantly, the joke only works for those familiar with both the medieval and the modern. As Bryant himself describes it, his mixture of modern popular culture with the perceived high culture of medievalism is designed “to blend specialist medieval scholarship with pop culture, and to throw the medieval and contemporary together in a way that would inextricably mesh them”.14 The result is a temporal conflation, based on a kind of humour which, as Kathleen Forni observes, has “the appeal of providing the privileged pleasure of a multiple-access exclusivity. That is, [a reader] presumably possesses the educational competence allowing access to a number of high and low cultural discourses required to decipher the coded puns.”15 A second example comes in the form of the popular Twitter account Medieval Reactions (@MedievalReacts), in which medieval manuscript illustrations are transformed into modern memes simply by the addition of a modern caption. One such example features a manuscript illustration of a fiddler with a contorted companion, to which the caption reads “when the DJ plays an absolute banger” (‘banger’ is regional British slang for a good, or popular, song). The deliberate anachronism of the tweet is broadly symptomatic of the entire account. Even if many of the paintings and images are drawn from outside of the Middle Ages, the account exists primarily to undermine and pillory medieval imagery in order to render its curios relevant to the modern era. Unlike @LeVostreGC’s deliberately playful relationship with the period, however, Medieval Reactions does not require the same multipleaccess exclusivity identified by Forni above to ‘read’ the tweet on different levels and through different cultural discourses of high and low. Instead, the account raids the high-brow world of art and manuscript illumination and transforms its works into inclusive medievalist memes geared towards modern audiences. Medieval Reactions thus offers an exemplary illustration of medievalism as a deliberately disruptive practice and one which makes no claims to any kind of historicity. Many of Medieval Reactions’ jokes are not grounded in anything identifiably medieval but relentlessly update the period to reflect modern-day (and, to judge from the slang, largely British) concerns, most notably its near-obsessive drinking culture (discussing ‘Jägerbombs’, ‘pre-lash’ and being ‘too smashed for the club’). The register of the Twitter feed further disrupts the medieval text by adopting the patois of modern youth culture to create a marked disjuncture between the earnestly medieval and the casually modern. The account regularly ends sentences with the word ‘like’, ambiguously referring to the picture or to the frequent use of ‘like’ in teenagers’ discourse, and uses slang like ‘fam’ (close friends who are like family), and ‘bae’ (literally a Danish word for excrement, but which has entered internet speech to mean ‘babe’ or partner, seemingly an abbreviation for ‘before anyone else’).16 Finally, 14 Brantley L. Bryant, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 20. 15 Kathleen Forni, Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), p. 128. 16 I am grateful to my anonymous reviewer (who was an embodiment of the polymath capable of multiple-access exclusivity with in-depth knowledge of an astonishing range of discourses and fields) for informing me of this meaning, and for the corrections on Katy Perry.

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Figure 2  The Medieval Reactions Twitter account raids the high-brow world of art and manuscript illumination and transforms its works into inclusive medievalisms geared towards modern audiences.

many of the account’s jokes are structured around a fundamental incompatibility between temporal planes. Following Sigmund Freud’s arguments about the essence of incongruity underlying humour,17 the amusement of the reader following the Twitter account comes from the deracinated medieval content being placed, in an entirely intentional anomaly, into the context of modern drinking culture. Though such incongruity is integral to both Medieval Reactions and to LeVostreGC, in the former case the requirements for understanding the meaning are lowered, making for a more ‘spreadable’ kind of medievalism. Where the Middle English Katy Perry song achieved 95 retweets, the Medieval Reactions tweet, with the account boasting 365,000 followers, achieved a staggering 24,000 retweets. The final example comes in the meme ‘medieval facepalm’, in which the medieval image of a queen from the Lewis chess set finds itself reinterpreted as a modern ‘facepalm’ – a term denoting exasperation at stupidity, ignorance or misunderstanding. While the gesture is surely by no means exclusively a modern one, the term itself has entered internet parlance as a catch-all trope to denote frustration, finding a home as an internet meme with several thousand variations. Thus, by adapting the meme to become a specifically ‘medieval’ facepalm with the addition of a caption “when

17 See Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002).

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modern facepalm is not enough to show how stupid it was”, the medieval once again finds itself uprooted and circulated in the service of the present. Here the conflation of temporal planes once again works to emphasise the modern era while subverting our expectations about the past. The subtle assertion on which the meme relies is that exasperation and frustration are atemporal emotions, and that the serious and earnest medieval period is used to disapprove of the frivolous and superficial trappings of the modern world. Such a hypothesis finds itself supported further by the fact that variations on the meme – in one example the chess piece is substituted by the Monty Python knights’ own facepalm in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – experienced nowhere near the same degree of success as the original.

Figure 3  The use of the Lewis chess piece as a ‘medieval facepalm’ shows the use of the Middle Ages in its ludic capacity, as part of an online meme culture.

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Here, success or failure is measured simply by spreadability and replication without alteration, following Limor Shifman’s definition of the meme’s success as dependent on its replication through longevity, fecundity and copy fidelity.18 According to an exact Boolean search through Google, the term “medieval facepalm” linked to 735 different sites, and iterations of the meme could be found on a huge variety of meme databases, suggesting its widespread acceptance as an instantly recognisable image, but one which has nothing at all to do with the Middle Ages. In all three of these examples it is clearly not the use of the Middle Ages which makes them into social media phenomena but their reuse and application to modern sensibilities in various contexts. Wrested from their immediate cultural context, these medieval elements are reapplied to modern concerns and, most importantly, repeated across the media to a receptive, even if unwitting, audience. What differentiates the three examples is the cultural capital required to decode each medievalism, which also impacts on the meme’s ability to be spread by wide audiences. While it is impossible to measure the reach of an internet meme such as Medieval Facepalm, the staggering difference in reach between the banal medievalism of Medieval Reactions and the intentional historical allusion of LeVostreGC demonstrates precisely my argument about the possibilities open to banal medievalisms. The power of banal medievalism lies not in its correspondence with any historical precedent but in its suitability to be retransmitted, and it is at its most powerful precisely when there is no expertise or historical knowledge required to decode it. In this process, then, banal medievalism – by dint of its dislocation from history – transfers such medievalisms into empty signifiers, following Peter Widdowson’s argument that the erosion of history means that “we are left in a world of radically ‘empty’ signifiers”. In such a world, Widdowson argues, the individual historical reference is removed in favour of “a ceaseless procession of simulacra; the past is played and replayed as an amusing range of styles, genres, signifying practices to be combined and recombined at will […] The only history that exists here is the history of the signifier and that is no history at all.”19 Though it is highly fashionable in some circles to pronounce history as ‘dead’ in a postmodern challenge to grand narratives, this is not my point. My description of banal medievalisms as ‘empty signifiers’ is not designed to suggest that there is no such thing as a historical datum to be attached to the signifier – it is neither my place nor my intention to make such a claim. Neither am I subscribing to a post-Annales school of thought to suggest, along with Paul Veyne, that there is no such thing as a historical fact.20 Rather, my point is that, returning to the original meaning of the signifier in Saussurean semiotics, the signifier has no specific, identifiable sign to which it is pointing, which is why it does not require any specific skills to decode it. It is not that there is no meaning at all in the context of these medievalisms but, in the case of the medieval facepalm meme or the Medieval Reactions Twitter account, 18

p. 18.

19 20

Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), Widdowson, cited in Jenkins, Rethinking History, p. 80. Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit L’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 42.

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there are no identifiably medieval meanings which thus renders a one-to-one correspondence of the signifier impossible.21 Likewise, when politicians and world leaders line up to dismiss Islamic State as ‘medieval’, and when IS themselves eagerly accept such a description (see Chapter 8), then it is clear that we are in the presence of an empty signifier. It is a chain of signification with no direct correspondence, whose openness is precisely what allows two groups to fight over its significance, like Joan of Arc and same-sex marriage. What makes these signifiers empty, then, is not the lack of historical references (Joan of Arc, like Crusaders, certainly does mean something), but the multiple meanings of their retransmission. If each remediation accrues new meanings, then the medievalisms under discussion are rendered ‘empty signifiers’ by dint of their excessive, or their contradictory, signifieds. Their emptiness allows them to be co-opted into modern ideological projects, posing new questions in turn. Jerome de Groot, one of the most important voices emerging in the kind of public history debates that are only now beginning to break into wider circles of discussion, poses one such insightful question not by dismissing the suggestion of an ‘empty signifier’ but by following through the logic to ask new questions: “If ‘the past’ is after all an empty signifier, just what are the semiotic processes involved in constructing, perpetrating and consuming purported meaning – what strategies are in place for pouring sense into such representational aporia?”22 While some might take issue with the suggestion that the representational aporia actually need to be filled, de Groot’s point is essentially correct and important. Within a world of mediated medievalism, when the signifieds of medievalism relate not to a historical Middle Ages but to a concept of them widely held across popular opinion, then the rhetorical strategies of medievalism merit analysis. In order to analyse them, however, it is necessary to take a step back to examine how and why these signifiers came to be ‘emptied’ in the first place. The various meanings of the term “medieval” reflect not a discrete historical period but rather the various uses to which the period has been put over the years between then and now, and often as a means to understand who we are in the present day. As Umberto Eco describes it, the constant return to the Middle Ages is the result of an eternal search for our roots. “Looking at the Middle Ages”, writes Eco, “means looking at our infancy, in the same way that a doctor, to understand our present state of health, asks us about our childhood, or in the same way that the psychoanalyst, to understand our present neuroses, makes a careful investigation of the primal scene. Our quest for the Middle Ages is a quest for our roots.”23 Again, de Groot puts it neatly when he argues that: “How a society consumes its history is crucial to the understanding of all contemporary popular culture, the issues at stake in representation itself, and the various means of self- or social construction available […]

21 Andrew Ross, Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 81. 22 Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 1. 23 Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, p. 65.

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consumption practices influence what is packaged as history and work to define how the past manifests itself in society.”24 If the use of the Middle Ages is a way of reaffirming our roots, then it is worth offering a (necessarily brief) overview of the broad ways in which the Middle Ages have been reinvented over the past 500 years to show how those roots have informed modern identity, to show the extent to which the period has become, as Brian Stock calls it “a foundation onto which cultural myths [have] been erected”.25 My intention here is by no means to offer a definitive account of each stage in the reinvention and reuse of the Middle Ages over centuries, since that has been ably and amply covered elsewhere.26 Instead, the point here is to show how, in several reconfigurations of the Middle Ages, there has been both an overt ideological project (to describe the ignorance/beauty/harmony/primitiveness of the past in order to highlight the intelligence/ugliness/discord/sophistication of the present) and a less well-recognised, or banal, project which lurks beneath the surface. Each use, accordingly, offers up a potentially new kind of Middle Ages to enter our cultural repository of medievalism. Reinventing the Middle Ages Though of course there are a number of critics who convincingly suggest that the Middle Ages were invoked and disparaged even within the period we now term ‘medieval’,27 it is clear that, in terms of a broader adoption of the term ‘Middle Ages’, the first real reinvention of the medieval period came about as an ideological project designed to sever links with an immediate past. Such a project had in mind the kind of fundamental divide between the medieval and the modern as two expressions not of period but of a more deeply rooted shift in mentality taking place with the Renaissance. As an attempt to sever links with an immediate past in order to posit a return to Classical Antiquity, Maria Bonet and John Style argue that “the Middle Ages emerged as a concept in opposition to Renaissance humanism’s aspiration to

De Groot, Consuming History, p. 2. Brian Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism’, New Literary History, 5.3 (1974), pp. 527–47 (p. 542). 26 See, for example, Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism; Ute Berns and Andrew James Johnston, ‘Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction’, European Journal of English Studies, 15.2 (2011), pp. 97–100; Clare A. Simmons, Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2001); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1991). 27 Such as, for example, Theodore E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, Speculum, 17.2 (1942), pp. 226–42; Barnet Litvinoff, 1492: The Decline of Medievalism and the Modern Age (Bristol: Avon Books, 1992); John Simons, From Medieval to Medievalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); Nickolas Haydock, ‘Medievalism and Excluded Middles’, Studies in Medievalism, 18 (2009), pp. 17–30; Simmons, Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages; Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 24 25

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be a new period of history. In its genesis, it was seen as an alternative, negative element in relation to everything that defined the Nova Aetas.”28 Thus, in Rabelais, we encounter Gargantua bemoaning the darkness of Middle Ages to his son Pantagruel, while at the same time vaunting the “rediscovery” of Classical knowledge in the Renaissance: the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of good masters such as thou hast had. For that time was darksome [ténébreux], obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Gothes, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity.29

The ‘darksome’ (ténébreux) Middle Ages, then, becomes a convenient metaphorical construction – an empty signifier – into which to pour superstition and ignorance so as to vaunt, by contrast, the light of the ‘new learning’ of the era’s immediate successor. What can be observed from the very beginning is an attempt to define the medieval period as a self-contained entity not for the purposes of historical inquiry (it is clear that Rabelais is not conducting a historical survey here and does not attempt to situate the period according to careful review of primary sources) but in order to suit the purposes of the present. It is no coincidence for Rabelais and his fellow Humanists that the invention of the ‘most elegant and correct’ printing press falls conveniently around the end of our medieval period. For Gargantua, at least, this new access to learning goes some way to explaining the darkness and ignorance of their former times. Yet, probing below the surface, we cannot of course hold Rabelais solely responsible. First, we can by no means be sure that in the figure of Gargantua his sweeping satire was not equally aimed at his contemporaries’ dismissal of the preceding era. The general attribution of ignorance to the recently ‘ended’ medium aevum was symptomatic, Norman Cantor contends, of “the negative view of medieval culture that had been invented by the fifteenth-century-Renaissance Italian humorists themselves as the historical theory to accompany and give narrative depth to their claim that they were engaged in the salutary post-medieval revival of ancient learning and classical Latinity”.30 Second, we can observe that the metaphor of darkness and light was certainly not new to Rabelais,31 but was extirpated from its religious context and applied to the ignorance of learning. The analogy, then, is as clear as it is neat; just as the world was in pagan ‘darkness’ while it lived in ignorance of Christ, so too were those in 28 Maria Bonet and John Style, ‘Utopia and the Middle Ages in Popular Culture: A Reading of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 5 (2007), pp. 55–93 (p. 63). 29 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), p. 160 (my emphasis). 30 Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 28. 31 Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, p. 227. For a nuanced and detailed discussion of the use of light and dark imagery, see also Alicia C. Montoya, ‘Medievalism and Enlightenment, 1647–1750: Jean Chapelain to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Romanic Review, 100.4 (2009), pp. 494–512.

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the Middle Ages living in ignorance of the illuminating effects of the pagan philosophers. Such an analogy is clearly important for the metaphorical use of light and dark in a term such as “dark ages”. Third, there is certainly some evidence to support Theodor Mommsen’s contention that among the dissident voices of the mid- to late- fourteenth century similar ideas about living in an age of ignorance were already in circulation. Petrarch notably complained that his own times were besmirched by ignorance and barbarity, claiming that his “fate is to live among varied and confused storms”.32 Nevertheless, when we move toward an era in which Flavio Biondo can confidently pronounce the existence of a “middle age” which fills the gap between two eras of learning and light (at least, in as much as they were perceived),33 then it is clear from the subtext that the medieval period has indubitably already begun its long process of reinvention and retransmission. That traces of a reaction against the ‘darksome’ medieval period can be found throughout successive generations of thinkers and writers (up to and including the Enlightenment) is a sure sign of the pervasiveness and tenacity with which later periods were to cling to this belief. One reason seems to be that in the period they saw precisely the opposite of what each generation wanted to uphold, so, for instance, thinkers such as Voltaire would use the Middle Ages as a convenient shorthand for the kind of superstition and adherence to religion over reason against which the Philosophes of the eighteenth century were taking such a notable stance. It is in this light that, as Mommsen argues, the ‘Dark Ages’ came to signify: a denunciation of the mediaeval conception of the world, of the mediaeval attitude toward life, and of the culture of the Middle Age… In the age of the Enlightenment […] the very name of that period was a manifest declaration of war against the era of ‘darkness’ and its scale of values.34

As Bonet and Style describe it, “the Middle Ages emerged as a concept in opposition to Renaissance humanism’s aspiration to be a new period of history. In its genesis, it was seen as an alternative, negative element in relation to everything that defined the Nova Aetas.”35 The Middle Ages as Social Myth That the Middle Ages were, from the very outset, an invention of contemporary fears, desires and anxieties is in itself generally understood and scarcely controversial. What is new with this argument, however, is that in examining who was

Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, pp. 227–8. For more on Biondo’s rewriting of the Middle Ages, see Chapter 3, ‘Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages’ in Denys Hay, Renaissance Essays (London: Hambledon, 1988), pp. 35–63. 34 Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, p. 227. 35 Bonet and Style, ‘Utopia and the Middle Ages’, p. 63. 32 33

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inventing this ‘middle age’, and what function it served in the popular mind, something is revealed about the mechanisms through which the Middle Ages came to be reborn. Stock’s argument, cited above, that “with the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages was reborn as a social myth”,36 makes it possible to locate the Renaissance project of the Middle Ages not as the ideological project of a handful of scholars but as a “prevalent cultural myth” that was unconsciously taken up by an entire society as a convenient shorthand to embody a range of (often contradictory) ideas too cumbersome to be deployed in non-historical description. As time wore on, it becomes clear that, just as the term ‘the Dark Ages’ was “not a scientific term, but rather a battle-cry”,37 so too was the nascent field of medievalism not wholly historical in nature but ontological. As Michael Alexander describes it, “the first research into English medieval origins did not come from disinterested scholarship or pious patriotism. Those who precipitated these radical remodellings of England […] sought native historical precedent for their religious and political redefinitions of national identity. Those who seek for precedents in early history can generally find them.”38 In this respect Stock agrees: The Middle Ages, after all, was invented long before it was studied; it began life with historiographical, not historical, reflection. To the medievals the media aetas did not exist at all; it was created by the humanists to describe what they thought they were not, but which in fundamental respects they still were. During the Renaissance, the Middle Ages ceased bit by bit to be a reality people lived without troubling to think about it and began to be a consciously re-created epoch.39

The ideological reinvention of the Middle Ages, of course, by no means stopped with the early modern project to construct the period as Object (to use Stock’s terminology), but instead constituted an ongoing reconstruction of an already constructed period. It is not difficult to see here, even in its germane status as an emerging cultural myth, that the ways in which the medieval was formulated represents the same process as the banal medievalisms under examination in later chapters of this book. Thus, to fast-forward through the intervening centuries, it is possible to find in each successive reuse of the medieval period an underlying ideological project which appropriates the period as a means of defining the present. Each successive iteration serves not to shed more light onto the heterogeneity of the period, but to further solidify its homogeneity, its existence as an Object of Otherness constructed in contradistinction to our own. Bonet and Style claim that a notion of the fundamental ‘alterity’ of the Middle Ages was thus a product of each writer’s contemporary outlook, meaning that the ideologies used to dismiss or celebrate the period 36 37 38 39

Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’, p. 538. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, p. 227. Alexander, Medievalism, p. xxiii. Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’, pp. 537–8. See also p. 544.

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in fact constructed it as a wholly foreign era outside of history, “distinct from ours, dark, and dominated by unreason and brute force”.40 For instance, we meet Voltaire’s singular dismissal of the period – even after a two-volume and intricate history of the morals and customs of the centuries since Charlemagne – as “the rough-and-ready [grossiers] era which we call the Middle Ages”.41 Voltaire’s dismissal of the era reflects precisely Bonet and Style’s point about the alterity of the Middle Ages. The dismissal of centuries of history as a “rough and ready era” says less about the Middle Ages than it does about Enlightenment dogma under which, “highly conscious of themselves as subjects, [the Enlighteners] made of all past periods mere objects which could be used as measuring sticks for the present”.42 So it is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the reuse and recreation of the Middle Ages had already been made available as a convenient metaphor, to embody those values from which first the Humanists, and later the Philosophes, were so ardently seeking to distance themselves. The differences between the two visions inform us less about the actual Middle Ages than about the dark incubi of Humanism (the absence of Classical learning) and Enlightenment beliefs (the absence of Reason and Rationalism), lending support to Cantor’s claim that in our interactions with the medieval “we are visibly creating a psychoanalysis in which our own anxieties, hopes, loves, fears and disappointments become interactive with the learned discoveries and databases that academic research proliferates”.43 The Romantic rejection of Rationalism is another case in point, in which the Middle Ages found itself, like Joan of Arc and the Front National, torn in two directions by competing ideologies. Where the Rationalists rejected the ‘rough-andready era’ of the Middle Ages, Cantor outlines the ways in which the Romantic movement openly challenged “the image of a ‘Middle Ages’ of barbarism, ignorance and superstition”.44 Perhaps more surprising is that such a volte-face took place in spite of several ideological obstacles. The Romantics of the nineteenth century were broadly united in their medievalism by a background of anti-Catholicism, the celebration of the individual, the sentimental over the Rational and mechanical and a eulogising of Nature as a pre-Industrial idyll inherently superior to the lumbering, inhuman and unnatural chimneys and factories of the Industrial Revolution. The legacy of the Middle Ages thus stood in many ways in stark opposition to such ideas, as a period much in thrall to the Church, regulated by a feudal system which privileged the institution over the individual and characterised by the development of fundamental new technologies – such as the printing press – that prompted further developments of machines. Its people were not – despite our perception to the contrary – occupying “a pre-Industrial idyll, a time when people supposedly lived in harmony Bonet and Style, ‘Utopia and the Middle Ages’, p. 64. “les temps grossiers qu’on nomme du moyen âge”. Voltaire, Essai Sur Les Moeurs Et L’esprit Des Nations Et Sur Les Principaux Faits De L’histoire Depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII (Paris: Garnier, 1963), Vol. 2 Chapt. CXCVII, p. 804. 42 Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’, p. 538. 43 Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 45. 44 Ibid., p. 28. 40 41

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with their environment”, but were rapidly changing the face of their landscape; for them, according to Marcus Bull, “it was simply the technology available that limited the rate of change”.45 However, as we will see later, it is precisely because these are surface differences that we can understand the appeal of the era to a Romantic movement. The latter used the Middle Ages once again as an ideological weapon, peering into the medievalist mirror and picking out those aspects which best served their purposes. Consequently, according to Stock, where “the Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves”.46 As Cantor summarises it, “The Romantics liked the Middle Ages because they thought they saw in that world the beliefs and behaviour that contrasted vividly with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the mechanism of the Industrial Revolution and the centralizing bureaucracy of the national state.”47 Of course, we must also be wary of ascribing a unanimously held view across each generation and movement, for this is to assert of one era a generalisation which we would not necessarily accept for our own, and to accept precisely the kind of periodisation of later periods that John Simons, Alexander, Stock and Weisl try to dispel with regards to the Middle Ages. If Walter Scott has shown us one side of the Middle Ages, we must equally bear in mind that the same Romantic spirit may be manifested in an opposite fashion, such as the general spirit of subversion identifiable in William Morris’s idealised view of the late Middle Ages in A Dream of John Ball. Though ostensibly lauding the Peasants’ Revolt of the fourteenth century, even the least attentive reader cannot fail to see the veiled criticism of the ‘monopolists’ and nobility of the late nineteenth century.48 Conversely, it is possible to view the same medieval mosaic through the eyes of the then poet laureate Tennyson’s celebration of the Empire (as a Camelot made global), and its conflation of the shining, pre-Raphaelite Arthur with Prince Albert.49 It is scarcely a coincidence, then, to find Dyce’s medieval motifs bedecking Westminster’s Robing Room, calling to mind the former use of Winchester’s Round Table and Arthur’s Glastonbury tomb in the ratification of claims to the throne.50 The differences between such uses of the past for markedly different purposes thus demonstrate precisely the same elasticity which has allowed it such freedom in twenty-first-century mediated medievalism.

Bull, Thinking Medieval, pp. 18–19. Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’, p. 543. 47 Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 29 (my emphasis). 48 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson (London: Reeves & Turner, 1890). 49 See Edward Donald Kennedy, King Arthur: A Casebook (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 274; Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 56. 50 For more on the Westminster Robing Room, see Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England, ch. 7. The Winchester Round Table and Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury were ‘found’ in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward I respectively. 45

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Twentieth-Century Reinvention As such, throughout its post-medieval construction, the medieval past has always found itself reinvented as much to suit present exigencies as through any attempt genuinely to return to the past. Already by the beginning of the twentieth century, from the point of view of audiences’ expectations of authenticity, it becomes clear that any kind of medievalism is beset by a number of different influences working on the reception of the medieval period. It is at this point in the history of medievalism that the development of film – and especially of Hollywood film – would begin to shape and mould even more disparate and complex visions of the Middle Ages, often drawing on one or another of these specific ways of reimagining the Middle Ages but, crucially, without necessarily returning to the Middle Ages themselves to find them. In fact, so great are the number of parallel fantasies of the Middle Ages in cinema that, as I and others have argued elsewhere,51 there begins a period after around the middle of the twentieth century when films reproducing the period begin to close in on themselves and form their own influences, rather than pointing backwards to any medieval sources.52 In their perpetual efforts to find in the Middle Ages precisely the values which modern authors hoped themselves to emphasise, medievalism becomes medievalism doubled back up upon itself (as Amy Kaufman calls it), referring not only to the past but to other versions of that past. What does change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, is the pace of change. Earlier movements were comparatively limited in terms of their medium’s reach; the acceleration of the above process of reinvention through the mass media comes hand-in-hand with the increased sophistication of those media themselves. Where, for instance, a nineteenth-century opera might influence a host of audiences for as long as it ran, the ability of the cinema to reach millions, and of the internet to reach billions, means that modern medievalisms are much more capable of influencing other depictions of that same period. Such an acceleration can be seen by the proliferation of medievalisms in popular culture towards the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, which David W. Marshall identifies as an ‘explosion’ of interest in all things medieval.53 Where, already by the 1970s, Umberto Eco was to observe a widespread – but largely casual and playful – consumption of the trappings of medievalism,54 by the end of the 1990s Jeffrey Richards observed an almost obsessive return to the medieval past, claiming that “as we approach the end of the second millennium, 51 Andrew B.R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). See also Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Films About Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). 52 Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages, pp. 180–84. 53 Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, ed. David W. Marshall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), pp. 5, 6. 54 Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’.

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the Middle Ages (site of the first millennium) has returned to haunt the popular consciousness”.55 For evidence of this turn, he continues: you have only to look around you: films, comics and heavy metal rock music are saturated in medieval images and ideas. ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and a host of imitation role-playing games draw on the ancient and medieval mythologies of all nations for their rules. CDs of Gregorian chants have entered the top ten lists. […] Britain, Norway, Denmark and Germany have Viking and Dark Age re-enactment societies which stage battles. A range of reproduction artefacts is available from mail order catalogues and specialist shops like Past Times.56

The existence of such competing influences does not, of course, necessarily undermine the individual importance of those traces, since the lasting legacy of these Romantic, or Gothic, or Renaissance Middle Ages all contribute to the ‘prevalent cultural myth’ described by Stock. Even if they are not historical references to the period, they are still nevertheless capable of influencing broader ideas about that past. As Michel Pastoureau acknowledges, even the most imaginative and fantastic deviations from the historical past nevertheless become part of ‘prevalent cultural myths’ which circulate (often indiscriminately) in popular culture: Should we be outraged by these romantic notions [of the Middle Ages]? Certainly not. For one thing because the imaginary is always part of reality, and that imaginary Middle Ages which we carry around with us, as affected and oneiric as it might be, is a reality: it exists, we can feel it, we can live it.57

In the light of such competing ideological uses of the Middle Ages, then, how is it possible to reconcile contrasting and contradictory views of the period? First, by the simple fact of recognising that, from the outset, the Middle Ages have often served as an imaginary object used to vaunt the present by casting the medieval Other in its shadow. Second, by recognising that any contradictions are the result of a socially conditioned and malleable idea it is easier to understand how and why they so readily become a collective cultural myth, and why they are not dead yet. Each reading of the Middle Ages, from the moment that they ‘officially’ came to an end, has thus been precisely that: a reading. That is to say, each attempt to offer a kind of renewal of the period has looked into the past and taken up those elements which suited present concerns, or which a given movement wished, nostalgically, to reinvent. In banal medievalism it is not the period itself which is summoned up by the signifier but the dominant reading of that period.

55 Jeffrey Richards, ‘From Christianity to Paganism: The New Middle Ages and the Values of “Medieval” Masculinity’, Cultural Values, 3.2 (1999), pp. 213–34 (p. 213). 56 Richards, ‘From Christianity to Paganism’, p. 213. 57 ‘Faut il se scandaliser de cette notion romantique? Certainement pas. D’une part parce que l’imaginaire fait toujours partie de la réalité, et que cette imaginaire du Moyen Âge que nous portons en nous, tout affectif ou onirique qu’il soit, est une réalité : il existe, nous le sentons, nous le vivons’ (my translation and emphasis). Michel Pastoureau, Une Histoire Symbolique Du Moyen Âge Occidental (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 338.

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Medievalism and Neomedievalism: A Clarification of Terms One final point worth mentioning concerns terminology. I am conscious that my use of the term ‘medievalism’ throughout this and the following chapters might well clash with others’ uses of terms such as ‘modern medievalism’, ‘neo-medievalism’ or ‘neomedievalism’. Perhaps it is precisely the acceleration of mediated medievalisms that has also given birth to such confusion over terminology. Referring to the millenarianism of the late 1990s, Richards offers the important suggestion that “there is not one Middle Ages but many different Middle Ages – or rather that the Middle Ages is being used as an imaginative quarry from which different people are selecting different things for different reasons”.58 Likewise, de Groot points out that “the ‘historical’ in popular culture and contemporary society is multiple, multiplying and unstable”.59 For Tom Shippey – a fundamental voice in the establishment of medievalism in the first place – such a plurality of medieval referents must be included in the very definition of medievalism, by recognising that “medievalism might be better thought of in the plural, as an array of types”.60 Again, Umberto Eco, with his customary ability to encapsulate complex arguments into one sentence, acknowledges the fact that “everyone has his own ideas, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages”.61 The question thus emerges: do all of these separate reuses constitute ‘medievalism’ taken as a whole? Or should we carefully classify them as plurals, defining them as I have, as (somewhat ungrammatical) medievalisms? After all, Nickolas Haydock defines medievalism as “a discourse of contingent representations derived from the historical Middle Ages, composed of marked alterities to and continuities with the present”, which clearly implies a plurality of potential medievalisms rather than one, single, monolithic medievalism.62 Then again, is ‘medievalism’ a purely scholarly term? Are we to follow David Marshall’s helpful distinction between what he terms ‘genealogical medievalism’, which “addresses the accumulative production of an idea of the Middle Ages”, and ‘pop-cultural medievalism’, which “has less to do with meta-history and the building of a scholarly genealogy and more to do with the cultural studies movement that emerged in the 1970s”?63 Somewhat anecdotally, beyond my chosen interdisciplinary field, such distinctions cause problems of classification of entire fields of study. Working in a Film and Media Studies department, many of my attempts to clarify that I work on medievalism, but am not for that reason a medievalist, are often met with blank stares or well-meaning suggestions that I should perhaps describe myself instead as a cultural theorist or, as one colleague suggests, as a “medievalismist”. While seemingly inconsequential, such confusions over terminology can lead to more serious confusion over methodology, since if medievalists are those who study the Middle Richards, ‘From Christianity to Paganism’, p. 214. De Groot, Consuming History, p. 4. 60 Tom Shippey, ‘Medievalisms and Why They Matter’, Studies in Medievalism XVII (2009), pp. 45–54 (p. 45) (my emphasis). 61 Quoted in Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 18. 62 Haydock, ‘Medievalism and Excluded Middles’, p. 19. 63 Marshall, Mass Market Medieval, p. 4. 58

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Ages within the period, but medievalism is its study in post-medieval culture, are those who study medievalism restricted to applying the same kind of historical analysis on their chosen field, or should they be cultural studies specialists? Here John Simons offers a helpful definition which embraces both scholarly medievalism and the study of the cultures which reproduce the Middle Ages when he defines medievalism “broadly as the study and use of medieval culture in the post-medieval period, which in turn can be seen as a key to understanding the culture of those periods in which it is pursued”.64 This chimes neatly with Michael Alexander’s claim – echoed by Marshall in the quotation above – that “medievalism is the offspring of two impulses: the recovery by antiquarians and historians of materials for the study of the Middle Ages; and the imaginative adoption of medieval ideals and forms. The second impulse gradually separated from the first.”65 These two impulses (and dual disciplinary inheritance) are thus contained within – and lurk beneath – academic definitions which focus on the memory of the Middle Ages, such as Weisl’s important definition of medievalism as “essentially the received Middle Ages, a collection of ideas generated from what people think the Middle Ages may have been rather than what they actually were”.66 Again, David Marshall offers the following temptingly inclusive definition: As a field of study, medievalism interrogates how different groups, individuals, or eras for various reasons, often distortedly, remember the Middle Ages. This interest in how the medieval is remembered distinguishes medievalism from medieval studies, which maintains an interest in what the Middle Ages actually were, how they looked and worked in reality. Medievalism, on the other hand, prompts scholars to ask how the Middle Ages are invoked in their myriad incarnations and for what purpose in relation to the historical context of any given expression of them.67

The attempt to avoid dismissing individual ideas as (ab)errant readings transmutes all medievalisms into the realm of memory, properly the domain of cultural studies. Such a focus on memory thus solves one problem but poses others when viewed in the context of a rapidly emerging field of memory studies. By offering an all-embracing, inclusive definition of medievalism as memory, the study of medievalism fully embraces postmodernity to the extent that it undermines the possibility of a pre-existent, extrinsic idea of the Middle Ages to which we refer. Put simply, by emphasising that medievalism is what people remember, if we champion each person’s right to hold a personal view of the Middle Ages (Eco), but recognise that some of these might be flawed (Alexander), or even contradictory (de Groot),68 then we arrive at the situation wherein memory can no longer operate as the link between the present and the past, since it is so unreliable and deeply personal. We also risk arriving at the relativistic position wherein George Bush’s ideas of the Crusades are as important and valid as those of a crusade historian such as Thomas Asbridge 64 65 66 67 68

Simons, From Medieval to Medievalism, p. 1. Alexander, Medievalism, p. xxii. Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism, p. 29. Marshall, Mass Market Medieval, p. 2. De Groot, Consuming History, p. 249.

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or Jonathan Riley-Smith, a somewhat absurd – or even dangerous – suggestion given the fallout from Bush’s famous use of the term, discussed in Chapter 5, and the co-option (by so-called Islamic State) of Arabic history in a spirit of pan-Arab nationalism, discussed in Chapter 8. Karl Fugelso seizes precisely on this lack of precision when he describes the secondary phase of this memory of the Middle Ages, asking what happens when there inevitably arises a process of mutual borrowing according to which one person’s recollection of the Middle Ages becomes the reality in which another’s is anchored. Here we enter, in Fugelso’s terms, the realm of ‘metamemories’, “whose constituents can only be thoroughly differentiated from each other […] by closely tracking a theme through multiple incarnations and/or carefully framing a work in the contexts from which it emerges”.69 Such a definition might well embrace the mutual borrowing which characterises postmodern pastiche, but introduces new issues of “slippages” which cause us to return to a genealogical model, only this time chasing down the various borrowings in modern medievalism itself. It is, he argues, “only by accounting for the serial nature of these distortions [that we] can begin to fully identify the slippage of medievalism, to map the myriad ways in which the Middle Ages have been (mis)remembered”.70 In its attempt to filter out the various tweaks and changes made to the memory of the Middle Ages, Fugelso’s genealogical medievalism fits in with Marshall’s argument that the job of medievalism is “to approach the period as one of those old European castles that has been augmented and modified over the years. The task is to create a genealogy of sorts, to locate what parts of the castle are not original in order to better reveal the true edifice.”71 Hence, as soon as we establish some concrete foundations on which to anchor our definition of medievalism, we immediately encounter new problems in the issues of high and low culture which such approaches engender. The shift from analysing “responsible historical reconstruction”, as Eco terms it,72 to analysing memories and metamemories thus shifts our attention away from the antiquarian roots of medievalism and into the field of Cultural Studies. When operating in this latter mode, Ute Berns and Andrew James Johnston identify a tendency to dismiss medievalism as wholly irrelevant to History as a discipline: To a certain extent, medievalism is a typical offspring of Cultural Studies. From its very beginning, medievalism has focused strongly on popular images of the Middle Ages, on films and graphic novels, on computer games and forms of re-enactment, but also on more elite phenomena such as Victorian re-creations of the medieval past […] Especially in its early stages and in as much as it was concerned with popular themes,

69 Karl Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XV: Memory and Medievalism (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2007), p. 2. 70 Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XV, p. 2. 71 Marshall, Mass Market Medieval, p. 3. 72 Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (London: Random House, 1986), p. 62.

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medievalism seemed to lack scholarly credentials and threatened to remain a rather marginal academic pursuit.73

And so we return to medievalism in its antiquarian sense, since the very dismissal of medieval studies in itself, as demonstrated by Richard Utz,74 was often justified by its apparently amateurish nature and its emphatic emphasis on the present. The recognition of postmodernity in medieval studies thus stands as the prime impetus for the invention of yet another new term, ‘neomedievalism’, which can be defined as an academic pursuit which recognises the influence of postmodernism on its own academic pedigree, forming the circuitous – and self-referential – “post-postmodern ideology of medievalism”.75 It is, then, perhaps, somewhat unsurprising that when we are offered a potentially new term, ‘neomedievalism’, we might have some real sympathy for Amy Kaufman’s description of a panel discussion in which the whole issue of terminology was rejected entirely. As she reports, “Why, some wondered, do we even need the word neomedievalism? After all, we have a perfectly sound word, medievalism, that encompasses all manner of interactions with the Middle Ages.”76 The kind of medievalism studied in this book, however, is one which is characterised mainly by being unconscious, unwitting and by having little or no intention to refer to the Middle Ages. It is certainly not genealogical – that is entirely the point here – but, given that it relates to their mass usage for mass audiences, neither are they personal memories. The scholarly temptation is always to coin a new term for these medievalisms, which might be termed something like metaphorical medievalism, or what I have described above as banal medievalism. However, I have no intention here of adding to the growing and confusing lexicon of terms. I am thus very happy to describe it, following Kaufman, simply as medievalism per se, with the only caveat that we recognise that when, in some instances, medievalism comes to haunt our present-day discourse, it does so without really knowing much about it, and neither does it want to. Conclusions Thus, if we are to draw any conclusions from this necessarily brief overview of the ways in which we reinvent our past, they should be that the number of medieval worlds which lie at our fingertips is itself an indication of its malleability, a malleability which affects the very name of our discipline as much as it affects the subjects studied under it. As Simons argues, “the Middle Ages have been stretched in many directions in order to provide an ideological space in which a society can explore and articulate concerns which are otherwise repressed”.77 It is for this reason that Berns and Johnston, ‘Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction’, p. 97. Richard Utz, ‘Coming to Terms with Medievalism’, European Journal of English Studies, 15.2 (2011), pp. 101–13. 75 Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements, ‘Living with Neomedievalism’, Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II (2009), pp. 55–75 (pp. 61–2). 76 Kaufman, ‘Medieval Unmoored’, p. 1. 77 Simons, From Medieval to Medievalism, p. 5. 73

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we may speak of banal medievalism as an empty signifier, since it is not that the signifier has no specific referent but that the cumulative weight of a host of ideological redeployments of the term has served to create any number of meanings which might be attached to the term itself. Each generation, each movement and each ideological shift has been able to draw out the elements which best suit its specific interpretation of our collective past, demonstrating a flexibility and malleability of the medieval period which I have been trying to show throughout this chapter. The zealous and casual reuse of the Middle Ages forms what Eco calls “an immense work of bricolage”78 undertaken over centuries. Such a bricolage, Fugelso argues, consequently gives us “a glimpse of how the Middle Ages have changed as they have passed between interpreters. Over the years, their original form has been obscured by not only the accidents and illusions of time but also the extraordinary degree to which medievalists have built on each other.”79 Thus, before we prepare to dismiss any reading of the Middle Ages as untrue – either on the page or on the screen – we must first pause to ask whether or not the images we are seeing, or the words we are reading, are not necessarily untrue, but whether perhaps they are merely following a different interpretation of the period to the one which we currently hold. What changes in this respect is the degree to which each specific medievalism is intended to connect with a medieval referent – it is a question of function, not of accuracy. The Middle Ages outside of the academy, then, as the title of this chapter suggests, are ‘not dead yet’, since we still need them daily to function in an ideological capacity. Rather, they stand alongside us a little like the old man slung over John Cleese’s shoulder in Monty Python and the Holy Grail to which this chapter’s title alludes. They are not quite dead yet, but incapacitated nonetheless, powerless to resist being thrown about and pulled in a number of contrary directions. Furthermore, and to continue the sketch, as my brief history of medievalism suggests, their protestations of being themselves powerful and in control of themselves “aren’t fooling anyone”.

78 Umberto Eco, ‘Living in the New Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987), pp. 73–85 (p. 84). 79 Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XV, p. 2.

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2 Getting Medieval on Your RSS: Medievalism and the Mass Media

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It’s medieval to refuse girls the pill. Headline from The Daily Telegraph, 28 March 2014, p. 14.

f, as discussed in the previous chapter, the range of modes of transmission through the mass media means that the Middle Ages continue to live alongside the present, then the ways in which they are transmitted are just as worthy of analysis as the worlds they represent. The central question explored by this chapter relates to those media processes themselves, using specific examples to show how banal medievalisms are used to reconfigure the past. If the Middle Ages emerge in the present as a multiple, varied and ultimately fragmented series of ideas, then it follows that such fragmentation might well be a result of the processes of transmission, rather than because of some inherent characteristic of the medievalisms themselves. Certainly, modern medievalism recognises the importance of studying the mechanisms of representation as much as the past which they represent. Michael Camille’s study of medievalism in Notre Dame’s gargoyles, for instance, begins not with a study of medievalism per se but explores the objectives of sculptor Victor Pyanet in his gothic medievalism and Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration project as the guiding principle for a gothic style of medieval revival.1 Kevin J. Harty’s canonical book on medieval film, The Reel Middle Ages, starts by examining not the Middle Ages but the cinema and its institutional imperatives; likewise, Bettina Bildhauer begins her study of medievalism with an in-depth analysis of cinematic genre, and not historiography.2 Such a focus on the mechanism of representation rather than the object being represented in itself is perfectly logical since, as the medieval memes in Chapter 1 demonstrated, it is the specific workings of the medium of retransmission that will ultimately govern the ways in which the past finds itself transmitted to the present. Furthermore, the idea of representation is further problematised by the 1 Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 2 Harty, The Reel Middle Ages; Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), pp. 12ff.

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implicit assumption of homogeneity which inheres in any question of translation – as Stock observes in his criticism of any treatment of the Middle Ages as an object and ‘prevalent cultural myth’.3 Indeed, the vast critical literature on historiography emerging in the past few decades suggests that our attempts to capture the Middle Ages precisely as a single, monolithic idea are impossible, and inevitably involve the historian in a series of choices and narrative ‘framing’ devices that serve to imbue the past with the present (as Norman Cantor argues) and, indeed, unwittingly insert the historian into the history that she is trying to unearth (as Richard Utz has recently suggested).4 In the case of the kinds of banal medievalism on which this book is focused, however, such scrutiny has been unevenly applied, if at all. Although studies of medieval themes in film and – to a lesser extent, television – have experienced a considerable increase in recent years, it continues to be rare to see the same kinds of scholarly analysis of other, newer, fields of popular-cultural medievalism. Of course, there do exist notable exceptions, such as David Marshall’s Mass Market Medieval, Elizabeth Sklar and Donald Hoffman’s King Arthur in Popular Culture and, more recently, Daniel T. Kline’s Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Helen V. Young’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms and Carol Robinson and Pam Clements’ Neomedievalism in the Media.5 All of these in one way or another attempt to move away from traditional ‘lit-crit’ approaches in order to focus on medievalism as it appears, in one form or another, out of context and when it is not intended to function as an indexical reference to the Middle Ages. However, that these texts remain exceptions in fact underscores the extent to which they are still unusual in the emerging field of medievalism. It is thus perhaps worth establishing a critical basis for the following study from the very outset. The first observation to be made is that the treatment of modern medievalisms adopted for the remainder of this book is one based on an understanding of medievalism in the mass media not as scholarly attempts to reach backwards into the past but precisely as non-scholarly attempts to connect with an imagined idea of the Middle Ages. Just as medievalism itself emerged in part as a cultural myth, so too do medievalisms aimed at mass audiences refer to the kind of imaginary (rather than historical) medievalisms discussed in the last chapter. Such is the case with the newspaper headline from the UK’s Daily Telegraph that forms the epigraph to this chapter, which claims that it is ‘medieval’ to refuse girls the contraceptive pill. Clearly, in this example, there is nothing historical about such a

Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’, pp. 543–4. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages. Richard Utz’s suggestion of our own influence on reconstructing the medieval comes from his plenary address, “The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle Ages, Ourselves”, delivered at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on 16 May 2015. 5 Marshall, Mass Market Medieval; Sklar and Hoffman, King Arthur in Popular Culture; Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, ed. Daniel T. Kline (London & New York: Routledge, 2014); Helen Young, Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015); Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games, ed. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012). 3

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medievalism, but it relies rather on our understanding that ‘medieval’ in this and other instances means something like ‘outmoded’. Likewise, calling a football commentator’s attitude ‘medieval’ demonstrates precisely the kind of medievalism favoured by the media. It clearly does not suggest that the football commentator is actually from the Middle Ages, and neither does it suggest that there were football commentators in the Middle Ages. Instead, the medieval functions purely as a metaphor, implying that the commentator’s attitude is out of place in the current age and belongs to an earlier point in our evolution and (probably) sexual politics (as will be explored in Chapter 3). While it might be possible in other cases to draw a genealogical link between a modern institution and the Middle Ages, this example is emphatically not suggesting that it would be possible to find an example of a football commentator’s antiquated opinions in a medieval manuscript.6 It suggests that the attitude belongs to the Middle Ages, even if such a belonging is historically implausible. The use of the term ‘medieval’, then, with its imprecision and variety of meanings, maps a range of semantic fields simultaneously which seek to make a connection not with the historical Middle Ages but, rather, with a collectively held idea about them. As such, the term does not belong to history, but to modernity. When, for example, the novelist Matt Haig upbraids a particularly obnoxious Twitter user’s biblically inspired homophobia by telling him to “step out of the Dark Ages”, or where Holly Baxter’s opinion piece in The Guardian criticises The Sun for “the latest medieval public shaming of a young girl”,7 it is clear that, likewise, in neither of these cases is there any real intention on the part of the writer to make a connection with earlier philosophical or historiographic uses of the past. Haig is not actually referring to a specifically medieval proscription against homosexuality, but implying that the use of the Bible to support intolerant positions is no longer appropriate in a ‘modern’, post-Enlightenment mode of thinking and sexual politics. Likewise, Baxter is not actually suggesting that newspapers existed in the Middle Ages, nor does she mean to say that the use of the mass media to ‘name-and-shame’ is medieval in itself, but rather that it seems like an outmoded practice in a civilised society. In both cases, then, like the football commentator and the contraceptive pill, the term ‘medieval’ in this sense is designed to invoke a specific kind of assertion that a particular ideology or practice is outdated. These last two examples were chosen because both are educated and intelligent writers who have an above-average chance of knowing about the complexity of a term such as ‘medieval’; yet both are happy to describe a given situation as ‘medieval’ 6 In fact, the implausibility of a medieval football commentator is precisely the butt of the joke in one episode of M6’s medieval comedy series Kaamelott (I.A.4: ‘La Bataille Rangée’), in which Arthur and his knights comment on a pitched battle from the sidelines using the metaphor of a modern football commentator. A similar joke is at work, more famously, in Brian Helgeland’s 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, in the comparison of a medieval tournament with a modern-day sporting event. In both cases, if the idea of a medieval sports commentator was not an egregious anomaly, the joke simply would not work. 7 Holly Baxter, ‘Beware the Stark Warning to Women in The Sun’s Magaluf “Investigation”’, The Guardian, 4 July 2014, [accessed 8 July 2014].

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when they really mean something akin to ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’ or ‘antiquated’. Both examples – along with countless others which might be adduced here8 – are clearly reliant on a kind of mutually understood shorthand, according to which the terms ‘medieval’, ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘Middle Ages’ are suggestive of primitiveness or intolerance, particularly where ideology is involved. In fact, a rather odd example drawn from the Daily Mail suggests a degree of flexibility which shows that such medievalisms are not related to the medieval at all, but to a generally understood sense of the Dark Ages as indicating a less sophisticated pastness. In a report on paternity leave, Thomas Cawston writes that “it sounds like something from the dark ages – invisible fathers who are unrecognised in the leave system, mothers who are put on the ‘mummy track’ in the workplace and low income parents who cannot afford to take time off. But this isn’t 1909, it’s 2009.”9 The use of 1909 as a period ostensibly from the Dark Ages show just how elastic these semantic fields can be in the realm of banal medievalism. The temporal flexibility of the term ‘Dark Ages’ seems to support Michael Alexander’s (somewhat sweeping) suggestion that, “in Britain at least, any simple anti-medievalism usually owes more to historical ignorance or to prejudice than to zeal for the Reformation, faith in the Enlightenment, or devotion to Petrarch, Copernicus, Bacon or Descartes, or even to Charles Darwin.”10 In any case, it does suggest that, in order to understand contemporary, mediated medievalisms, it is as important to focus on their references to the present as much as – if not more than – any kind of medieval original. Medievalism and the Production of Meaning Such self-referential uses of the period are not, then, direct reflections of the past, but reflections of other reflections of the past. They thus constitute ‘medievalism squared’, since most such medievalisms are channelled through someone else’s idea of the past, often filtered through Tolkien, T.H. White or scholarly works by medievalists. As Amy Kaufman describes it, “the neomedieval idea of the Middle Ages is gained not through contact with the Middle Ages, but through a medievalist intermediary […] Neomedievalism is thus not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism.”11 The idea of a self-referential mode of medievalism, however, does admittedly present something of a circular argument. The claim that medievalism is reliant on other medievalisms precludes the possibility of discovering where those secondary uses came from in turn. Attempts to answer such a problem are likely merely to uncover yet more filters through which our contemporary medievalisms have passed. 8 For a longer and more in-depth discussion of this kind of medievalism, see Bull, Thinking Medieval, pp. 13–15. 9 Thomas Cawston, ‘Anti-Dad Maternity Leave Is Bad for Children and Business’, Mail Online, 15 July 2009, [accessed 15 September 2014]. 10 Alexander, Medievalism, p. xxv. 11 Kaufman, ‘Medieval Unmoored’, p. 4.

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Such a problematic question of originals is only amplified and exacerbated by their retransmission in modern media environments. Anyone who has tried to identify the source of, say, a specific tweet will quickly find themselves mired in questions about chronology, influence and media technologies. Moreover, the fact that a tweet might be an online and wholly virtual representation of an offline and tangible cultural product only makes matters more complicated. One needs only to consider the phenomenon among Twitter users to photograph a significant passage from a book and then to upload it for other readers to consume. Any question of the ‘source’ or creator of that text is complicated by the ease of retransmission which modern media technologies allow and the absence of search facilities in tracking down the original. The same occurs with the use of the term ‘medieval’ to signify something outdated: it refers to other medievalisms which are similar, but whose original referential debt is impossible to identify. The only solution seems, on the surface, to be highly unsatisfactory: we can only really claim that medievalisms are used because they have popular currency and meaning, a currency and meaning which is reinforced by their continued use. The meaning of any given medievalism thus determines its own meaning. In fact, however, the issue of uncovering an inexistent original is by no means a new one, as a range of thinkers from Aristotle (with his Unmoved Mover problem) to Jean Baudrillard (with his simulacra) can attest. Indeed, the only way forward for such mediated medievalisms is to abandon the idea of genealogical medievalism altogether and recognise that the ways in which meaning is generated in modern mass media are not an issue of historical inquiry but one of communication theory. Transferring the debate from history to media theory may seem to be mere prevarication, but is in fact the only logical way out of a self-negating argument. While historical enquiry is based precisely on identifying sources and patterns of influence and retransmission – and thus tends to resist imprecision and ambiguity – most theories of new media are perfectly at home with the concept of a floating, or even empty, signifier such as medievalism. As Jim Collins puts it, “the very modes of dissemination and circulation of messages in mass media makes any notion of a controlled or orchestrated semiotic environment hopelessly antiquated”.12 Collins cites Umberto Eco’s argument about the cyclical nature of meaning-production in popular culture, wherein the production of meaning is individual to each new retransmission and cannot be traced back to any individual process of production. As Eco observes, within reader-response theory the question of authorship is irrelevant, since the actual producers of meaning are multiple and varied, and almost all of the agents involved in the circulation of meaning function in a dual capacity, both as producers and consumers: “Here we have not one, but two, three or perhaps more mass media, acting through different channels. The media have multiplied, but some of them act as media of media, or in other words, media squared. At this point who is sending the message?”13 Baudrillard’s simulacrum – which we might loosely define as a copy of a copy 12 Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 17. 13 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London: Picador, 1987), p. 149.

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without an original – is in fact based precisely on this kind of recirculated image. A given sign is copied in a new text in order to signify something new (placing it at one remove from the original meaning), and the success of the new sign makes it ripe to be copied once more, placing it at yet another remove from the original sign, and so on until the new sign – the simulacrum – loses all relation to the original. The tendency for Twitter users to photograph extracts from a book perfectly illustrates the simulacrum. The book itself is a copy of a master version (in turn copied from a word-processed document in most cases) which is reprinted in high quantities. Thus: a copy of a copy. The photograph is taken (another copy), uploaded to Twitter (another copy), and downloaded to another user’s screen (yet another copy). The user can thus read (and share once again) a copy without ever coming into contact with – or even knowing – the original. Baudrillard’s most famous example of a simulacrum are the Lascaux caves with their prehistoric paintings, which became such an obligatory stopping point for swathes of tourists that the crowds risked destroying the precious cave paintings.14 The response was to create an exact replica of the caves for tourists, which in fact improved on the original by providing clearer contrast, better lighting and better tourist facilities. Baudrillard’s question was thus simple and complex in equal measure: of the two caves, which one was the ‘real’, since the copy was more widely known, and better, than the original? As he argues, “it is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication serves to render both artificial.”15 In another example, the fact that both Baudrillard (in his Simulacrum and Simulation) and Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (in their The Disney Middle Ages) recognise the power of Disney as an institution capable of regurgitating a modernised Middle Ages without medieval meaning speaks volumes about the extent to which media theory and medievalism share similar processes. Where Baudrillard argues that “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra”,16 Pugh and Aronstein observe that the ahistorical nature of Disney’s Middle Ages brings them closer to the modern audiences to create a more authentically medievalist text, focusing on: how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. To study Disney’s medievalisms is to confront the intertemporality of time, in which anachronism may be celebrated as a means of understanding the present rather than solely as a solecism detracting from historical ‘authenticity’.17

Indeed, Pugh and Aronstein come to a strikingly similar conclusion to Baudrillard: that, through their mediation, “Disney’s fictions are perceived as more real than 14 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 15 Ibid., p. 9. 16 Ibid., p. 12. 17 The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 2.

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the source texts or historical events they represent.”18 Both recognise that Disney is in the business of manufacturing signs of the present rather than replicating originals of the past. Banal medievalism in the twenty-first-century media operates in the same way. The medieval is a copy of an abstract conception of the past, only here it has been copied without any reference or fidelity to the original. In the case of the football commentator, there simply is no original. Nevertheless, even if a theory of simulacra offers us a way out of the circular argument of genealogical medievalism, one final argument presents itself in the problem of understanding who determines the correct reading of the past. This problem is most noticeable in popular-cultural medievalism, when we recognise that, as scholars of medievalism, we are ourselves by no means immune to such banal medievalism. For medievalists, a wildly popular television series such as Game of Thrones can call into question our role as producers of meaning. As scholars of the Middle Ages our business is to interpret the meaning of the medieval. However, as viewers consuming the medievalist text, we are also unwittingly complicit in the production of meaning – and even more so given that our consumption of an ahistorical medievalist text is quantitatively no different from non-specialists in terms of audience numbers. It is often difficult to escape the fact that even as scholars of medievalism we are ourselves part of the broader process of meaning-making because we are ourselves part of the audiences which we are discussing. Objections to Game of Thrones are often objections to our own readings of Game of Thrones. Again, then, it is not to theories of medievalism that we can most profitably turn here, but to Cultural Studies. In fact, one of the most pre-eminent scholars of popular culture, John Fiske, offers a careful way out of the reader’s own immersion in popular culture precisely by analysing the role played by the reader in the production of meaning in popular culture. Reader immersion theories challenge not only the production of meaning (described as ‘encoding’ by Stuart Hall) but also our ability to decode the signs produced within it.19 As a consequence, it is not only producers who determine a text’s meaning, since the consumers of media texts are complicit in the production of meaning. As Fiske argues, the creation of meaning in popular culture is not wholly the responsibility of the producer who encodes the text and insists on one particular kind of reading; each text is instead open to interpretation by the reader. What this means, then, is that meaning in popular culture cannot be understood as a fixed, static, one-to-one relationship, but changes from one reader to another. The reader is thus complicit in the production of meaning, since “the relative openness of […] each narrative leaves the viewer in a position of power vis-à-vis the text. She is invited to participate actively in the construction of the narrative […] The

Ibid., p. 3. Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’. Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture. For more on encoding and decoding, see Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128–38; Justin Lewis, The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and Its Audience (London: Routledge, 2013). 18

19

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texts themselves are the raw materials out of which a number of narratives can be produced.”20 The relevance of Baudrillard’s simulacra, Fiske’s open texts and Eco’s multiple producers to medievalism is thus not difficult to discern. In all three cases a particular idea is no longer viewed as a monolithic idea retransmitted through media, but instead can be seen as the end result of a process of negotiation as a given concept passes through a range of media. First, the producer encodes a text, then it is mediated through one or many channels of communication, and at each point a reader emerges to assemble the narrative in a way which makes sense to her based on existing knowledge, knowledge of other texts and her individual circumstances and ability. Thus, the recognition that medievalism is contingent on some kind of negotiated meaning is quickly apparent. Modern references to, and depictions of, the Middle Ages are revealed as partly social constructs, dependent on a modern understanding of the term or idea in order to decode it to a new audience, as well as the media themselves used to transmit them. Do the Middle Ages Really Surround Us? Consequently, using these combined theoretical models we arrive at a final paradox. The Middle Ages become a useful pretext for modern communication because modern medievalism is rich with a range of possible meanings which can easily be communicated to a given audience. Yet, at the same time, medievalisms are rich with meaning because they are used so often across the mass media that the meaning is made elastic. Thus the (seemingly circuitous) assertion of banal medievalism is that medievalisms have meaning because they surround us, and they surround us because they have meaning. The next step in unpacking banal medievalism, therefore, is to explore some specific examples of banal medievalism to demonstrate, first, that they surround us every day and, second, how they come to be so readily available. The frequency of such medievalisms is, in the context of media theory, in many ways as important as the kinds of medievalism, since in its simplest form popular culture is most significant and meaningful precisely when it is popular, and it is popular when it is abundant. Of course, there is a reason that most texts on medievalism focus on the vertical relationship between modern medievalism and the Middle Ages, rather than the horizontal relationships between various medievalisms. Not only does the latter kind of study require a set of skills more familiar to scholars working in sociology or media theory but also the argument that the Middle Ages surround us in media is very difficult to sustain without a particular kind of sociologically inclined study which ignores questions of fidelity or accuracy in order to concentrate on the uses made of the past. It is also a difficult argument to support with concrete evidence, most obviously because the sheer scale of the media has exploded over the past decade, with more and more users of the internet crossing the (in any case artificial) boundary from 20

Fiske, Reading the Popular, p. 121.

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consumer to producer. The ability for members of the audience to absorb, respond to, transmit and exchange information has exponentially increased the number of mediated messages which flow around the internet and the airwaves. If scholars of popular culture such as Fiske are right, then each instance of remediation – the retransmission of a medievalism in this case – is not only increasing the number of examples but also changing the meaning and, at the same time, erasing the sense of any ‘original’ meaning determined by an author as opposed to a reader. If I were to retweet Matt Haig’s tweet (about homophobic ideas belonging to the Dark Ages), I switch from reader to producer, even without becoming an author myself. My own retransmission of the medievalism serves both to endorse the original meaning as well as to attach my own meanings to it in relation to my own beliefs and ideas expressed on Twitter. If I prefixed it with a sarcastic comment, however, I might negate or undermine the meaning of the tweet, and thus become both an author and a producer in Fiske’s terms. In addition to standard print and TV-based media, the prominence of usergenerated content in online interactions has facilitated a two-way flow of information which makes it immensely difficult to study global traffic (even laying aside the not inconsiderable issue of language and the ethics of privacy intrusion). Estimates of these numbers produce eye-watering statistics. For instance, a recent article in Time magazine quoted a Pew institute survey which estimated that “Americans aged 18–29 send and receive an average of nearly 88 text messages per day, and 17 phone calls.”21 The ease of use, low barriers of entry and – perhaps most of all – the drop in costs has led to an expansion of the number of SMS messages sent and received from 14 billion per month in 2000 to 188 billion per month in 2010 and to an estimated 535 billion per month by 2013. It is also worth remembering that Kluger’s study includes only SMS, and not the increasingly prevalent instant messaging services such as Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Kik, or Facebook Chat or Messenger, all of which are estimated to have overtaken standard SMS in April 2013, with 19.1 billion messages per day against 17.6 billion SMS per day. Nor do the statistics include social media which allow both individual and multiple recipients, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yik Yak, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and others. Finally, as any academic knows only too well, there is also email. A Radicati report from 2011 estimated that there were 3.146 billion email accounts worldwide, with each sending an average of 105 emails per day, suggesting global traffic of something in the region of 330 billion emails per day, which was predicted to rise to just over 500 billion by 2015.22 Counting only email, instant message, SMS and Facebook status updates daily, these statistics result in something like 368 billion interpersonal communications per day.

21 Jeffrey Kluger, ‘We Never Talk Anymore: The Problem with Text Messaging’, Time, [accessed 10 October 2013]. 22 [accessed 10 October 2013].

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Medievalisms in the Media Such staggering statistics thus clearly make it impossible to monitor all traffic and discourse for medievalisms to offer a comprehensive study of the media’s use of the Middle Ages. However, in order to demonstrate the prevalence of the medieval past in our daily discourses, using keyword searches, it is possible to gain an indicative sample of these instances of medievalism through openly accessible mass media platforms as well as open-facing social media sites such as Twitter which allow search facilities. Using a randomly chosen sample period of one week running from 20 to 27 October 2012, the sample ran date-restricted Google keyword searches of six terms, “medieval, Middle Ages, feudalism, Crusade, Templar, and Dark Age(s)”, to monitor the major English-speaking television networks, radio stations with searchable content, print media, online sources (including newspapers and aggregation or mash-up sites) and social media with open interfaces (e.g. Twitter, blogs and forums). After removing obvious false positives (including references to “middle age” and its adjectival form), within the first ten pages of Google the sample produced eighty references to the Middle Ages from one week alone and using only those six keywords on a handful of archived sites.23 Closer examination of these mediated medievalisms reveal that – while of course such numbers represent only a tiny fraction of the overall online discourse – it is by no means an exaggeration to say that the Middle Ages are prevalent across the mass media, nor that they are “flagged daily”, to reprise Billig’s terms. Such an approach is of course not intended to be offered as a scientific methodology and, for this reason, the results have not been used to make any kind of quantitative analyses or conclusions. However, a closer examination of these eighty references does yield helpful qualitative insights into the most prominent ways in which the Middle Ages are used in social and mass media. Viewing each one in context not only shows that these terms abound in media discourse but also offers a glimpse into how often the medieval past figures as a frame of reference and, by examining the specific context of their use, affords useful insight into the relevance, variety and context of their use. Several of these references were discounted on the grounds that they were intentional and thus do not represent the kind of unconscious banal medievalisms explored in this book. For instance, on 20 October the Independent newspaper ran a feature on Hilary Mantel’s suggestion that Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell functioned as a “model for Tory welfare ideologues” and that the UK’s Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition policies were sending us “back to the Middle Ages, where poverty is once again being viewed as a moral failing or a weakness, and relief by the state is a privilege and not a right”.24 Clearly in this case the intentional historical reference (even if it conflates Tudor history with the Middle Ages) and

23 For obvious reasons of privacy and access, these results did not include Facebook or closed social media sites to which access would be impossible or unethical, and which in any case do not appear in searches unless in public-facing sites. 24 Lisa Hilton, ‘Was Henry VIII’s Arch-Fixer the Model for Tory Welfare Ideologues?’ The Independent, 20 October 2012, p. 35.

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the explicit, knowing use of terminology makes Mantel’s remarks a different kind of medievalism from the newspaper headlines in the epigraph to this chapter. Alongside such deliberately historical references, the sample also produced a number of examples of medievalism explicitly placing the medieval and the modern in parallel. On 23 October, for example, political blogger Ahmad Mustapha Hassan posted a short article in which he claims that Malaysia’s ruling party Umno (United Malays National Organization) has a “feudal and colonial mindset”.25 Likewise, on 26 October, Corey Robin uploaded a blog post entitled “American Feudalism: It’s Not Just a Metaphor”,26 which refers to another blogpost from 25 October describing legislature in Philadelphia as “Another Step Toward 21st Century Feudalism”.27 Such medievalisms occupy a murky ground between the two impulses of “medievalism” identified by Michael Alexander, represented on the one hand by “the recovery by antiquarians and historians” and on the other by the “imaginative adoption of medieval ideas and forms” (with the implication that these latter adoptions would also remove the past from its context and play with it in the present).28 While the scholarly references of Mantel reflect an antiquarian approach, going back into the past to find a model for the present, the vagueness of Robin’s description of feudalism reflects a different kind of use to which the Middle Ages can be put. In this mode, the second example demonstrates the popular use of a vague past which has “less to do with accuracy per se than using the past as a kind of communal, mythic response to current controversies, issues, and challenges”.29 Playing with Medievalisms The vast majority of the results, however, exemplified banal medievalism at its most potent. These included earnest attempts at popular medievalism, such as Samantha Holt’s release on 26 October of the Kindle edition of her medieval romance The Crimson Castle,30 and less serious attempts, such as a report on MSN news from 22 October describing a “medieval Fight Club” in Concepción, Chile, which trains enthusiasts in medieval fighting techniques.31 The results also included a video from the BBC’s Top Gear, not exactly a programme renowned for its sensitivity to detail and nuance, which on 23 October posted a video of what they term “car destruction,

25 [accessed 11 October 2013]. 26 [accessed 13 March 2013]. 27 [accessed 13 March 2013]. 28 Alexander, Medievalism, p. xxii. 29 Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), pp. 5–6. 30 [accessed 10 March 2013]. 31 [accessed 2 March 2013].

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medieval style”.32 The medieval style, it transpired, was to fire a cannonball through the engine block, seemingly trying to recreate in earnest the parodic scene in Les Visiteurs in which Jean Reno destroys a French postal van. Here Top Gear’s medievalism is another interesting example of medievalism doubled back on itself. The idea of the ‘medieval’ is not used in any historical sense, but to connote excessive violence, as in Pulp Fiction’s “get[ting] medieval on your ass”. Indeed, a similar use of violence-as-medieval appears in another example from 23 October, which reported on a 600lb fish jumping into a boat off the coast of Cairns, Australia, under the headline “Black Marlin Goes Medieval on Tourney Crew”.33 The ludic element of the Middle Ages was in fact pushed to the foreground in a number of other sites which offer ideas for playing with the Middle Ages. On 27 October an online tutorial explained how to build a medieval helmet out of cardboard.34 Earlier the same week, a similar tutorial showed how to make a “Medieval Fantasy Beer Helmet”, based on Gimli’s helmet in the Lord of the Rings films but with the customisation of two beer steins attached to the sides and a straw assembly.35 Combining the two fields of sports and Tolkien’s medieval fantasy – as filtered through the lens of Peter Jackson’s film versions of the books – the medieval beer helmet offers an apt metaphor for playing with the Middle Ages in the modern world, representing the remediation of an already mediated medievalism, which collapses a whole list of medievalesque notions into one, patently non-medieval, medievalism. With almost 60,000 views, too, it is clear that this kind of invented medievalism cannot be discounted as lacking influence or popularity. Again, throughout the examples tensions arose between genealogical, thoughtful medievalism and the entirely invented fantasy worlds. New York’s Time Out advertised a “Knightwatch Medieval Slumber Party” which promised that “kids will be transported back in time as they spend the night under the roof of the world’s largest Gothic cathedral”.36 In the UK, Winchester City Council advertised a more historically inclined event aimed at “shedding light on the Dark Ages” which would see “Angles, Saxons and Jutes setting up camp in the City Museum, Winchester during half term week. They will bring Winchester’s Dark Age [sic] history alive for visitors.”37 A surprising number of results related to a vogue for ‘Renaissance-themed’ weddings, which openly adopt a loose, vaguely medieval setting and even warn visitors not to be too surprised by wayward or anachronistic interpretations. Such 32 [accessed 1 March 2013]. 33 [accessed 2 November 2012]. 34 [accessed 9 March 2013]. 35 [accessed 11 October 2013]. 36 [accessed 10 March 2013]. 37 [accessed 10 March 2013].

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interpretations include a medieval wedding which fused Renaissance and Steampunk features in Hollywood Castle, in Hollywood Hills, LA. The site claims, without apparent irony, that “this eclectic couple’s dream wedding would blend Renaissance and Steampunk elements to create an event that you would have found long, long ago”.38 The implausibility of this claim is at least recognised in a reprint of the photos on another wedding site, www.poptasticbride.com, which introduces it as a chronologically implausible event: “Today we have a wedding that looks like it came straight out of the pages of a fairy tale book!”39 In both examples, the repetition of ‘long’ (‘long, long ago’) and the fairy-tale nature serve to situate the medieval worlds of these weddings outside of any historical reference point. Instead they conjure up the fantasy worlds of medievalism which sit alongside our present, both far away and long, long ago. Such fantastic medievalisms become, as Helen Young has convincingly argued, a continual reference point both for our present selves and our modern medievalisms.40 Other examples from the week included Pinterest links on how to create the perfect medieval-themed party,41 a series of medieval greetings cards42 and a “helpful little booklet” explaining how to manage the catering for a “handfasting ceremony party or medieval wedding reception”.43 Another common term used without reference to its original meaning was the term ‘crusade’. During the timeframe of one week, the range and variety of ‘crusades’ launched across the media is somewhat surprising, even if the sources are perhaps less so. The week began with the Belfast Telegraph’s report on Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond’s plans for a Scottish referendum as part of his “independence crusade”.44 By Friday, the Daily Express had also publicised on their front page a crusade to “save Britain’s High Street” from the onslaught of retail chains and supermarkets.45 The following day’s front page focused on another of the Express’s crusades, this time the anti-EU crusade mentioned in Chapter 1, under a headline which claimed that “Britain’s Economy [is] Too Good for [the] EU”.46 Online, the Express also reported on the singer Charlotte Church’s ‘crusade’ for new privacy laws as part 38 [accessed 9 March 2013]. 39 [accessed 9 March 2013]. 40 Young, Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms, ch. 1. 41 . 42 . 43 . 44 Tom Moseley, ‘Tax Devolution Move Is Hard to Figure as PM Eyes Options’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 October 2012, p. 27. 45 Jane Warren, ‘Revenge of the High Street’, The Express, 26 October 2012, pp. 30–31 (p. 31). 46 Martyn Brown, ‘Britain’s Economy Too Good for EU’, The Express, 27 October 2012, p. 1 (p. 1). As I write this in summer 2016 it is worth noting that the British economy has just lowered interest rates in response to fears about a second recession seemingly caused by Britain’s decision to leave the EU in June.

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of the UK’s Leveson Inquiry into media ethics,47 and the Daily Mail site’s sidebar continued its own “crusade to win a fairer deal over cash ISAs”, launched the previous month.48 Other crusades taking place during the week included a series of talks as part of the Piracy Crusade and the launch of a climate change road show called “Crusade for Climate: Do the Math”.49 Alongside these crusades were an overwhelming number of stories which used the adjective ‘medieval’ to imply barbaric practices. These included a blog post on 26 October on horrific violence carried out on women and girls in Cameroon following a practice called ‘breast ironing’, which the blog describes as “a medieval, barbaric practice”.50 Likewise, in an interview with Russia Today, political analyst Ibrahim Alloush describes Western involvement in Libya as effectively sending “the country back to medieval darkness”.51 Other, more playful examples used the term ‘medieval’ to signify barbaric and cruel practices, such as Popular Science magazine’s 23 October post which lists “9 Anti-Snoring Aids from 1917 that Look Like Medieval Torture Devices”.52 Still in the same week, Forbes magazine used it not as a mode of condemnation but as a selling point for a new video game whose cruelty makes it “fun, fast-paced and full of blood and gore” and “typically medieval”.53 By far the most common use of the terms “medieval”, “Middle Ages” and “Dark Ages”, however, was to signify a general sense of backwardness or a lack of technological sophistication. Even discounting the painfully familiar proliferation of such meanings in the comments sections of online newspapers and blogs (which were excluded from the sample), the use of such terms to imply backwardness appeared in no fewer than thirty-two of the eighty medievalisms. Other uses simply played on the widespread cultural elision of the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, demonstrating the extent to which the Middle Ages as an era of primitivism has become entrenched within our daily and political discourse. Even the exceptions to this usage, however, nevertheless relied on a common understanding of the ‘medieval’ as an era of backwardness and primitive thinking. 47 ‘Charlotte Church Furious over Media Campaign Backlash’, Express.co.uk, 2012 [accessed 11 October 2013]. 48 Jeff Prestridge, ‘Save Our Savers: Join Our Crusade to Win a Fairer Deal over Cash ISAs – Bizarre Rules Should Be Updated to Minimise Risks’, Mail Online [accessed 11 October 2013]. 49 [accessed 10 October 2013]; [accessed 10 October 2013]. 50 [accessed 5 November 2013]. 51 [accessed 5 November 2012]. 52 [accessed 10 November 2012]. 53 Erik Kain, ‘“Chivalry: Medieval Warfare” Review (PC)’, Forbes, 2012 [accessed 11 October 2013].

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For instance, a news story broke online on 23 October (appearing in the print editions on 24 October) detailing an Italian court ruling to convict seismologists for their collective responsibility in giving incorrect assurances in the hours before the L’Aquila earthquake of April 2009. The report in the Guardian describes international outrage at the sentence, with “one of the scientists describing the court that convicted him as ‘medieval’”.54 Comparing the case to the persecution of Galileo (hardly a medieval scientist), Claudio Eva, the 74-year-old physicist at the heart of the case, claimed that “it was a very Italian and medieval decision”; his colleague Enzo Boschi, who was also sentenced, likewise “compared himself to Galileo … an analogy that has echoed around the world since the ruling”.55 The Galileo analogy had in fact already been drawn by Fox News (however ironically, given their own treatment of scientists regarding climate change) after the scientists’ initial arrest back in May 2011, when they described the arrest as having a “medieval flavor to it – like witches are being put on trial”.56 However, the convenience of the analogy after the court’s ruling – with an Italian court appearing to put science itself on trial – quickly reverberated around the online and offline media. Early reports quoted numbers of scientists who, according to one AFP report on 23 October, “likened it to the persecution of Galileo”, frequently accompanied by a quotation from Lord Robert May of Oxford University, who claimed that “the verdict might have been understandable in the Dark Ages, standing alongside the persecution of Galileo, but in today’s world it simply is an embarrassment to the Italian government and anyone associated with it”.57 In almost all cases, the story seems to have been drawn almost straight off the Associated Press news wire, in some cases with the medieval analogy left exactly as it appeared.58 What is curious, however, is that over the course of the story’s journey around the mass media, even after the scientists’ statement was dropped along with comparisons to the Church’s persecution of Galileo, comparisons with the Middle Ages or 54 Tom Kington and Lizzy Davies, ‘Italian Court Sends Shockwaves around the World as It Convicts Seismologists: Scientists Face Jail for Not Predicting L’Aquila Quake Ruling Compared to Persecution of Galileo’, The Guardian, 24 October 2012, p. 3. 55 Ibid. 56 ‘Italian Seismologists Charged with Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake’, FoxNews.com, 2011 [accessed 15 October 2013]. 57 Though it is difficult to trace the original source, seemingly the first instance of May’s comment appeared on 22 October on , followed by the AFP report the following day, which was then picked up by a number of bloggers and news aggregation services. The quotation subsequently appeared in the print edition of the Guardian, 24 October 2012, p. 3, but not the online version which had, the previous day, run the article without May’s comments. 58 See, for instance, Sky News on 22 October [accessed 15 October 2013]. Interestingly, however, the emotive comparison to the Middle Ages was excised on the Iowa Space Science Center’s website, which made an explicit link with Galileo in an extended report but removed the scientists’ comments about experiencing a return to the Middle/Dark Ages, perhaps recognising the temporal problem of calling a seventeenth-century scientist ‘medieval’. , accessed 15 October 2013.

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Dark Ages were almost always quickly reintroduced in the comments sections of online news outlets. On www.cbsnews.com, for example, one user deplored the ruling, pleading with the Italian people as a whole: “Don’t let this verdict stand, Italy. It makes your legal system look medieval at best.”59 On the same site another commenter agreed, claiming that “this sounds like something your [sic] would hear from the dark ages” prompting a third to widen the chronological remit to suggest that it is a “witchhunt” which is “the same as a scientist saying that the Earth is round and getting convicted because at the time the Earth was flat.” Likewise, the emotive use of the Middle Ages to suggest not only ignorance but unscientific obstinacy found its way, intact, onto Twitter on 24–25 October, with one user making an explicit link with the Middle Ages as an era of backwardness and fanaticism: “Convicting scientists for (failing to) predict earthquakes … back to the middle ages, are we?!!!!” She also posted a link to a Schneier article which expanded the “medieval” analogy with the persecution of Galileo.60 There are a number of interesting factors in the case of the L’Aquila scientists and its insistent, yet banal, medievalism. First, the rapid dissemination (or, more precisely, retransmission) of the story around the web allowed for a sustained suggestion that the trial signalled a “return to the Dark Ages” in which superstition and ignorance overruled scientific curiosity. This claim was further bolstered – however anachronistically – by the references to the heliocentrism controversy, though none of these recognised that, coming in the mid-seventeenth century, Galileo’s trial could scarcely be termed “medieval” but ironically sprang from the same Renaissance impulse which set up the Middle Ages as a period of ignorance in the first place. The second factor of interest was the way in which the story demonstrates to what extent the Middle Ages/ Dark Ages have come (even among highly educated commentators) to be synonymous with backwardness, religious persecutions, witch-hunts and scientific ignorance (as well as the stubborn refusal of the establishment to accept scientific progress). Despite the excision by professional news agencies of the explicitly medieval terms, it is clear that the allusion was readily associated with commonly held ideas about the Middle Ages – as witnessed by the haste with which comments sections and social media commentators reintroduced those same medievalisms. Consequently, what emerges from the media commentary on the trial is the extent to which the Dark Ages and its related medievalism has come to serve as a byword for any dark qualities of wilful ignorance or the suppression of science in the face of stubborn superstition. Conclusions Taking into account the various functions which the Middle Ages serve in the mass media, then, it emerges that not only do banal medievalisms crop up regularly in a range of media and in a broad range of contexts but also that their deployment 59 ‘Italian Scientists Get 6 Years in Earthquake Case’, CBS News [accessed 15 October 2013]. 60 [accessed 3 November 2012].

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in these media rarely has much to do with history. Instead, the essential point to be made, as will be discussed in more depth in later chapters, is that it is not the historicity which matters most to such mediated medievalisms but the very fact that they were remediated in the first place. The media are, after all, institutions whose function above all else is to communicate an idea as widely, as powerfully and as convincingly as they are able. If banal medievalisms allow them to communicate such messages by their reliance on a shared set of values and judgements about the past, it is scarcely a surprise that they should employ them. Given that popular culture, of which internet culture forms a major part, is not geared to nuance in the same way as academic scholarship, such widely understood concepts are essential for communication. Thus, the popular usage of the term ‘medieval’ comes to act as a catch-all term for barbarity, primitivism and a lack of sophistication. Of course, for anyone familiar with the period, such a description of the medieval as a kind of primitive and unsophisticated era is of course grossly unfair and overly simplistic, yet such nuances do not often find a place in modern media practices, which instead seek a means of quickly communicating a given idea. While it is perhaps equally reductive to suggest that the mainstream mass media are incapable of nuance – patently, the almost forensic dissection of TV shows by fans across social media argue quite the reverse – it is also true that when it comes to the Middle Ages, or indeed most historical eras, the readily identifiable mode of pejorative medievalism makes it a handy cultural shorthand, privileging brevity and comprehensibility over complexity and nuance. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, when the media deploy these medievalisms, the medieval is the message.

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3 “Let’s not go back to the Middle Ages”: Medievalism, the Dark Ages and the Myth of Progress

Conventional thinking around [internet] security is a bit medieval. Mike Volpi, ‘Why Security Tech Is Finally Ditching Its Medieval Roots’1

M

y arguments in Chapter 2 demonstrate that it is not only the use of medievalisms which should be of interest to scholars, but their re-use and remediation across a range of channels which, to reduce complex theories of communication to their very basic elements, fosters a sense of familiarity and therefore flattens out contradictions. As Marcus Bull rightly suggests, this kind of banal medievalism is a “manifestation of popular culture’s insistence on simplifying the Middle Ages as far as possible”.2 As a result, Bull argues, “the latest pop-cultural appropriations of things medieval are almost always variations on well-worn themes, even when the specific medium, such as a computer game, is a recent phenomenon”.3 Though a great deal of recent scholarship contradicts such a dismissal of popular culture’s complexity (in fairness, this was not Bull’s point), the essential argument is correct. As he himself points out earlier in the book, postmodernity means that “we have abandoned our faith in history as progress, a sort of straight line stretching from then to now, so instead we now play with the past, treating it like a giant shopping mall full of images, motifs and ideas which we can consume in whatever combinations we choose”.4 In the context of a postmodern, anything-goes medievalism, if accuracy and credibility can no longer be treated as objective qualities determined by an educated élite, then it logically follows that the truth of a given phenomenon can be established by recurrence and non-contradiction, as Adorno suggests.5 In the case of medievalism, then, it is not the truth-quality of a specific image, 1 The quotation comes from an article on LinkedIn Pulse [accessed 14 September 2015]. 2 Bull, Thinking Medieval, p. 141. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 Ibid., p. 9. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2003).

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concept or meme that determines the appropriateness of the Middle Ages as metaphor but the extent to which that trope is recognised as medieval by its reader. In this sense, though it might seem to be the case, it is not true that the uses to which the Middle Ages can be put are infinite. To call someone’s way of thinking ‘medieval’ might well be intended as a compliment by an admirer of Aquinas or Abelard, but it is most unlikely that the recipient will take it as such. To say that a beautiful image, vibrant in colour, not mass-produced and demonstrating unique artisanal talent, “belongs in the Middle Ages” might well be intended to compare mass-produced ‘art’ unfavourably with medieval workmanship, but unless one’s interlocutor is herself a medievalist, such a comment is likely to be taken as an insult. The list could go on, but suffice to say that in both cases the medievalisms are not completely ‘empty’ signifiers; however, the fact that they group around well-worn meanings tells us that it is the frequency of their reproduction and not their truth value which determines credibility. The more frequently a term is deployed, the more recognisable it becomes, and therefore the more credible.6 In this context, though a number of medievalisms dependent on a positive, nostalgic view of the Middle Ages do exist, as the survey in Chapter 2 shows, far more frequently we find that the period is used to connote barbarity or a lack of sophistication, technological backwardness or unchecked violence. In this latter mode, the term “medieval” finds itself deployed as a trigger for “a range of negative associations: primitiveness, superstition, small-worldism, bigotry, fearfulness, irrationality, superficiality, inflexibility and intolerance”.7 Medievalism in Political Discourse The prevalence of the term ‘medieval’ in order to signify barbaric practices not only draws on a shared cultural repository tied to a range of judgements and unwitting assumptions but each instance of its reuse through the media more firmly embeds the connection between the two ideas within that same cultural repository. For example, when politicians use the term ‘medieval’ to describe Islamic State militants, intolerant regimes, terrorist attacks or primitive living conditions they are both drawing on and simultaneously perpetuating the negative associations of the term. Moreover, the extent to which shaggy medievalism has centred around geopolitical, value-laden terms is demonstrated by what Louise D’Arcens and Clare Monagle identify as a ‘spike’ in the term ‘medieval’ in political rhetoric surrounding the rise of Islamic State. In their article for The Conversation, they point out that after only eight mentions of the adjective ‘medieval’ during John Howard’s first term

6 This distinction between veracity and credibility is the fundamental premise of an argument I have made elsewhere, categorising it as a distinction between accuracy and authenticity. See Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages, ch. 9; Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliott (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ch. 1. 7 Bull, Thinking Medieval, p. 15.

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as prime minister of Australia, his successor Tony Abbott saw no fewer than fortysix uses in a shorter term.8 In the UK the parliamentary records indicate a similar spike, particularly when compared with earlier references. To be sure, it is by no means uncommon for politicians to cite the Middle Ages to underscore a given political idea or agenda. To list only a few examples, in a 2004 House of Commons debate on council housing the MP for Grimsby, Austin Mitchell, claimed that tenants “have to fill in a ballot form, but there’s only one candidate on the list … this sounds more like a medieval dictatorship than democracy”.9 In a discussion of the imprisonment of Angela Cannings after her child died from suspected sudden infant death syndrome, Alice Mahon, the Labour MP for Halifax, suggested in the same year that the persecution of Cannings had “the hallmark of a medieval witch-hunt”.10 Debating parliamentary reforms in 2002, which promised the ‘modernisation’ of the House of Commons, the then newly elected MP Huw Irranca-Davies voiced his agreement with the motion on the grounds that “to support the changes shows that the House is moving from the medieval to the modern”.11 In fact, even Early Day Motions (hence, scripted, formal motions rather than potentially unscripted speeches or responses made from the floor) demonstrate the extent to which banal medievalisms, in their pejorative mode, have become an accepted and unchallenged part of political discourse. A 2003 Early Day Motion, for instance, refers unflinchingly to “the medieval attitudes of the Taliban in Afghanistan”.12 Another in 2004 objects to “medieval practices for farm livestock”,13 while yet another in 2002 condemns China’s support for milking bile from bears as a “medieval practice”.14 In all of these examples it is clear that, just as the social media uses of the Middle Ages collapse distance to create a one-size-fits-all medievalism, parliamentary debates are often no more precise, and no less unintentional, than conventional media rhetoric. Even when parliamentary references are rather more careful in their references to the Middle Ages, they nevertheless reveal a determined use of the period to connote byzantine legal systems (another medievalism of course), hysterical witchhunts or fanatical religious persecution, as well as insensitivity understood more broadly. A 2002 debate on the Sexual Offences Amendment Bill, for instance, revisited the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 regarding sexual relations with people with learning disabilities – including the outdated and offensive term “a mental defective”, which, to Viscount Tenby, felt “almost as though one was reading something from the darker periods of the Middle Ages”. He continues in the same speech to 8 Clare Monagle and Louise D’Arcens, ‘“Medieval” Makes a Comeback in Modern Politics: What’s Going On?’ The Conversation, 2014, [accessed 5 August 2015]. 9 HC Deb 30 June 2004, vol 423, cols 75–99WH, c. 77. 10 HC Deb 20 January 2004, vol 416, cols 1215–23, c. 1219. 11 HC Deb (Modernisation of the House of Commons) 29 October 2002, vol 391, cols 689–805, c. 763. 12 EDM 974 Religious Oppression of Women in Jammu and Kashmir, 2002–3. 13 EDM 1153 Farrowing Crates, 2003–4. 14 EDM 1750 China’s Bear Farms, 2001–2.

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criticise the practice of cross-examining victims of sexual abuse in order to confirm that they qualify as learning-impaired, which “would perhaps have been at home in some of the more unusual medieval courts”.15 Later in the same debate Lord Ashby of Stoke concurs, claiming that “to describe the originators of this particular law as ‘medieval’ was being rather kind and generous to them”.16 It is worth mentioning, though, that the term is not always used without objection. In a debate on the Hunting Bill in the same year Lord Roberts of Llandudno used the term to suggest an opportunity to move into the modern age, claiming that “bear baiting, cock fighting or even bull fighting […] belonged to a medieval age. I suggest that the tradition of hunting for entertainment or sport belongs there too.”17 The response of Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, however, queries such banal medievalism, when he asked if “the noble Lord [was] sure that the word ‘medieval’ is a synonym for ‘evil’? I believe that many people would say that medieval Europe or medieval England had a sense of commonality and justice that we would do well to echo.”18 It is noteworthy, perhaps, that, as one of the very few objecting to such a casualisation of the period, Lord Thomas is himself an Honorary Fellow at Cambridge University, an accomplished historian and author of numerous historical works. Neither are these medievalisms an exclusively modern phenomenon; examples can be found going back through historical parliamentary records. In 1937, for example, a Foreign Affairs debate over the massacre of 30,000 civilians at Addis Ababa by Italian fascists sees the curiously atemporal claim that “you have to go back to the massacre of the Albigenses; you have to go back to the Roman Empire itself before you find this reproduction of medieval savagery”.19 Elsewhere we might meet a complaint over the “medieval methods of treating offenders” in both 1953 as well as 1962, or a 1969 dismissal of Northern Irish police forces as part of a “medieval situation” in a “feudal landlord system”.20 Still other instances reflect a curiously anachronistic, or more properly achronic, use of the term, such as a description of single-carriageway roads (as opposed to the dual carriageways under discussion) as ‘medieval’, or the bizarre and self-contradictory formulation of MP Robert Cant in 1978: “Let us not go back into medieval times of pre-1939; let us start at 1945.”21 However, as with D’Arcens and Monagle’s claim relating to the Australian parliament, such references increase significantly once into the twenty-first century. More significantly, it is in the climate of terrorist threats and the intensification of religious and ideological fanaticism that the term has returned to the fore in order to drive a wedge between medievalism and modernity. Even in purely quantitative terms, records of parliamentary debates since 1950 HL Deb 11 October 2002, vol 639, cols 552–72, c. 559 and 560. HL Deb 11 October 2002, vol 639, cols 552–72, c. 561. 17 HL Deb 12 October 2004, vol 665, cols 124–260, c. 204. 18 Ibid. 19 HC Deb 25 March 1937, vol 321, cols 3103–80, c. 3156. 20 HC Deb 13 February 1953, vol 511, cols 754–842, c. 782. HC Deb 08 November 1962, vol 666, cols 1140–42, c. 1142. HC Deb 25 November 1969, vol 792, cols 211–337, c. 237. 21 HC Deb 09 November 1960, vol 629, col. 1010, and again in HC Deb 23 October 1987, vol 120, cols 1023–92, c. 1040; HC Deb 05 July 1978, vol 953, cols 469–597, c. 538. 15

16

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demonstrate that the increase in use of the term ‘medieval’ is marked by a sharp intensification in the twenty-first century. While, for the fifty years between 1950 and 2000, there were 431 uses of the term (an average of between eight and nine times each year), the ten years between 2001 and 2010 saw 168 references (an average of almost seventeen per year, double the frequency). The following five years reflect an even sharper increase; the first parliamentary term of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, running from 2010 to 2015, saw 122 references in only five years (an average of twenty-four to twenty-five per year, three times the pre-2000 rate). Even factoring out those instances in which the speakers were specifically referring to the Middle Ages (for example, the debates around Magna Carta celebrations or reforms to medieval laws), those figures remain high: the period 1950–2000 saw 139 ‘metaphorical’ medievalisms; September 2001–May 2010 saw sixty-four, and May 2010–2015 a further forty-six. Comparing these numbers on an annual basis, this means that while banal medievalisms initially constituted between two and three references per year, that number rises to over six between 2000 and 2010, and nine per year from 2010 to 2015. One aspect about the post-2000 references which remains striking is that, of the forty-six references to the Middle Ages between 2010 and 2015, no fewer than eighteen are used specifically in reference to Islam or to Middle-Eastern nations in one way or another, either by oblique reference to the Middle East in general or by references to specific individual countries (such as Sudan or Iraq) afflicted by Islamic fundamentalist violence, or most often in reference to Islamic State terrorism.22 This same association between the Middle East and the Middle Ages is witnessed in another series of Early Day Motions. One 2006 motion deplores the “medieval cruelty” of the Taliban.23 Another from 2007 condemns Pakistan’s alleged support for suicide bombers as reflecting “medieval attitudes which damage Pakistan’s reputation in the world; [thus the house] urges the country to embrace modernity”.24 Yet another from 2010 condemns the medieval barbarism of Iran’s proposed execution by stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.25 While this phenomenon will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 8, it is possible to surmise already that banal medievalisms, irrespective of whether they are used in the Houses of Parliament or by the below-the-line trolls on social media, not only can be but have already become politicised in ways that have direct impact on the modern world. In fact, such a politically charged, value-laden use of medievalism can also be seen in mainstream media news. While it is, perhaps understandably, not uncommon for news reportage to describe any kind of war zone as “medieval”, when it comes to reports from countries in the Middle East, a geopolitical use of medievalism reveals a number of unwitting cultural assertions and assumptions. For instance, CNN’s Evening News from 12 March 2012 describes an attack by Assad’s forces on the Syrian 22 Of those eighteen references, six were made with reference to IS, ISIS or ISIL, two to Sudan, one to Afghanistan, one to the Israeli occupation of Gaza, two to Qatar, one to Pakistan, two to Iraq, one to Saudi Arabia and two to the Middle East in general. 23 EDM 216 Deaths in Helmand Province (No. 2), 2005–6. 24 EDM 1732, Sir Salman Rushdie, 2006–7. 25 EDM 450, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 2010–12.

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city of Homs as “a medieval siege”. However, when CNN reported on US airstrikes, also in Syria, this time against IS targets in Raqqa in September 2014, they were reported as “focused” or “targeted strikes” which had been “reviewed by the President individually”, with no medievalism in sight.26 My point here is not to evaluate the morality of the strikes, nor the USA and its allies’ claims of ‘justified’ retaliation, but rather to point out that such banal medievalism tends more often to be applied when describing Middle-Eastern protagonists. In an era of hi-tech warfare and supposedly “smart” bombs, the use by Assad’s regime of traditional bombs implies his use of unsophisticated – and therefore brutal and primitive, so doubly medieval – methods. In this fraught territorialisation of medievalism, the medieval past is frequently, and powerfully, used as a rhetorical site representing primitivism and barbarity in order to vaunt the triumph of Western progress, in the same way as John Ganim argues that medievalism and orientalism can frequently function in directly comparable ways.27 Medievalism as Regression The political context outlined above offers insight into the ways that – even at the highest level – medievalist rhetoric can be yoked to a specific political outlook, and how the Middle Ages can come to support a range of different positions once it has been detached from any historical setting. However, that same political context also demonstrates the extent to which political uses of terms such as ‘medieval’ implicitly contain a sense of regression, a return to a more primitive and less sophisticated – or even inhuman or barbaric – mode of thinking. It is in the sense of ‘going back to the Middle Ages’, or to the ‘Dark Ages’ that such undertones of regression emerge most fully. However, even if the term ‘medieval’ is being used to suggest something primitive or irrational (i.e. literally, not subject to reason), it is misleading to characterise such uses as a direct consequence of the Renaissance project outlined above in Chapter 2. Simply put, as many of the politicians’ uses quoted above and many of the examples studied throughout this book will attest, it is often quite difficult to trace such medievalisms back genealogically to the Renaissance or Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, many uses of the term ‘medieval’ are to witchhunts, a phenomenon of the early modern period far more than anything medieval in itself. Given this fact, and the temporal ambiguity of referring to anything up to 1974 as ‘the dark ages’, it is clearly not the case here that such banal medievalisms are part of a broader movement to uphold the periodisation of history. Bonet and Style demonstrate that the pejorative use of the Middle Ages is reliant on a prevalent notion of alterity dependent on ideologies or clichés more related to the writers’ contemporary reality than to the past. Often, therefore, the image of 26 Jim Sciutto, Mario Castillo and Holly Yan, ‘U.S. Airstrikes Hit ISIS Targets inside Syria’, CNN, 2014, [accessed 15 January 2015]. 27 John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

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the medieval which developed was “partial, distorted and unreal, stereotyping it as ‘another time’, distinct from ours, dark, and dominated by unreason and brute force”.28 That these political or ideological uses of the Middle Ages are not intentional is frequently immediately obvious from the context. One example of such unintentional – and self-contradictory – medievalism occurred during a 2008 dispute over the future of the UK within the European Union, in which the then prime minister Gordon Brown criticised David Cameron’s ambitions to propose a referendum on EU membership, calling on his party to reject the bill. Describing imminent rows with Europe over EU membership, Brown suggested that “the Conservatives would drag us back into the dark ages on Europe”.29 Here it is clear that Brown’s generic use of the Dark Ages is not suggestive of an actual return to the early medieval state (when, ironically, greater centralised power and co-operation across Europe was much more commonplace); rather, his meaning is clearly that such a referendum would return us to a less sophisticated era of politics. In this case that would necessitate a Dark Ages in the 1990s, an era much later than the modernity of earlier parliamentary mentions. Medievalism, used as an opposition to modernity, is clearly atemporal. Of course, it is not particularly novel to observe that this kind of banal medievalism is yoked to politics. D’Arcens and Monagle, in the article cited above, classify former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott’s description of IS as ‘medieval’ as a “successful form of negative branding”.30 They argue that such descriptions – intended to highlight the barbarity of IS by equating them with a period generally believed to be barbaric – are not about facing down a specific threat (here IS) but instead constitute a broader attempt to marginalise others by placing them “opportunely outside of modernity, in a sphere of irrationality”. This branding exercise works because “medievalising IS supporters puts them a very long way away from the here and, even more pointedly, from the now”.31 Such a dichotomous understanding of modernity as distinct from medievalism perhaps says more about our own fears than anything medieval. As Pugh and Weisl observe, following Eco, in the use of medievalism as a pejorative dismissal “the medieval qualities of the present are evident in the potential for modernity to be irrevocably lost”.32 Chris Jones makes the similarly important argument that the use of the term ‘medieval’ to describe barbarity or terrorist atrocities is not only to misunderstand the Middle Ages but, more importantly, it is unwittingly to espouse the triumphalist rhetoric of modernity according to which such barbarity is safely behind us and contained by the advent of a new age of reason. As Jones argues, “‘the Middle Ages’ Bonet and Style, ‘Utopia and the Middle Ages’, p. 64. Brendan Carlin, ‘Cameron Would Take Us back to “Dark Ages” with Europe, Says Brown’, Daily Mail Online, 3 February 2008 [accessed 8 November 2011]. 30 Monagle and D’Arcens, ‘“Medieval” Makes a Comeback in Modern Politics’. 31 Ibid. 32 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 140. 28

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is not a neutral historical term. It’s a metaphorical way of understanding history as a process of evolution, by which a less advanced culture has to (or perhaps fails to) progress from a ‘medieval’ period to modernity.”33 As such, its deployment as a pejorative term is to accept a grand narrative which places the ‘medieval’ subject behind us in history: To call the perpetrators of these crimes, and the societies that foster them, ‘medieval’ is to place them on the other side of a temporal fault-line imagined to run through history. ‘We’ are ‘modern’ and therefore civilized and unable to countenance these forms of violence; ‘they’ are ‘medieval’, pre-modern, and have not progressed through the same process of historical evolution that would render such acts unthinkable.34

Such accusations of ‘going back to the Dark Ages’, when analysed in more depth, are thus often revealed to imply an underlying sense of lawlessness, of violence, of barbarity and, most often, a sense of deliberate and obstinate backwardness. According to the implicit rhetoric, the modern world is offered a clear choice between barbarity and sophistication, between civilisation and chaos, and ‘they’ have stubbornly opted for ‘shaggy medievalism’ over the civilisation offered by ‘our’ modernity.35 Political medievalisms of this kind thus rely not on history but on the underlying myth of progress which forms the title of this chapter. According to the logic of such a myth, it is healthy for a society to move on to the future, rather than to regress to its past, mapping a range of other models – not least human development from childhood and adolescence to full maturity – onto a complex political and ideological landscape. Such a conflation thus reframes IS not as a modern terrorist threat but as a disobedient child whose immaturity should be punished. Such, then, is the elasticity and imprecision of terms such as ‘the Middle Ages’, ‘Dark Ages’, ‘medieval’ and so on, that they can be found across the media to suit a range of different positions, ideas and arguments, but always insisting on the fundamental conflict between medievalism and modernity – even when the chosen examples, such as dual carriageways or EU negotiations, have nothing whatsoever to do with the Middle Ages. Medievalism and Violence Perhaps most common, as Marcus Bull and others have observed, is the association between medievalism and violence – particularly in its most ‘primal’ and unpolished state. As Pugh and Weisl argue, even if

33 Chris Jones, ‘Is Islamic State Medieval?’, 2014 [accessed 27 October 2014]. 34 Ibid. 35 “Shaggy medievalism” is the third of Umberto Eco’s ten types of Middle Ages, which interprets the “Middle Ages as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings”. See ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, p. 69.

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medievalism speaks to a desire for a Golden Age past, it is often used with surprising frequency to justify violence. Such violence may be ludic in spirit and structure, such as the reinvention of jousting in modern times, and in these instances, ‘medieval’ games provide an outlet for sanctioned violence […] In other examples of medievally inspired violence in modern times, the violence may be very real.36

Probably the most famous of these examples comes in Pulp Fiction, in which the gangster Marsellus Wallace threatens his hillbilly rapist that he is about to ‘get medieval on [his] ass’, a threat deployed to suggest imminent pain, torture, violence and unchecked sadism involving, we are told, “a pair of pliers and a blowtorch”.37 Quite where Tarantino drew inspiration from for this expression is much less important than the fact that, used as a threat in this way, the tenets of banal medievalism are instantly recognised and understood – it is revealing to recognise that nowhere is any explanation given about what was specifically medieval about the threat. The pliers and the blowtorch are clearly modern – without wishing to engage in an entirely irrelevant discussion of the provenance of pliers, the subtext here indicates the probability of a modern, rather than archaeological, exemplar – and the retribution for Zed’s own sexual violence (an eye for an eye) is Old Testament through-and-through. Examining more closely the subtext of Wallace’s threat, then, it becomes clear that the medievalism inheres somehow in the unchecked brutality awaiting Zed. As Carolyn Dinshaw observes, the realm of the medieval in Pulp Fiction “isn’t exactly another time […] The medieval, rather, is the space of the rejects – really, the abjects – of this world.”38 It is in this atemporal context of unchecked violence, rooted in cinematic history, pop culture and Tarantino’s fascination with violence as spectacle, that the medievalism draws its meaning. Importantly, medievalism as violence, despite Tarantino’s offhand allusion, is not something inherently medieval. Though of course the period does not lack its examples of violence and brutality, both in the ‘historical’ records as much as the ‘literary’, the use of medievalism to dismiss unchecked brutality relies on a dialectic between medievalism and modernity, placing the former as a constructed era diametrically opposed to the latter. Pulp Fiction’s ‘medieval’ violence is a deliberate rejection of the rational in favour of emotion. The application of the blowtorch and the pliers by Marsellus’ unspecified ‘pipe-hitting’ henchmen clearly suggests torture of the most rudimentary, and deliberately painful, kind. Like Butch’s choice of the sword – the most medieval of available weapons – rather than the chainsaw, gun or bat, Marsellus’ vengeance is a kind of symbolic overkill, promising a kind of torture which risks forcing Marsellus himself back across the boundary from rational punishment to irrational retribution. It is, then, an emotional reaction, and not a rational one. Such an explanation makes sense of other medievalisms Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms, pp. 141–2. For an excellent discussion of this scene from the perspective of medievalism, see the coda, “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past”, in Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 183–206. 38 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 185–6. 36 37

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deployed to suggest a culture of violence, such as Chris Tookey’s review of the 2011 Jason Statham film The Mechanic, in which Tookey claims that the film is “stuck in the Middle Ages”: “Risibly macho, brutal and sexist, it feels like a throwback to a previous age, possibly the 14th century.”39 The association between medievalism and irrationality informs another interesting example. In a speech to the Asia Society on 28 March 2011, NATO representative Ambassador Mark Sedwill offered a doubly confusing temporal reference to the Taliban, claiming that: despite much speculation, […] the Taliban still show[s] little interest in a genuine reconciliation process. Within their own world view, they act rationally. […] But it is clear that their motive is power: the power to turn the clock back to the medieval barbarity of the 1990s regime, a regime they impose wherever they have the opportunity.40

The suggestion that the Taliban are applying rationality and reason to their actions is quickly undermined by the suggestion not that their real motive is power but that their rationality is irrational – or at least their rationality is somehow different from ours. Moreover, their absence of ‘real’ rationality places them beyond the pale of modernity and plunges them back to the inevitably medieval barbarity of those who do not belong to a post-medieval Age of Reason. Deployed as a byword for violent behaviour, the medieval consequently functions as a relic of a premodern state relegated to the margins of civilisation by a chronological dismissal to obscurity. Such, for instance, is the effect of David Cameron’s criticism of Syria as “guilty of ‘medieval barbarity’”.41 Similarly, after a terrorist group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq announced the killing of an Italian journalist held hostage for over a week, the then Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi instinctively labelled their actions ‘medieval’. Justifying his claim, Berlusconi continued by offering precisely the same dichotomy between pre-modern barbarity and modern rationality: “There are no words for an act lacking any humanity and

39 Chris Tookey, ‘Brutal, Macho and Sexist, This Film Is Stuck in the Middle Ages’, Daily Mail Online, 3 February 2011, [accessed 16 August 2011]. 40 Mark Sedwill, ‘Afghanistan: Transition & Partnership’, NATO, 2011, [accessed 2 September 2015]. Emphasis my own. 41 David Blair and Alex Spillius, ‘David Cameron Accuses Syrian Regime of “Medieval Barbarity”’, The Telegraph, 2 March 2012, [accessed 31 August 2015]. The story, emerging from an EU summit, was also covered by The Guardian, which suggested a united front offered by Britain and France. See Peter Beaumont and Ian Traynor, ‘David Cameron Demands Assad Face War Crimes Trial over Syria Bloodshed’, The Guardian, 2 March 2012, [accessed 14 September 2015].

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which at a stroke cancels out centuries of civilization and takes us back to the dark ages of barbarity.”42 A range of other politicians from around the world joined in, too, with comments equating the Middle Ages with violence and regression. In 2010 the newly elected Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff announced her opposition to some MiddleEastern countries’ policies towards women, arguing that “I do not agree with practices that have medieval characteristics [when it comes] to women.”43 However, in a demonstration of the elasticity of medievalism, by 2015 Rousseff would herself be described as ‘medieval’ for her proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility. According to Amnesty International, Rousseff ’s plan would consign children “to a medieval prison system” and the report claimed that conditions in Brazilian prisons were themselves “medieval”.44 Conversely, in 2006, when Iran’s nuclear programme came under scrutiny from the UN Security Council, its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used precisely the same terms as Rousseff, calling the United States and other Western nations “bullies with a medieval view of the world”.45 The great irony, of course, is that here Ahmadinejad used specific terms that had been applied by a number of journalists to describe Iran itself, such as The Express newspaper’s dismissal of “Ayatollah Khomeini and his gang of mullahs, whose rule became a byword for medieval oppression and barbarity”.46 Likewise, The Times’ forceful description of Iran clearly relies on a similar medievalism, describing the nation as “medieval in its cruelty”, as does The Sunday Telegraph’s description of Ahmadinejad as “Genghis Khan with a nuclear bomb”, intent on upholding ‘medieval practices’ such as stoning.47

42 John F. Burns, ‘Hostage Journalist from Italy Killed in Iraq By Captors’, The New York Times, 27 August 2004, [accessed 31 August 2011]. 43 Lally Weymouth, ‘An Interview with Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s President-Elect’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2010, [accessed 14 September 2015]. President Rousseff ’s description of Iran’s ‘medieval’ behaviour also featured in a later CNN report on Brazil–Iran relations in 2012. Eduardo J. Gómez, ‘Why Iran–Brazil Friendship Has Gone Cold’, CNN, 5 April 2012, [accessed 14 September 2015]. 44 ‘Brazil: Lowering Age of Adult Criminal Responsibility Will Consign Children to “medieval” Prison System’, Amnesty International USA, 2015, [accessed 14 September 2015]. 45 ‘Iranian leader insists on right to nuclear research’, 15 January 2006, CNN.com, [accessed 13 January 2014]. 46 Leo McKinstry, ‘Don’t Rejoice over Egypt till We See What Comes next’, The Express, 21 January 2011, p. 12. 47 Ben Macintyre, ‘Oil and History Fuel Iran’s Extreme Paranoia; Tehran’s Ban on Exports of Crude to Britain Is Symbolic Revenge for Our Seizure of Their Greatest National Asset’, The Times, 21 February 2012, p. 19; Alasdair Palmer, ‘Stoning Is Just One of the Barbarities of Modern Iran’, The Sunday Telegraph, 9 May 2010, p. 22.

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Lack of Sophistication Underlying all of these examples is an explicit association between the Middle Ages and a concept of unchecked brutality and violence. Moreover, embedded within such criticisms there exists an implicit kind of temporal rejection, according to which the violent Middle Ages also becomes wrapped up in the Middle-Ages-asregression explored above, to create a subtext in which the ‘medieval’ suggests an underlying lack of sophistication. Following this logic, the brutality and violence of Assad, like the rejection of modernity by the Taliban, becomes something not only out of place but, more importantly, out of time. Not only are Berlusconi, Cameron, Rousseff and others rejecting the violence of terrorist groups as out of place in a ‘civilised’ (read: Western or European) world but they are simultaneously suggesting that these enemies are so medieval that they butt up against, and ultimately reject, modernity. The latter rejection is, reading between the lines, held publicly to be the more objectionable one, since such violence – though suitably ‘medieval’ – is not taking place in the Middle Ages, its ostensibly appropriate context, but in the modern world. Following the logic through to its conclusion, calling something ‘medieval’ means that even though the benefits of modernity lie open to them, the perpetrators have deliberately and perversely opted for the medieval over the modern. It is in this context that, taking a contentious example, discussions over the niqab, burqa or hijab make frequent recourse to the Middle Ages. As anyone who (however willingly) follows such discussions will know, it is scarcely surprising to find online chatter dismissing veils as medieval apparel used in support of a medieval regime dominated by medieval patriarchy.48 Though, on the whole, mainstream and official political discourse is obliged to restrict itself to less inflammatory dialogue – as France’s immigration minister Eric Besson discovered in the backlash against his reference to the niqab, on radio station Europe1, as a “walking coffin”49 – it is nevertheless possible both in parliamentary debates and mainstream media examples of the connection between online medievalisms calling the burqa ‘medieval’ and the undertone of medievalism as regression. The regularity with which the medieval can be deployed to imply the irrational in fact works in favour of politicians to form a kind of indirect medievalism. The problem facing attempts proposed by, among others, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Dutch MP Geert Wilders,or the former French president Nicholas Sarkozy to ban the wearing of full veils is that in many countries such legislation 48 Jacob Rees-Mogg, ‘Ban the Burka? No, Muslim Women Need Our Protection’, Telegraph.co.uk, 6 November 2013, [accessed 10 January 2014]; The Edmonton Journal, ‘Lifting the Veil on a Bogus Issue’, Canada.com [accessed 14 September 2015]; Tony Parsons, ‘Opinion Column’, The Sun, 26 October 2014, p. 11; Kevin Toolis, ‘We Need a Proper Debate on Banning Burkhas in Britain’, The Express, 19 January 2010, p. 14. 49 ‘Besson: Le Voile Intégral, Un Cercueil Ambulant’, Europ. 1, [accessed 15 December 2014].

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is quickly confounded by legally protected rights of religious expression. The association between the Islamic veil and medieval oppression is thus trotted out by opinion pieces such as Allison Pearson’s column in the Daily Telegraph which describes one young woman wearing the full burqa and niqab as “surveying the 21st century through a medieval slit”, Tony Parsons’ description in The Sun, where he called the burqa a ‘medieval body bag’ (in another article by Parsons, Muslim dress is described as ‘Darth Vader drag’), or Sue Carroll’s dismissal of the veil (even while ostensibly defending it) as a “medieval badge of male oppression”.50 Of course it is true that in the last two cases the columnists were deliberately employed, like Katie Hopkins and Jeremy Clarkson, to generate controversy through a populist rhetoric. However, while the deliberate controversy to some extent might account for their provocative terms, the extent to which they are echoed across social media demonstrates the powerful effects of such comparisons. By equating the veil with medievalism, the language serves to suggest that the veil is both out of place and out of time, rendering it (by implication) culturally inappropriate. Thus, indirectly, banal medievalism operates once again to carry out the legwork for extreme positions where official political discourse cannot stray. In this context it is not even necessary for Sarkozy to overtly insult wearers of the burqa as did his immigration minister. All that is needed is for him to claim that it is ‘not appropriate for France’51 – out of time/place – and the medievalist subtext delivers the remainder of the message. Here, again, the implication underpinning the connection is that the lack of sophistication is voluntary and the result of a deliberate rejection of rationality and reason, the twin legacies, apparently, of the Enlightenment. The subtext of such statements is clearly that, without a European-style renaissance, such countries are condemned to live in a perpetual medieval state. The assertion of the ‘medieval’ nature of the veil, then, clearly adopts the same logic as the frequent classification of the Taliban as ‘medieval’, with all of its concomitant suggestions of regression, barbarity and superstition, positioning anything described as medieval as de facto antithetical to modernity and civilisation. The Guardian’s report on Afghanistan in 2006, for instance, bemoans the country’s “medieval social attitudes” as inherently at odds with the modern world.52 Likewise, even on the day after Bush’s controversial ‘crusade’ comments on the South Lawn of the White House, on the floor of the House of Representatives Congressman Dana 50 Tony Parsons, ‘School Niqab Ban Isn’t Racist … Just Common Sense’, The Sun, 28 September 2014, p. 15; Tony Parsons, ‘We’re All Equals in UK. Like It or Leave’, The Sun, 22 September 2013, p. 13; Sue Carroll, ‘Burkha Ban Is a Veiled Threat of Dictatorship’, Daily Mirror, 20 July 2010, p. 21. 51 Nabila Ramdani, ‘French Burqa Debate Is a Smokescreen’, The Guardian, 8 July 2010, [accessed 14 September 2015]; Stefan Simons, ‘France’s Controversial Immigration Minister: The Man Who Launched the Burqa Debate’, Spiegel Online, 1 February 2010, [accessed 14 September 2015]. 52 Conor Foley, ‘A Dangerous Cliche’, The Guardian, 1 September 2006, [accessed 11 May 2012].

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Rohrbacher (R-CA) was heard to claim, without any reaction, that “the Taliban were and are medieval in their own words, in their world view, and their religious view”.53 While, as will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, such medievalisms are deeply entrenched within the post-9/11 rhetoric of terrorism, the accusation of ‘medieval’ attitudes or material conditions is by no means limited to the Middle East exclusively, and nor does it occur only after 9/11. Instead, such banal medievalism stands as a generic term to indicate almost anything outmoded, regressive or oppressive, or merely something which is considered to be inherently incompatible with modern life, which is perhaps why they escape censure in many cases. Medieval living conditions, for example, are understood widely not to refer to the varied and complex living conditions of the medieval era but instead are filtered through the prism of popular culture’s insistence on hovels, mud and dirt. The term thus suggests anything without running water – quite literally, in the case of a WMAR News report from 8 March 2010 on Reisterstown, MD, which had been left without water thanks to a burst main. The anchor, commenting on the resulting chaos, suggested that it was “like living in the Middle Ages out there in Reisterstown. No water. People are having to melt down snow to flush their toilets.” When the British television presenter Richard Madeley, as part of a reality TV series, met groups of squatters in East London living in the most abject squalor, rather than attributing the root causes of the problems to unchecked external investment in London property, exorbitant rent without controls or rampant speculation on the property market, it was to the Middle Ages that he turned, describing their poverty and living conditions as medieval. As he admitted in a newspaper interview prior to the programme’s transmission, “I was deeply shocked that in the capital, a stone’s throw from the Olympic site, there were people living in conditions that would have been unacceptable in the Middle Ages.”54 It is particularly interesting that Madeley here reached instinctively not for modern terms to describe the kinds of poverty which could, after all, only be a product of a modern, post-industrial, globalised and capitalist society, but to the Middle Ages. The ideological effect of this medievalism in particular, then, is that its implicit sense of regression could safely relegate these ideas as behind us in time, instead of a stark reminder of the losers in a globalised labour market. They may well be physically a ‘stone’s throw’ from modernity, but in this rhetorical mode, they adopt a temporal disconnection of much greater distance. Other claims to medieval living conditions may well be less fraught in terms of rhetoric, but are nonetheless helpful in revealing the extent to which such banal medievalisms can be used without any historical intention whatsoever. After an attack on Margaret Salcedo, a resident of the New Mexico town Truth or Consequences, by a pack of pit bulls, the New York Daily News reported one neighbour 53 Californian Representative Dana Rohrabacher in his speech to Congress on September 17 2001, ‘Challenge Facing America’, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 107th Congress, First Session Vol. 147 Part 12 (Government Printing Office), pp. 17197–17202, p. 17199. 54 Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘I Was Deeply Shocked That a Stone’s Throw from the Olympic Stadium I Found People Living in Conditions Unacceptable in the Middle Ages’, Daily Mirror, 21 October 2012, p. 30.

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as claiming that “I think it’s like living in the Middle Ages, where you hate to go outside because the wolves are going to eat your grandchildren.”55 In another bizarre example, the online hotel reviewing site Trip Advisor offers a number of reviews which describe living conditions as apparently ‘medieval’. Once again, however, the understanding of ‘medieval’ had nothing to do with the Middle Ages, but rather described old towels, unreliable Wi-Fi,56 a lack of soundproofed bathrooms,57 a poor breakfast58 or the provision of a CRT, rather than flat-screen, television set.59 In a similar way, and adopting the same rhetoric, the medieval can also be found expressed as attitudes, rather than external living conditions. Any kind of prejudice can find itself dismissed not as the product of fear or ignorance but as an outmoded ‘medieval attitude’. In 2003, when British MEP Michael Cashman criticised Egypt’s history of discrimination against certain sexual orientations, it was to the Middle Ages that he instinctively turned, claiming that “not only does the Egyptian government openly and repeatedly violate human rights through their entrapment and torture of homosexuals, but now they are lobbying countries in the UN to allow these medieval attitudes to sexuality to continue”.60 Writing in Ireland’s The People in 1999, Stephen Maguire applauds legislation against racism as one that drags Ireland out of the Dark Ages. “I am minded to lambast our politicians for not coming up with something like this sooner. But I think I’ll leave that in the past. And that is where we should learn to leave discrimination – back in the dark ages where it belongs.”61 It might include sexual liberation (or lack thereof), such as John Patterson’s claim in The Guardian that Mormons, Baptists and US Irish Catholics share a series of reactionary positions with regards to sex, singling out Massachusetts as a state whose “medieval attitudes, towards sex in particular, seem to have persisted into the 21st century”.62 In all of these instances, the relegation of such attitudes to an invented medieval past confines them to an 55 Michael Sheridan, ‘Pack of Pit Bulls Kill Woman in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico’, NY Daily News, 2011, [accessed 8 September 2015]. 56 Tony K, review of Radisson Blu Hotel Bodo, 14 July 2015, [accessed 1 September 2015]. 57 Milan-Czech, review of Hotel Canadiano, 19 June 2015, [accessed 1 September 2015]. 58 Drashko D, review of Hotel Garni Merano, 30 January 2014, [accessed 1 September 2015]. 59 Amit U, review of Lebua State Tower, 16 April 2014, [accessed 1 September 2015]. 60 Ewen MacAskill, ‘Anger at UN Role for Rights Violators’, The Guardian, 21 April 2003, [accessed 11 May 2012]. 61 Stephen Maguire, ‘This Land of Emigrants Is Crawling out of Dark Ages’, The People, 24 October 1999, p. 27. 62 John Patterson, ‘Prude Awakening’, The Guardian, 20 April 2001, [accessed 11 May 2012].

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imaginary period lying outside of modernity. As such, the often very serious issues to which they relate are held at arm’s length, safely imprisoned within a rhetorical past. Similarly, sexist attitudes are equally relegated to the medieval era, such as those of Italian comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, who found himself criticised by his own party when one female member objected to his patronising comments, describing Grillo as a “medieval chauvinist”.63 In an opinion piece written for the Daily Mirror about the pop singer Cheryl Cole’s name change after her marriage, Polly Hudson asked “why, in 2014, are so many women still changing their surnames to their husbands’ when they get married? It’s not only horribly sexist, it’s also basically medieval.”64 Curiously, even those legislations which are designed to combat such attitudes can also find themselves derided in precisely the same terms, such as a 2012 article in The Telegraph which cited criticisms that “mandatory quotas for women on boards would be a nod to the dark ages”.65 Such self-contradictory uses of the medieval can, therefore, demonstrate precisely the elasticity of banal medievalism, through which the term can find itself applied as much to sexist attitudes as it can to precautionary measures taken against those attitudes. The only way that such elasticity can be accommodated without prejudicing direct meaning, then, is if the terms are able to refer, however indirectly, to something else instead: in this case, that ‘something else’ is precisely the suggestion of an underlying lack of sophistication and refinement. The banal medievalisms of these examples cumulatively demonstrate that the Middle Ages, as used in modern mass media, thus fulfils a twin function to suggest regression on the one hand and a de facto opposition to modernity on the other. Medieval as ‘Non-modern’ Further proof that the rhetorical Middle Ages of regression resides not in the past but in the modern day comes in the unlikely fields of sport and technology. The curious frequency with which journalistic writing in these two areas uses the Middle Ages in the above sense of ‘something to avoid’, ‘something backward’ or ‘something which is not progressive’ demonstrates both the elasticity of the terms themselves and the importance of an underlying myth of progress implicit within them. In the sporting press – perhaps in part because there is so much more coverage of it compared with other sports – it is the world of football which is dominated by both a myth of progress and a seemingly irrational fear of the Dark Ages. After a 63 Pier Francesco Borgia, ‘La Grillina Offesa Si Ribella Al Padre Padrone Beppe: “Maschilista Da Medioevo”’, Il Giornale.it, 2012, [accessed 5 November 2012]. 64 Polly Hudson, ‘A Shame to Take a Bloke’s Name, Chez’, Daily Mirror, 17 July 2014, p. 25. 65 Louisa Peacock, ‘We Need Female Board Quotas Because Men Aren’t Listening’, The Telegraph, 23 October 2012, [accessed 13 September 2015].

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goalless draw in a match against low-ranking team Montenegro in 2012, the Guardian’s football correspondent Richard Williams bemoaned England’s “Return to the Dark Ages”.66 With no other reference to the period in the article itself, the sole medievalism at work here is the first line’s mention of a revival and return to form, which was undermined by the players’ performance. In this instance, then, the ‘Dark Ages’ stands as a catch-all term containing any and all disappointing performances by the national team. Likewise, one year later, another dismal performance by the English national team would see footballer-turned-commentator Gary Lineker singling out the team’s apparent 4-4-2 formation as “a step back to the dark ages of two lines of four”, a comment supported by fellow ex-footballer Rio Ferdinand’s claim that English football was stuck “in the dark ages” in terms of tactics.67 On other occasions, terms such as ‘the Dark Ages’ refer more identifiably to the rampant football hooliganism of the 1960s and 1970s, where the terraces were under the public spotlight as much as – or perhaps more than – the players themselves. Following a pitch invasion after a match between Birmingham City and Aston Villa in 2010, one player, Alex McLeish, condemned the fans’ actions, suggesting that “the carry-on on the pitch, and the interaction between the stand and pitch, took us back to the dark ages”.68 After one supporter invaded the pitch and assaulted the Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper Chris Kirkland in 2012 a Lincolnshire Echo headline called for fans not to “let football go back to the Dark Ages”.69 Interestingly, in the often-overlooked field of women’s football, the sexist implications of terms such as ‘Dark Ages’ create a double medievalism in which an antiquated system is responsible for sexist attitudes referred to as medieval in the examples above. Such, for example, was the case with criticisms levied by Maureen McGonigle, the executive administrator of Scottish Women’s Football, in her claim that Scottish premier league clubs were “living in the Dark Ages” because of their failure to support women’s football.70 Likewise, after the commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys made a series of sexist comments about the female assistant 66 Richard Williams, ‘England Return to the Dark Ages’, The Guardian, 13 October 2010, [accessed 8 November 2011]. 67 Sam Wallace, ‘“What Are Dark Ages?” Asks Hodgson as He Defends His Tactics’, The Independent, 31 May 2013, p. 68. Ken Millar, ‘Rio Has a Dig at English Football’, Evening Times, 1 June 2013, p. 44. In another instance, the Coventry manager Steven Pressley criticised Bradford City’s tactics as football “from the Dark Ages”. Quoted in the Daily Star’s football section, Pressley claimed that “it’s difficult to play against Dark Age football”. Jason Mellor, ‘Dark Rages: Pressley Fuming after Nahki Rescue Act’, Daily Star, 18 November 2013, p. 12. 68 Sandy Macaskill, ‘McLeish: Crowd Trouble Returns Us to Dark Ages’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2010, pp. 6, 7. Also reported in Phil Shaw, ‘McLeish: Pitch Invasion Recalls “Dark Ages”’, The Independent [accessed 16 August 2011]. 69 ‘Don’t Let Football Go back to the Dark Ages because of Idiot Cawley’, Lincolnshire Echo, 25 October 2012, p. 86. 70 Martin Williams, ‘Women’s Football Is Left on the Bench’, The Herald, 3 August 2006, p. 10.

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referee Sian Massey, the ex-footballer Lee Dixon claimed that “what Gray and Keys said was taking football back to the dark ages”.71 Off the pitch, references to the Dark Ages can be even less literal in their referential framework referring to injustice or power imbalance. In a column for the Daily Mirror in 1996, former football manager Sir Alf Ramsey described the firing of a manager as taking football “back to the Dark Ages”, though here there is nothing obvious from the context to suggest why this might be the case.72 In 2002, likewise, the Scottish Football Association found itself criticised as medieval when a disciplinary committee refused to overturn a referee’s mistake. The then Hearts’ boss, Craig Levein, argued that “the whole thing is so draconian. We are told the appeal is not successful but are not told the reasons why […] It is like living in the dark ages.”73 Similarly, in the aftermath of the failed England bid to host the football World Cup in 2022, the Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger, claimed on two separate occasions that the governing body, FIFA, belonged to the Dark Ages. On the first occasion, following FIFA’s decision to ignore England’s World Cup bid, he castigated the voting system as medieval: “the way they decided looked to me like it was from the Middle Ages”.74 In The Telegraph he elaborated on his claim, complaining that “the bid team put some unbelievable work in. I don’t understand. The way to decide looked to me, in fairness, a little bit from the Middle Ages. It doesn’t look right in modern life that people have to go over there and lobby.”75 The 2010 criticisms were not the first of Wenger’s medievalisms, either: in 2006 he criticised the ‘trial by television’ of a Panorama investigation into football bribery: “it looks to me like Middle Ages justice [sic], where you burn somebody quickly to satisfy people”.76 The world of technology, too, frequently uses medievalism as an indexical term pointing to anything not considered to be progressive and relentlessly forwardlooking. Such medievalisms need not make any real sense, but are able instead simply to suggest anything retrograde or unapologetically traditional. The absence of paperless billing in one insurance company, for example, caused the chairman to announce that “the insurance market needs to pull itself out of the ‘Dark Ages’”, claiming that “there are some large operators who have said that in the future we’ve got to get our act together electronically, rather than live in the dark ages, and we completely agree with that”.77 Even Google, perhaps the pioneer of virtual and paperless technology, found itself weighing in on the digital vs. analogue debate, 71 Lee Dixon, ‘Gray and Keys Comments Belong in the Dark Ages. Sexism Is as Bad as Racism’, The Independent Online, 29 January 2011, [accessed 31 August 2015]. 72 Alf Ramsey, ‘Back to the Dark Ages’, Daily Mirror, 12 January 1996, pp. 42, 43. 73 Paul Kiddie, ‘Levein in “Dark Ages” Jibe at SFA’, Evening News, 22 January 2002, p. 36. 74 Vikki Orvice, ‘This Was Decision Straight from the Middle Ages’, The Sun, 4 December 2010, p. 96. 75 Jeremy Wilson, ‘FIFA Bid Process from Middle Ages, Says Stunned Wenger’, The Daily Telegraph, 4 December 2010, p. 4. 76 Adrian Curtis, ‘Wenger Hits out at TV “Middle Ages Justice”’, The Independent, 23 September 2006, p. 81. 77 James Daley, ‘Lloyd’s Still in the Dark Ages’, The Independent, 7 April 2006, p. 58.

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with its criticism of the absence of paper trails risking “a new dark age” for future historians.78 The Daily Mail continues such logic in its criticism of banks which, they claim, are “still stuck in the dark ages when it comes to displaying the interest rate you get”.79 In one British regional newspaper a group of entrepreneurs could be found claiming that the absence of reliable broadband condemns regions to a digital ‘dark ages’, arguing that “it’s like living in the Middle Ages”.80 And, in the light of an imminent energy crisis connected to climate change – a phenomenon which Bruce Holsinger shows has also produced its own active field of medievalism81 – the absence of stable electricity supplies promised a return to medieval living conditions. Warning of predicted fuel shortages over the winter of 2008, one Daily Mail article reported that the National Grid warned of blackouts, under the headline “Back to the Dark Ages”.82 A year later, before the winter of 2009, a similar prediction could be found on the Telegraph’s website, proclaiming that “Britain [was] heading back to the dark ages” because of its inability to satisfy high demand.83 Once again, in the face of predicted energy shortages in 2013, the front page of Independent for 20 February carried the headline “Britain warned to prepare for energy dark age”. On 6 January of the same year, the Mail Online transformed an energy issue into a problem caused by the European Union, but nevertheless continued to use precisely the same terms to frame the debate when it questioned why the UK was “about to pay £110 billion to enter a new Dark Age”.84 Having learned nothing from the earlier proclamations of an imminent Dark Age back in 2009, in June 2015 the Telegraph could once again

78 ‘Internet Pioneer Warns That Digital Technology Could Produce a New Dark Age’, Yorkshire Post, 13 February 2015. 79 Dan Hyde, ‘Victory! Nationwide Comes Clean on Savings Rates Online’, MailOnline, 23 October 2012. 80 Ron Bendell, ‘Assessing Net Loss due to Ubiquitous Horror’s Rollout’, Western Morning News, 2015, [accessed 8 September 2015]. 81 Bruce Holsinger, ‘The Worlding of Medievalism: Past and Present in the Early Anthropocene’, plenary talk delivered at the Middle Ages in the Modern World conference, University of St Andrews, 25–28 June 2013. See also Louise D’Arcens and Clare Monagle, ‘So Hot Right Now: The Middle Ages in the Climate Change Debate’, The Conversation, 2014, [accessed 15 December 2015]. 82 Sam Fleming, ‘Back to the Dark Ages: National Grid Raises the Spectre of Blackouts This Winter’, Daily Mail, 26 September 2008, [accessed 16 August 2011]. 83 By Rowena Mason, ‘Britain Heading back to the Dark Ages’, 5 September 2009, [accessed 31 August 2015]. 84 David Rose, ‘Why Is Britain about to Pay £110billion to Enter a New Dark Age? A Damning Indictment of the New “Green-Friendly” Energy Bill’, Mail Online, [accessed 31 August 2015].

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be found warning that the National Grid should be broken up to prevent “a new dark age” of energy.85 On closer inspection, the range of medievalisms relating to the various proclamations of imminent energy crises demonstrate an identical set of concerns and rhetorical strategies at work as with football’s references to hooliganism, in the sense that it was not to a medieval precursor that these medievalisms referred but to a modern one that was intended to be relegated to the oubliettes of history. As Sam Fleming’s 2008 article later acknowledged, the ‘dark ages’ to which his headline alludes were those of 1974’s blackouts, rather than anything specifically or identifiably medieval. Indeed, reviewing the full text of most of the instances cited above reveals that it is the underlying suggestion of a return to candlelit homes and electricity cuts which ideologically suggests a return to a pre-industrial era. As with football, technology and gender, the extent to which such banal medievalisms are entrenched in the journalistic discourse is revealed by the fact that even when rejecting the premise of the above arguments, and even when arguing against green initiatives, those same medievalist buzzwords emerge. In 2007, for example, Kevin Toolis offers a spectacularly naïve apology for climate-change deniers in his claim that the green lobby want to turn back the clock of technology. In an article entitled “Doom-Mongers Want Us Back in the Dark Ages”, Toolis claims that “according to these new green prophets, we are all about to die unless we entirely change our way of life right now by turning off the lights and mending our energyburning ways”.86 His argument explicitly posits a rift between modern industrialisation and the ‘greenspeak’ police which aims to take us back to an unspecified past. Relying more on his opinion than any scientific data, Toolis’ argument adopts medievalism as a rhetorical mode according to which green energy policies operate as a countermeasure to the relentless march of technological progress. A similarly fraught example emerges in a 2011 blogpost written for the Spectator by Matt Ridley which rails against the green lobby as a force which, Ridley also claims, threatens to send us back to the Dark Ages. The entire piece, warning of a new “green dark age”, is couched in distinctly medievalist language and finishes with the accusation that “the neo-medieval policy of picking winners – or rather losers – creates a salivating lobby for subsidies […]. But it is saddling ordinary Britons with uncompetitive energy prices, lost jobs, rising fuel poverty, spoiled landscapes – and higher carbon emissions too. Time for a peasants’ revolt.”87 It is the sense of an imminent new Dark Age, one to which we will return having experienced the dazzling brightness of our twenty-first-century Enlightenment, that many of these warnings use as their ideological crutch. In these fields of technology, football, gender and elsewhere, the real fear that dominates these journalistic medievalisms is not of a past Dark Age but of a new one lurking ahead of us. 85 Alexander Temerko, ‘The National Grid Must Change to Stop a New Dark Age’, 20 July 2015, [accessed 31 August 2015]. 86 Kevin Toolis, ‘Doom-Mongers Want Us Back in the Dark Ages’, The Express, 7 March 2007, p. 25. 87 Matt Ridley, ‘A Green Dark Age’, The Spectator, 21 May 2011, [accessed 31 August 2015].

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Used as a shorthand not only for going backwards metaphorically but for actively regressing, such examples of banal medievalism clearly are not intended to summon up a medieval past but are using that past to suggest a teleological superiority: a myth of progress. Moreover, in some cases these banal medievalisms are not only ahistorical, but can actually work against any kind of intentional medievalism to demonstrate precisely the opposite meaning to that intended. For example, complaining on a medical forum about the refusal of the British NHS to promote alternative medicine, one user commented that it was “like living in the Middle Ages”. The irony, of course, is that the kinds of medicine the user advocated were precisely those most connected with the Middle Ages, rather than the pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on modern medicine.88 Similarly, in a legal help forum, one US tenant belonging to a housing association bemoaned the strict laws of Nevada state which precluded her from opting out of the association, claiming that “it’s like living in the middle ages under the rule of a despicable dictator”.89 Again, the actual meaning of the term is precisely the opposite: the binding terms of the association come about precisely because of the complexity of property ownership and the protection of developers’ capital investments – as such the phenomenon is the product of a distinctly modern, and not a medieval, system. Conclusions: Thoroughly Modern Medievalism Thus, it emerges that almost any attitude, belief or idea might find itself described as medieval if it is deemed to be outmoded or conservative in any way, and there is clearly no necessity for any kind of connection, however tenuous, to the Middle Ages. One effect of this elasticity, however, is that rather than remaining static the incessant use of banal medievalisms can end up affecting collectively held beliefs about the Middle Ages themselves, since the logic underpinning such descriptions shifts the meaning and the place of the medieval. In a description of a modern attitude as ‘medieval’, or else inherent in the suggestion of ‘going back’ to the medieval period, the ‘medieval’ is not static, but moving, functioning as a term to describe anything resisting a perceived progression. Put simply, the logic suggests that those who are not moving forwards are for that reason ‘medieval’. As the above examples demonstrate, the rhetorical dark ages which underpin a dominant myth of progress are not a temporal comparison, but instead are used to conjure up a less precise, temporally vague idea of a period which is remote in time but which nevertheless threatens the ineluctable march of the present towards the future. Used to designate a temporally incoherent period as far back as the Stone Age or as recent as the 1970s, 1980s or even the early 2000s, the concept of ‘getting 88 ‘UK NHS, God, It’s like Living in the Middle Ages’, Nutrafx.your-Talk.com, 2009, [accessed 8 September 2015]. 89 ‘How Can I Legally Opt out of a Homeowners Association in Nevada?’ JustAnswer, [accessed 8 September 2015].

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medieval’ has very little to do with the chronology and periodisation of the Middle Ages and very much to do with a rhetorical and ideological struggle to demonstrate concrete progress towards the future. Freed from a specific medieval referent, the Middle Ages of progress thus become a readily available tool to castigate anyone who expresses a desire to take the world in a different direction to that desired by the speaker. It emerges, logically, that a substantial part of the myth of progress underpinning these Dark Ages and ‘medieval’ regressions is defined not by its ‘medievalness’ but instead by its opposition to modernity. In this mode, the banal medievalisms outlined above denote not only a lack of sophistication but, often, a wholesale regression. A 2009 opinion piece by Melanie Phillips, for example, uses precisely this sense of regression in her claim that “with the economy in far worse shape than even the most pessimistic among us had imagined, we appear to have entered a time machine which is blasting us back to the dark ages of state control and economic paralysis”.90 The Dark Ages to which Phillips alludes again turn out to be the 1970s – as another article from the Mail’s money blog in 2008 suggests.91 Though many of these examples belong to the right wing – as the word ‘conservative’ might lead us to expect – examples can be found across the entire political spectrum. To give one example from many, a 2011 article from the Guardian rails against the religious right’s alleged return to medieval beliefs in which the liberal left are “being dragged back into the dark ages by our government”.92 The reason that both ends of the political spectrum are able to tap into the same rhetoric, then, is not because of any kind of innate conservatism, but because of a prevalent medievalist dichotomy which places science, reason and modernity on one side and medievalism on the other as a dark mirror of emotionality, sentimentality, ignorance and intolerance. Such is the subtext of Tory frontbencher Liam Fox’s claim that a fixation with celebrity culture risks dragging the UK back to the Dark Ages. With the headline “Dumb UK ‘heading back to the Dark Ages’ thanks to cult of celebrity”, Fox argues that “Britain risks entering a new Dark Age because the cult of celebrity is undermining learning, [with] the ‘age of reason’ going into reverse.” Closer inspection of the argument reveals exactly this false dichotomy between rationalism and the Middle Ages, a subtext which eventually surfaces in Fox’s potted history of modernity: The defence spokesman said a generation ago children wanted to be astronauts or scientists – now they simply want fame. ‘Since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, 90 Melanie Phillips, ‘Labour Is Blasting Britain back to the Dark Ages’, Mail Online, 28 April 2009, [accessed 16 August 2011]. 91 ‘Inflation: A Return to the Dark Ages’, Mail Online, 2008, [accessed 16 August 2011]. 92 Michele Hanson, ‘Dragged back to the Dark Ages’, The Guardian, 27 May 2011, [accessed 16 August 2011].

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the age of reason, we have transformed our world,’ he said. ‘But there is a crisis of confidence, an uncertainty and a lack of optimism in our society which should trouble us. Diminishing social mobility, the cult of the celebrity society, the decline in serious learning, the increasing disregard for empiricism and social attitudes verging on value-phobia threaten to cast a shadow on the enlightened western liberalism which has taken us so far’.93

It is in this same sense, then, that the mass media uses terms such as ‘going back to the Middle Ages’ as part of a threefold rhetorical strategy of containment. First, such expressions distance a given phenomenon from the present, driving an entirely fictitious wedge between the past and the present. Second, by invoking a myth of progress which rewrites Western history according to a triumphalist discourse of increasing sophistication, the medieval comes to be divested of any chronological attachment to become a free-floating signifier of all that is primitive and therefore out of place in the modern world. Third, by positioning a given phenomenon in the pre-modern Middle Ages, and by relying on an idea of the Renaissance as the watershed moment in which scientific rationalism frees us from the shackles of primitive medievalism, any return to the Dark Ages is reframed as a willing, purposeful and ultimately perverse return to a pre-rational chaos. As a consequence, the frequent reliance on a medieval model in journalistic discourse repositions the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages not as a period of history but as a trope. It is a trope, however, that reflects as much on modernity’s desire to flaunt its own technological, ecological, political or ideological sophistication as it does on anything historical, deftly “positioning the past as a threat to which the future may return us”.94 Indeed, it reflects more darkly on the subject of medievalism than on its object, since, as Zumthor observes, “each era constructs an image of its past which belongs only to itself, and which characterises its own mode of historical consciousness”.95 Here, then, in our perennial – though inaccurate – claims to be going back to the Middle Ages, banal medievalism takes on a new significance in an entirely unintended, but nevertheless powerful, rhetorical strategy to position ourselves as the endpoint in an ineluctable march of progress.

93 James Chapman, ‘Dumb UK “Heading back to the Dark Ages” Thanks to Cult of Celebrity, Says Senior Tory’, Mail Online, 1 April 2009, [accessed 16 August 2011]. 94 Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms, p. 140. 95 “Chaque époque se fait du passé une image qui n’appartient qu’à elle et qui caractérise le mode de prise de conscience historique qui lui est propre” (my translation). Zumthor, Parler Du Moyen Âge, p. 18.

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4 “This crusade, this War on Terror, is gonna take a while”: The Bush Doctrine, the Crusades and Neomedievalism

The shining hero going against the dragon has been the great device of self-justification for all crusades. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces1

O

n 16 September 2001, in a country still reeling from the shock of 9/11, George Bush made a now infamous gaffe when he publicly announced the War on Terror, conceived as retaliation for the attacks, as part of a “crusade”. At a press conference on the South Lawn of the White House, after an emergency summit at Camp David, Bush laid out the new policy by describing the nature of what he described as a new kind of war, claiming that: “We’re facing a new kind of enemy. Somebody so barbaric that they would fly airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. […] We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism for a while. […] This is a new kind of evil.”2 It was then that Bush uttered the words that would return to haunt him for much of his presidency. In a seemingly spontaneous departure from a prepared text, and warming to his rhetorical theme, he added that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while”.3 In hindsight, looking back at the footage, it certainly seems in all likelihood to have been an unscripted ad lib, even if a poorly chosen one. Despite the probability that the comment was not part of a carefully planned policy announcement (Bush’s aside seems to have been intended to stress the potential for a protracted and determined war on several fronts: his emphasis was clearly on the idea that “it’s gonna take a while”), and even after an almost immediate retraction by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, his use of the word ‘crusade’ was sharply criticised, with newspapers, magazines and opinion pieces condemning the casual use of such a loaded term. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Fontana Press, 1993), p. 341. Transcript of press conference 16 September 2001. A full transcript of the speech can be found at ‘Remarks by the President Upon Arrival’, The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 2001, [accessed 20 November 2012]. 3 Ibid. Emphasis added. 1

2

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Writing in the Seattle Times the following day, Sally Buzbee warned that “using such a term, loaded with historical baggage about religious wars” was potentially dangerous and risked alienating “moderate Arabs and Muslims [… making them] more nervous about U.S. motives”.4 Buzbee’s thoughtful piece went on to cite a number of experts on the Middle East who stressed the importance of phraseology in the already fragile US/Middle East relations, including Joshua Salaam, then director of the Council of American–Islamic relations in Washington, who recognised that in the tense environment of post-9/11 America “we’ve got to be careful of the words we use”.5 A.N. Wilson, writing in the Sunday Telegraph the following week, observed that the term’s cultural baggage brought out key differences in the term’s historical resonance. For President Bush, Wilson argued, “you could be fairly sure that if you played a game of associations with President Bush, and tried him out with the word ‘crusade’, it would simply conjure up a picture in his mind of some good guys, probably in cowboy outfits, chasing after some bad guys”.6 In the context of the Western media’s association between Islam and the Middle Ages outlined above, however, his choice of words told a very different story. In the same week, the Boston Globe columnist James Carroll recognised that, “far from being a long-ago history that we can blithely abjure, the Crusades created a state of consciousness that still shapes the mind of the West, and if Americans don’t know that, many Muslims do”.7 Likewise, in a cover piece for the Wall Street Journal from 21 September, Hugh Pope and Peter Waldman argued that in, the context of a divisive memory of the crusades, “the president’s reference to a crusade had already reinforced the anxiety of some Muslims that the war on terrorism is really a war on them”.8 However, it is not the case that journalists’ responses were universally condemnatory. Indeed, a number of mainstream media outlets opted to toe the governmental line as it geared up for what, as was increasingly obvious, was going to be a war. Perhaps more surprisingly, as Andrew Gumbel noted in The Independent, Bush’s gaffe in fact “attracted remarkably little opprobrium domestically”, and it was, rather, the dissenters who found themselves attacked most often for a lack of patriotism.9 Some, like CNN’s online news section, reported the speech but passed no comment on the term. Others, like the New York Times, neglected to make any reference to 4 Sally Buzbee, ‘Experts Worry That War on Terrorism Will Be Seen as Crusade against Islam’, Seattle Times, 17 September 2001, [accessed 27 November 2013]. 5 Ibid. 6 A.N. Wilson, ‘Let Us Hope This Is Not a Crusade’, Sunday Telegraph, 23 September 2001, p. 23. 7 Reprinted in James Carroll, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), p. 24. Also available at [accessed 20 May 2013]. 8 Peter Waldman and Hugh Pope, ‘Some Muslims Fear War on Terrorism Is Really a War on Them’, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2001, p. A1. 9 Andrew Gumbel, ‘Dissenting Voices: Free Speech Has Become Second Casualty of War’, The Independent, 28 September 2001, p. 10.

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the gaffe at all in its coverage.10 Still others attempted to contextualise, clarify, refine or explain away the use of the words altogether. Jean Bethke Elshtain, for example, repudiated the various suggestions that Bush’s gaffe would unleash a fresh clash of civilisations. In Just War Against Terrorism she defends Bush from accusations of orientalism, arguing that, despite the folly of his use of the term, “he excised the word from his vocabulary thereafter and explicitly enjoined the American people to avoid a crusading mentality”.11 Indeed, the following week, Bush made a series of appearances in Islamic centres in an attempt to undo the seeming attack on Islam. In one visit he appealed to a shared culture and explicitly renounced any comparisons with the Crusades, reminding his audience that “this is the time to recall our historic debt to Moslem [sic] culture, and to remember also that for most of our history, we and the Islamic world have not been the enemies suggested by the Crusades”.12 More important than the use of the term is its historical context, Elshtain argues, since an allusion to the Crusades “taps the vein of Christian guilt, but does it enhance historic acumen or offer students concrete understanding of the complex events we call ‘the Crusades’?”13 A.N. Wilson’s thoughtful piece went on to examine the historical understanding of the period in order to explain away the term, pointing out that popular knowledge about the Crusades is hardly likely to be more in-depth and nuanced than that of Bush himself. Taking the analogy seriously, he questions the appropriateness of the crusade as a metaphor for the War on Terror, asking “which Crusade does he [Bush] have it in mind to imitate?”14 By taking it seriously and comparing it with the historical record, Wilson’s ostensibly flippant arguments make a serious point, underscoring the extent to which the crusades themselves are not necessarily references to the actual European history surrounding the Crusades, but rather to a collection of rather vague memories that exist alongside it as filtered through a range of mediated versions (especially films to television series) and through a range of different contexts (such as adaptations of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, versions of Robin Hood or films about crusades more generally). Writing in the National Review in November 2001, Thomas F. Madden dismissed the whole affair altogether and tried to reclaim the term’s historical significance by arguing that the Crusades were “irrelevant to current politics in the Middle East”

10 Todd S. Purdum, ‘Bush Warns of a Wrathful, Shadowy and Inventive War’, The New York Times, 17 September 2001, [accessed 5 August 2014]; Manuel Perez-Rivas, ‘Bush Vows to Rid the World of “Evil-Doers”’, CNN.com, 2001, [accessed 5 August 2014]. 11 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 116. 12 John Casey, ‘Truth About Crusades’, Daily Mail, 22 September 2001, p. 12. The use of the term ‘Moslem’ rather than ‘Muslim’ is in itself revealing, in that the use of the outmoded adjectival form can often be seen as part of a broader rhetorical point which aligns Islam with the Middle Ages, as I discuss in Chapter 5. 13 Elshtain, Just War against Terror, p. 117. 14 A.N. Wilson, ‘Let Us Hope This Is Not a Crusade’, Sunday Telegraph, 23 September 2001, p. 23.

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and “are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history”.15 He continued, “Muslims in the Middle East – including bin Laden and his creatures – know as little about the real crusades as Americans do. Both view them in the context of the modern, rather than the medieval world. The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression.”16 However, even after such a clarification, the December issue of the same magazine featured a caricature of George Bush in crusader garb, carrying a shield and banner emblazoned with red crosses. The picture carries the caption “here we go again: Islam and the West”, directly recalling Bush’s gaffe as an indication of foreign policy. Outside of the US, however, where perhaps the greater physical and emotional distance from the 9/11 attacks allowed a greater scrutiny of the rhetoric of retaliation, the term provoked a far bigger reaction. Newspapers across the world emphasised two aspects in particular. First, many commentators explicitly criticised the divisive language which placed the great Evil on one side (without anyone identifying precisely who was implicated by that term) and the US on the other. Second, they focused on the potential ramifications of the specific term ‘crusade’, which could threaten to derail the already fragile coalition that the US was trying to put together. Jonathan Phillips recognised both aspects, observing that “as the President tries to engineer support for his counter-attack from the Muslim nations, he needs to understand that ‘crusade’ is a word not to be employed lightly”.17 Even the Daily Mail, not exactly a newspaper renowned for its cultural sensitivity or its multicultural agenda, and one which, as we saw in Chapter 2, periodically launches its own crusades on a regular basis, recognised that in this context it was an injudicious choice of words. John Casey’s article on 22 September lamented the choice of the word ‘crusade’ as a word we like to use in the West because it suggests a righteous fight, a battle for good against evil. But crusade has a very different and ominous meaning in the Arab and Moslem world. There, they take it literally as referring to the warfare Christendom conducted against the Moslems [sic] from the 11th to the 15th century.18

In France, Le Monde warned that “if this ‘war’ takes a form that affronts moderate Arab opinion, if it has the air of a clash of civilizations, there is a strong risk that it will contribute to Osama bin Laden’s goal: a conflict between the Arab–Muslim world and the West”.19 Like the US dailies, many leading European politicians politely avoided mentioning the inappropriateness of Bush’s expression, following what The 15 Thomas F. Madden, ‘Crusade Propaganda’, National Review, 2 November 2001,

[accessed 5 August 2013]. 16 Madden, ‘Crusade Propaganda’. 17 Jonathan Phillips, ‘Why a Crusade will lead to a Jihad’, The Independent, 18 September 2001, p. 5. 18 Casey, ‘Truth About Crusades’, p. 12. 19 Reported in ‘Europe Cringes at Bush “Crusade” against Terrorists’, The Christian Science Monitor, 19 September 2001, [accessed 10 August 2011].

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Independent’s Stephen Castle called a “carefully co-ordinated message”.20 The German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, French prime minister Jacques Chirac and Australian prime minister John Howard all carefully overlooked the president’s choice of terminology, choosing to focus instead on the message. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, confirming his nascent role as the USA’s staunch ally, and future member of the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’, made no explicit commentary on the president’s words but instead issued a series of statements asserting a distinction between Islam and Islamic terrorism which only obliquely referenced the president’s blunder.21 The ‘carefully co-ordinated message’ of European unity on Bush’s verbal ineptitude was, in fact, only highlighted by the equally quixotic Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, in what seems, ironically, to have been an attempt to rush to Bush’s aid. Attempting to defend Bush’s use of the term ‘crusade’, Berlusconi provoked further outcry by declaring Islam to be an ‘inferior civilisation’, making matters still worse – especially since he made explicit the implicit temporal rift of Bush’s own words (Berlusconi’s arguments centred on the myth of progress examined in Chapter 3, observing the ‘duty’ of a ‘superior West’ to conquer other peoples in order to “extend the benefits of the West on those who are 1,400 years behind”).22 The reactions of senior European politicians in explicitly condemning Berlusconi, but not mentioning Bush’s gaffe, demonstrated the extent to which internal diversity seems to have been set aside in favour of building a broad base of support for the inevitable war. This is not to say, of course, that there was no discussion of – and reaction to – Bush’s comments in political circles. Despite the prime minister’s notable silence on the use of crusade rhetoric, the terminology was explicitly criticised in Britain’s Houses of Parliament. Already by 14 September, British peer Lord Wallace of Saltaire had recognised that the rhetoric of retribution was rapidly becoming a prelude to armed conflict, which suggests that the rhetoric of neomedievalism was already common currency in higher-level policy discussions. In his speech to the House of Lords on international terrorism two days before Bush’s comments, Lord Wallace urged his parliamentary colleagues to “avoid all language about a clash of civilisations, let alone of a crusade”.23 Within the front benches, the then Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, used his party conference a week later as a platform to criticise Bush’s comments, claiming that words such as ‘crusade’ “raised the spectre of a battle between Christianity and Islam”.24 Even in Blair’s own cabinet, the inter 20 ‘Diplomacy: Europe Disowns Berlusconi for Attack on Islam’, The Independent, 28 September 2001, p. 7. 21 John Innes, ‘Terrorism, Not Islam, Is Our Enemy Says Blair’, The Scotsman, 28 September 2001, p. 6; Paul Waugh, ‘War on Terrorism: Blair Says Fight Is Not with the Muslim Faith’, The Independent, 28 September 2001, p. 7; ‘Blair’s Pledge: Islam, a Religion of Peace’, Daily Mirror, 28 September 2001, p. 5; Anne Perkins, ‘Downing St Condemns Racist Attacks: PM Stresses Shared Heritage’, The Guardian, 28 September 2001, p. 6. 22 Bruce Johnston, ‘Islam Is Inferior, Says Berlusconi’, The Telegraph, 27 September 2001, p. 12. 23 House of Lords debate on International Terrorism, 14 September 2001, vol. 627, cols 10–100, c. 19. 24 George Jones, ‘Kennedy Urges Caution over Terror, Liberal Democrat Conference’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2001, p. 12, p. 6.

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national development secretary, Clare Short, broke ranks to criticise Bush’s words openly as unfortunate and, by implication, inaccurate.25 The Bush PR Campaign Given his instant retraction, and the fact that Bush’s use of the term seems to have been a misstep rather than an intended medievalism, it would be understandable if the subsequent rhetoric emerging from the White House was to tone down any references to medieval precedents in an attempt to brush the controversy under the carpet. Especially so since not only did the term ‘crusade’ depict Bush, as Hugh Miles described it, “as the leader of a ragtag band of mercenaries on their way to the Middle East to pillage and plunder”26 but other policy attempts failed too on the grounds that they also brought up centuries of bitterness and conflict between the East and the West. In fact, however, as Bruce Holsinger has comprehensively demonstrated, rather than toning down the medieval, the months and years following 9/11 and leading up to the Iraq invasion saw a relentless ramping up of the Bush administration’s medievalism.27 During the months immediately following Bush’s ‘crusade’ comment the rhetoric of retribution continued to mine the Middle Ages, causing them to flounder in a series of badly chosen words which played on medieval precedents of East/West relations, cumulatively creating what one commentator described as “a catalogue of PR gaffes [which] helped spoil the coalition’s image abroad”.28 For example, a week after the South Lawn address, a new attempt to create new terms again struck the wrong notes when the retributive attacks on Afghanistan were given the codename “Infinite Justice”, a term which, when “faithfully translated into Arabic to mean something along the lines of ‘divine retribution’, sounded incredibly blasphemous”.29 Already by 21 September The Times declared that “Operation Infinite Justice was over before it had even properly begun last night, after the Bush Administration’s latest attempt to create a vocabulary for its war on terrorism again inflamed the Muslim world.”30 The sense of embarrassment was almost palpable in a BBC report from 25 September, which declared that “what had been dubbed ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ is now to be known by the less controversial name ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’”. The report continues with the statement from Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, that “the administration had quickly reconsidered the original name 25 Patrick Wintour and Kevin Maguire, ‘Cabinet Unity Broken Again by Short’, The Guardian, 21 September 2001, p. 1; Paul Gilfeather, ‘War on Terror: Short in Outburst over War’, Daily Mirror, 21 September 2001, p. 8; Andy McSmith, ‘Short Attacks Bush for “Crusade” Quote Britain’, The Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2001, p. 13. 26 Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 160. 27 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. 28 Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 160. 29 Ibid., p. 160. 30 Sam Lister, ‘“Infinite Justice” Dropped as Words Fail Bush Again’, The Times, 21 September 2001.

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because, in the Islamic faith, such finality is considered something provided only by God”.31 Seemingly learning nothing from Berlusconi’s faux pas, in a later speech regarding the coalition Bush claimed that the “civilized world” “was rallying to America’s side”, a term which once again seemed to propose an imminent clash of civilisations.32 Bush’s continued use of value-laden terms such as “the civilized world” were reliant on a zero-sum dichotomy that implicitly suggested the presence of an uncivilised world on the other side of the equation. As such, his words implicitly suggested a rhetorical ‘we’ in the civilised West opposed by a monolithic, though equally hypothetical, ‘they’ of the unreconstructed Middle East. At one point in 2002, Rahul Mahajan reports, such was the extent of their series of PR mistakes and blunders that the Pentagon “felt so beleaguered that it even hired the Rendon Group, a PR firm in Washington, D.C., to help get its ‘message’ across to the Islamic world”.33 While, individually, many of these medievalisms can be explained away, the cumulative effect of an underlying banal medievalism seems to be demonstrable throughout world politics. Bush and the White House’s PR problems thus fused with other world leaders’ various faux pas which cumulatively suggested not that it was the individual words which were rooted in a medievalist mode of thinking but that each gaffe revealed a pervasive and deep-rooted undercurrent of neomedievalism. As mentioned in Chapter 3, despite the uproar after his suggestion of Islam’s inferiority, after the capture and killing of an Italian journalist in Iraq in 2004 Berlusconi condemned the killing by saying “there are no words for an act lacking any humanity which at a stroke cancels out centuries of civilization and takes us back to the dark ages of barbarity”.34 Taken in conjunction with his earlier comments, Berlusconi’s words chimed with the Bush/Blair rhetoric condemning the Middle East as a cauldron of primitive and barbaric societies which suggested a pervasive understanding of the world as on the brink of a new confrontation between a ‘modern’ West and a ‘medieval’ East. One of the ironies of the Bush administration’s medievalism was that, while they were busy castigating al Qaeda for fighting a ‘medieval’ Holy War, the Pentagon was itself deliberately introducing overtly religious elements to their own War on Terror, in what appears to be a conscious policy to transform the Coalition invasion itself into a divinely sanctioned Holy War. As Hew Strachan and Sybille Schiepers maintain, both sides “employed an expansive conception of self-defence that was

31 , 25 September 2001 [accessed 10 August 2011]. 32 Debra Merskin, ‘The Construction of Arabs as Enemies: Post-September 11 Discourse of George Bush’, Mass Communication and Society, 7.2 (2004), pp. 157–75 (p. 168). 33 Rahul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 89. 34 John F. Burns, ‘The Reach of War: Journalist from Italy Killed in Iraq by Captors’, The New York Times, 27 August 2004, [accessed 8 August 2014].

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ultimately informed by broadly religious factors”.35 They argue that the most shrewd of these declarations were cloaked by an ostensibly moral imperative: “in justifying the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush repeatedly appealed to an overarching moral cause, involving ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ and the bestowing of ‘freedom’s blessings’ upon an oppressed people, which became the dominant justification for the US adventure”.36 More overtly religious justifications, however, were in abundant evidence. These included biblical quotations in the daily briefings delivered to the president in an effort to convince Bush that “America was on the right path”.37 Other initiatives included engraving religious inscriptions on weapons to create so-called ‘Jesus rifles’ to be used by US and Afghan troops,38 and a series of claims by Bush that he was on a mission from God,39 who had, according to The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, “told him to fight these terrorists in Afghanistan” (God, it seems, once again willed it).40 They were also compounded by statements from his advisers, too, with the “nearly obsessive medievalism”41 of his deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, declaring that they were clashing with ‘Satan’,42 or else explicitly condemning the USA’s ‘medieval’ enemies, their medieval regimes and the terrorists’ medieval methods, mindsets and regimes.43 Wolfowitz’s comments were amplified by those of his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, who also made regular announcements outlining the medieval mentalities of their enemies in the War on Terror, as Holsinger illustrates.44 In another, particularly bizarre, echo of medievalism, in 2002 it was claimed that another prominent member of Bush’s team, the attorney general John Ashcroft,

35 Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 185. 36 Ibid., p. 185. 37 Paul Thompson, ‘Donald Rumsfeld’s Holy War: How President Bush’s Iraq Briefings Came with Quotes from the Bible’, Mail Online, 20 May 2009, [accessed 8 August 2014]; Steven Waldman, ‘BibleQuoting Defense Memos and Holy War’, The Wall Street Journal, 18 May 2009, [accessed 8 August 2014]. 38 ‘Bible Codes on Afghan Army Guns’, Al Jazeera, 22 January 2010, [accessed 15 January 2014]; Daniel Nasaw, ‘Arms Maker to Remove “Biblical” Gunsight Messages’, The Guardian, 21 January 2010, [accessed 8 August 2014]. 39 Tom Carver, ‘Bush Puts God on His Side’, BBC, 6 April 2003, [accessed 8 August 2014]; Perez-Rivas, ‘Bush Vows to Rid the World of “Evil-Doers”’. 40 Ewen MacAskill, ‘George Bush: “God Told Me to End the Tyranny in Iraq”’, The Guardian, 7 October 2005, [accessed 8 August 2014]; see also Amy E. Black, ‘With God on Our Side: Religion in George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy Speeches’ (presented at the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2004), [accessed 8 May 2012]. 41 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 43. 42 Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 353. 43 See Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, pp. 44–8. 44 Ibid., pp. 48–50, 54.

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anointed himself with holy oil before taking office, and regularly continued the practice thereafter.45 The cumulative effect of the Bush administration’s fervent belief in their divine approval thus transformed relatively minor quirks and missteps into serious policy initiatives to drive an ideological wedge between East and West, prompting what Holsinger describes as a “mass enlistment of all things medieval into a global conflict in which the Middle Ages function as a reservoir of unconsidered analogy and reductive propaganda”.46 As Holsinger terms it, “the medievalism of al Qaeda and the Taliban became a calculated and consistent part of Pentagon agitprop during the first year of the War on Terror”, and, accordingly, the ‘medieval sensibilities’ of the terrorists were “tactical, and they must be met with newly medieval sensibilities of our own”.47 Indeed, the White House PR machine finally began to find its feet when it shifted the focus from its retaliatory policy of fighting al Qaeda in 2001 to the ‘pre-emptive’ policy in 2002 of launching a war against specific states rather than Islam as a whole. Given the total failure to bring bin Laden to justice, a war against a specific state would allow the morally upright, divinely appointed Coalition of the Willing to display its full force against the East, an attack famously dubbed “Shock and Awe” but whose aftermath, as Bush and his administration knew full well, would lead to a long period of fighting in the Middle East. The protracted nature of the war hinted at in his ‘crusade’ statement was, in fact, overtly spelled out by Bush himself in his address to the Joint Meeting of Congress on 20 September 2001, when he proclaimed that “this war will not be like the War in Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion”. It is, then, in the context of the broader medievalism underpinning the Bush doctrine that the president’s reference to ‘crusades’ really begins to make sense, since the long-term concept of a ‘crusade’ is an alarmingly accurate way of describing the coalition’s invasions.48 As James Carroll defines it, the use of crusade ideology in the response to 9/11 established a new “mental map of the Crusades, with Jerusalem at the center of the earth”, which reframed the contemporary invasions of the Middle East as continuations of the religious wars of the Middle Ages, wars rooted in divisions of the world into camps of Good versus Evil.49 In this case, irrespective of the ostensible motivations on offer to the world about WMDs or the threat of radical Islam, it was instead the convenience of the PR department’s relentless medievalism which motivated its reuse, since it allowed reporters, politicians and commentators quickly and conven 45 Julian Borger, ‘Staff Cry Poetic Injustice as Singing Ashcroft Introduces Patriot Games’, The Guardian, 4 March 2002, [accessed 13 October 2014]. 46 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 15. 47 Ibid., pp. 48–52. 48 See, for instance, Fiala, ‘Crusades, Just Wars, and the Bush Doctrine’; Denise Bostdorff, ‘George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89.4 (2003), pp. 293–319; Malise Ruthven, ‘Shock and Awe, circa 1095: How Are Today’s Conflicts Linked to the Language of Medieval Holy Wars?’ The Observer, 1 March 2010, p. 17. 49 Carroll, Crusade, p. 5. See also Fiala, ‘Crusades, Just Wars, and the Bush Doctrine’.

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iently to divide the world into a righteous ‘us’ and a barbaric ‘them’. The crusades, many centuries after they began in earnest, thus found themselves relaunched in a media-friendly bid finally to unite the West into a cohesive identity under a recognisable banner of modern Christendom. Continued Use of the Term ‘Crusade’ What is also less well-documented is that, despite the media uproar over Bush’s use of controversial terms such as “crusade” and “Infinite Justice”, it is clear that both on and off the record politicians, policymakers and journalists continued to use precisely those same terms which were excoriated so publicly. Despite Lord Morris’ criticisms of casual medievalism in the House of Lords, for example, September 2001 was by no means the last time that the term ‘crusade’ would be used in the British Houses of Parliament. Prime minister Tony Blair was himself no stranger to the term, having launched a range of crusades before 2001, from a crusade to fight cancer in 199950 to a “moral crusade” for wealth creation in 2000,51 and even campaigned for the Labour leadership on a plea to “join us [the Labour Party] in this crusade for change”, which he reiterated in his acceptance speech in July 1994.52 After the events of September 2001, the censure of his fellow parliamentarians notwithstanding, Blair continued casually to call for crusades, such as in his 2004 speech on Law and Order, where he outlined his “personal crusade” for a culture of respect and responsibility.53 Only two months later his education secretary, Charles Clarke, unveiled his own ‘crusade’, this time for education54 – the irony being that this faux pas occurred the year after he had publicly questioned the value of the very same medievalist historians who could have explained why the word ‘crusade’ might not have been the best choice.55 Numerous other examples see MPs regularly announcing crusades against a range of issues, such as unfair newspaper reporting, low wages, smoking or rape in war zones.56 Nor would it even be the last time that the term ‘crusade’ would be used in relation to the War on Terror. In a Commons debate on the Coalition against International 50 Sabine Steimle, ‘UK’s Tony Blair Announces Crusade to Fight Cancer’, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 91.14 (1999), pp. 1184–5. 51 Blair’s speech to the Labour Party Conference on 26 September 2000. The full text of the speech is still available on the Guardian website: ‘Blair’s Speech, Part Two: We Are in a Fight and It’s a Fight I Relish’, The Guardian, 26 September 2000, [accessed 12 October 2015]. 52 Bonnie Hinman, Tony Blair (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), p. 59. 53 ‘Full Text: Blair on Law and Order’, BBC, 19 July 2004, [accessed 12 October 2015]. 54 Andrew Sparrow, ‘Child-Care Plan “as Ambitious as NHS”’, The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2004, p. 6. 55 Will Woodward and Rebecca Smithers, ‘Clarke Dismisses Medieval Historians’, The Guardian, 9 May 2003, p. 7; Laura Peek, ‘Medieval History Is Bunk, Says Clarke’, The Times, 9 May 2003, p. 7. 56 HC Deb 19 Mar 2015, c. 338WH; HL Deb 11 Mar 2010, c. 412; HC Deb 7 Nov 2013, cols 438–480, c. 467; EDM 916 G8 Time to Save The Congo Campaign, 2012–13.

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Terrorism on 8 October 2001, Sir Teddy Taylor, ironically in the midst of a speech about the need for sensitivity to local Muslim communities in the UK, twice called for a “crusade against terrorism”, claiming that: There is a need to build support […] in the Muslim countries for a stand against fundamentalism and the terrorism linked to it. […] there is a huge potential for creating terrorism, unless someone is prepared to lead a crusade against it. More is required than simple statements in which almost every organisation in the world says that the disaster was shocking and shameful. There needs to be a crusade against terrorism in the Muslim community.57

Only thirty minutes later in the same debate, the MP Ian Taylor warned of the dangers of calling for a crusade not on account of the need for sensitivity (as the Bush administration had learned to its cost) but rather because he did not want to discount unity with Muslim allies in the Coalition. He began with an objection to the term, claiming that “it would be dangerous, although tempting, to try to say that this is a crusade against terrorism”; however, it transpired that his criticism was not actually levied against the word ‘crusade’, but against the word ‘terrorism’. He continued: “it would be tempting but wrong, because terrorism is defined in many different ways”.58 It is important to recognise that it is not only the use of terms such as ‘crusade’ that is noteworthy – after all, it is clear that, in the English-speaking world, such terms are fairly common and largely divorced from their original meaning – but the context in which they are used and the extent to which they are remediated. For example, even after Blair, Clarke and Taylor had announced their various crusades without much comment, in 2007 David Cameron (then Leader of the Opposition) described a plan to foster greater cohesion among communities in a “new bid to woo Muslim voters” as part of “a crusade for fairness”.59 Despite the recognition at the foot of the Telegraph article that the term crusade might prove divisive (the article quotes a spokesman claiming that Cameron’s “reference to a ‘crusade’ had not been intended to cause offence”), the only newspaper to object explicitly to the term was the fervently anti-Establishment Morning Star, which argued that “by invoking the language of the bloody Medieval Crusades, he risked antagonising the very community that he was seeking to win over. [… Cameron’s message] will be lost amid words like this.”60 In 2014 John Prescott (Tony Blair’s former deputy prime minister) revisited old territory when he publicly accused Blair of wishing us back to the Crusades after, in his ironic role as Middle Eastern peace envoy, Blair called for the West to bomb 57 HC Deb Coalition against International Terrorism, 8 October 2001, vol. 372, cols 830–902, c. 848. 58 HC Debate “Coalition against International Terrorism, 855. 59 Melissa Kite, ‘Multi-Culturalism Damages UK, Says Cameron’, The Sunday Telegraph, 28 January 2007, p. 2; Isabel Oakeshott, ‘Cameron to Woo Muslims on Britishness’, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2007, p. 3. 60 ‘“Crusader” Cameron Puts His Foot in It with Muslims’, Morning Star, 29 January 2007.

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Syria in 2013. “Your great danger,” claimed Prescott, “when you want to go and do these regime changes, you’re back to what Bush called a crusade … put on a white sheet and a red cross, and we’re back to the Crusades.”61 In both cases, with only few exceptions, the medievalisms that had proved to be so explosive in Bush’s case passed almost without comment in other situations. In fact, the irony of the uproar in the British press over Bush’s ‘crusade’ comments is that, as discussed in Chapter 3, British tabloids are in fact very keen on crusades themselves. As mentioned above, the Daily Express is particularly fond of launching crusades, and does so on a regular basis. So common are such crusades, in fact, that an interesting battle of banal medievalisms emerged in March 2012, when the Mail’s crusade against plastic carrier bags clashed with the Express’s crusade to leave the EU, after “meddling EU bureaucrats” proposed a Europe-wide ban on carrier bags, with the story even appearing on the front page of the latter newspaper. So entrenched was each newspaper’s crusade rhetoric that, in the face of what was clearly a beneficial ruling by the EU, the Express’s desire to refute any ruling from Brussels out of hand led them to embrace climate-change denial, denouncing “the latest in a long line of interfering legislation” against “so-called pollution” claiming, however implausibly, that it is “proven” that plastic bags had “only a minor effect on the environment”.62 In the end, the Mail’s crusade against the bags eventually won out in October 2015, prompting the newspaper to issue a timeline demonstrating the Mail’s instrumental role in calling for the ban but making no mention of the EU’s role at the legislative level. The Daily Star, which, like the Daily Express, is owned by Richard Desmond, also launches crusades on a regular basis, for example to renegotiate Britain’s role in the EU,63 to help protect Britain’s youngsters from internet pornography64 or to fight against street gangs,65 as well as a curious crusade, launched on 13 August 2011, to reclaim the streets from violent “thugs and scum”. The crusade was not, in fact, a response to illegality or any specific rise in street crime, but, as the timing suggests, it was a response by predominantly white, middle-class journalists to a spate of riots over the summer of 2011 seemingly triggered by some of the city’s poorest black and ethnic minority citizens, but which spread to other cities in the UK. The riots – described by historical novelist Dan Jones, in another instance of medievalism, as a “new Peasants’ Revolt, with BlackBerry in hand”66 – culminated in a spate of looting of mainstream chain stores, prompting government intervention. 61 Jason Groves, ‘Outcry over Tony Blair’s “Crusader” Call for Blitz on Iraq’, Mail Online, 2014, [accessed 7 August 2014]. 62 Martyn Brown, ‘Now EU Bans Plastic Bags’, The Express, 26 March 2012, p. 1. 63 Robin Cottle, ‘Cameron: Brits Will Come First for Jobs’, Daily Star, 11 June 2015, p. 8. 64 Gary Nicks, ‘Leave Our Kids Alone’, Daily Star, 12 October 2011, p. 2. 65 Gary Nicks, ‘I’ll Bring Back National Service: Cameron in War on Gangs’, Daily Star, 16 August 2011, pp. 8–9. 66 Dan Jones, ‘A New Peasants’ Revolt, with BlackBerry in Hand’, Evening Standard, 2011, [accessed 12 October 2015].

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The Daily Star’s crusade against such ‘scum’ – the riots were in fact triggered by allegations of police brutality after the fatal shooting of a young black Londoner, Mark Duggan, as well as broader issues of racial profiling and unequal treatment of ethnic minorities – was also divided into camps of Good and Evil, though this time these divisions were unashamedly rooted in racial, ethnic and socio-economic differences. However consciously, like that of the West against the Middle East, the crusade represented a cohesive effort by a privileged group to ‘civilise’ the most deprived according to an underlying Myth of Progress. The Daily Star’s crusade against ‘scum’, for instance, was backed by multi-millionaire footballer Wayne Rooney and his wife Colleen, alongside Richard Desmond, the billionaire businessman and publisher, and other billionaires, including X-Factor pioneer Simon Cowell, PR guru Max Clifford, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, and it (initially) received the explicit endorsement of David Cameron and his cabinet. A few days later, on 16 August, the newspaper reiterated its new crusade on its front page, once again underscoring Cameron’s support of “the Daily Star’s crusade to win back communities from thugs [as he] declared ‘all-out war’ against the looting gangs”.67 Only one week later, however, after a series of PR disasters made the public aware of the extent to which the riots were in part rooted in legitimate objections to racial discrimination (including a controversial interview by historian David Starkey on Newsnight on 12 August 2011 in which he seemed to imply that it was ‘black culture’ which caused the looting because “the whites have become black”), Cameron’s support for the crusade was quietly withdrawn and the funding for the project was promptly cut. No longer a clear-cut crusade with an identifiable target, and despite the Star’s hollow claims that the ‘crusade’ was gathering support by the hour, all mention of their crusade quickly disappeared from the newspaper thereafter.68 Even though the crusade proved ultimately to be a doomed venture, it is interesting to note that in its rhetoric of medievalism it incorporated precisely the same banal medievalism encountered in Chapter 3, according to which the media’s use of a term such as crusade implies legitimacy and a battle of the righteous against injustice. Such terms sidestep the obviously fractious ideology by which a privileged white middle class tried to impose its own standards on an economically and socially disadvantaged sector of society. The logic of crusade, then, masked the same kind of orientalist discourse as the War on Terror, in which the standards and values of one group were to be applied to another, less powerful, group. Resonance While crusades over plastic bags might seem flippant and wholly distinct from invasion in the Middle East, my point is that in the context of media theory they are not, and that such banal medievalism fits into a broader casualisation of the medieval in the service of modern speech. The serious point behind all of these examples is ‘National Service for Riot Thugs’, Daily Star, 16 August 2011, p. 1. Paul Robins, ‘Gang-Bust Scheme in Jeopardy: As Our Crusade Gathers More Support Fears Mount for Riots Project’, Daily Star, 23 August 2011, pp. 8–9. 67

68

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the extent to which modern newspapers, journalists and politicians are all equally liable to use the term ‘crusade’ without any real intention to recall the medieval past. The term has thus become completely naturalised in most contexts so that, as Jonathan Phillips writes in the Daily Express, “we have become accustomed to using the word with only the barest reference to its origins”.69 Consequently, it is not only the immediate meaning of the term but the context in which the term is remediated. As James Carroll writes: All of this is implicit in the word that President Bush first used, that came to him as naturally as a baseball reference, to define the war on terrorism. That such a dark, seething religious history of sacred violence remains largely unspoken in our world does not defuse it as an explosive force in the human unconscious. In the world of Islam, of course, its meaning could not be more explicit, or closer to consciousness. The full historical and cultural significance of crusade is instantly obvious, which is why a howl of protest from the Middle East drove Bush into instant verbal retreat. Yet the very inadvertence of his use of crusade is the revelation: Americans do not know what fire they are playing with. Osama bin Laden, however, knows all too well, and in his periodic pronouncements, he uses the word crusade to this day, as a flamethrower.70

Given the above examples, it is clear that the banal medievalism of a term such as ‘crusade’ is not necessarily meaningful on its own. It is not simply a question of counting those instances when words such as crusade are used; nor is it even dictated by the context in which they are spoken, or the ‘reach’ of the message through the mass media (very few of these examples appeared on the front covers of any newspapers). Rather, these banal medievalisms become meaningful because they are remediated, and only when they demonstrably resonate with a particular way of thinking. Clearly, as the above examples demonstrate, ‘crusade’ has been a fairly commonplace term in political rhetoric both before and after 9/11, to suggest a movement with an ideological dimension. It is, then, only when the terms used reach a sufficient level of saturation across the news media that the message reaches a certain critical mass, and only when that message connects with a preconception already held by that audience, that the banal medievalism functions at its most efficient. Mass Communication theorists term this specific effect ‘resonance’ (part of a broader theory called ‘cultivation analysis’ which has of late fallen out of favour but which nevertheless still has much to offer), to describe a moment when frequent exposure to a particular phenomenon affects later media reports on that same phenomenon and which, as a consequence, serves to exaggerate its importance. The classic example of such resonance in cultivation theory is what George Gerbner calls the ‘mean world syndrome’, wherein: long-term exposure to television, in which frequent violence is virtually inescapable, tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world. Responses of 69 Jonathan Phillips, ‘Terrorists Use Horror of the Crusades to Justify Attacks on West: Why Al Qaeda Still Wages a Medieval War’, The Express, 26 March 2004, p. 56. 70 Carroll, Crusade, p. 7.

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heavier (compared to matching groups of lighter) viewers suggest the conception of reality in which greater protection is needed, [where] most people ‘cannot be trusted,’ and most people are ‘just looking out for themselves’.71

Resonance, then, occurs when “everyday reality and television provide a ‘double dose’ of messages that ‘resonate’ and amplify cultivation”,72 or when, in short, audiences receive a message which confirms their own preconceived ideas, and which thus amplifies the original preconceptions.73 It is under these conditions that the banal medievalism of Bush’s lapsus comes to underpin an entire ideology: not only because of its worldwide – and almost instantaneous – retransmission but because it resonated with an existing strain of neomedievalist rhetoric already existing in the public discourse. A Clash of Civilisations Consequently, even after drawing criticism from across the globe, the ideas which underpinned Bush’s crusade comments were in ample evidence long after the furore faded away and had even by this point filtered through to public opinion on the War on Terrorism. Even up to June 2008 governmental advisory bodies were still referring to the Middle Ages in policy documents such as Phil Williams’ report for the Strategic Studies Institute titled, revealingly, ‘From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Ages: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy’. Williams’ argument throughout the report is compelling in its rhetoric – principally that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant fragmentation of the former empire into newly independent nation-states marks a return to the Middle Ages; however, not only is it shaky in its grasp of history but it also leads to the kind of zero-sum thinking espoused by those who embrace the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory to describe East–West relations. The clash of civilisations theory itself, alluded to throughout this chapter, is a famous and influential description of the post-war geopolitical landscape that dominated international relations towards the end of the twentieth century. Initially proposed by Samuel Huntington in his eponymous 1993 article, and explained in more depth in his 1997 book of the same name, the essential thesis of the clash itself is the idea that the ways we think about the world have changed. Huntington’s essential argument, which it is worth quoting in full, suggests that: during the Cold War the world was divided into First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not

71 George Gerbner, ‘Cultivation Analysis: An Overview’, Mass Communication & Society, 1.3/4 (1998), pp. 175–94 (p. 185). 72 Ibid., p. 182. 73 For more on the specific effect of resonance and its relationship to perceived and actual threats of violence, the canonical study remains Gerbner et al.’s ‘The “Mainstreaming” of America: Violence Profile No. 11’, Journal of Communication, 30.3 (1980), pp. 10–29.

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in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilisation.74

This return to supranational cultures and civilisations leads to a fundamental impasse, according to which, in a new phase of world politics: the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. […] The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.75

What is revealing about this way of viewing and dividing the world is that it relies on fixed, monolithic and homogeneous cultures (which obviates individual differences between, say, Sunni and Shi’ite as much as it does between, say, Protestant and Catholic Northern Ireland or Democrats and Republicans in the USA). This elision of difference thus projects the past onto the future, suggesting an inevitable continuation of the Crusades as East/West clash after a brief halt following the Sykes–Picot agreement. Thus, it is not that the War on Terror is anything new per se but rather that, as Huntington wrote back in 1993, it is an ongoing clash between Islam and the West as a whole: [The] conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East.76

It is in this sense that the clash of civilisations theory is seen to be operating under the surface of much of the medievalist discourse surrounding the War on Terror. While it is by no means uniquely a medievalist or neomedievalist worldview on offer here, it is clear from Huntington’s ‘history’ of Islamic expansion that the logic of such a dualist worldview is rooted in the medieval past. According to the logic of the clash of civilisations, then, the same logic of crusades can be seen to mask an essentially orientalist conception of geopolitics in which Islam and the East are elided into one single entity to be confronted by Christianity and the West. Consequently, the rhetoric of crusades not only is revealed as an unfortunate gaffe but, through its naturalisation in media rhetoric, demonstrates the extent to 74 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72.3 (1993), pp. 22–49 (p. 23); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 75 Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ p. 22. 76 Ibid., p. 31.

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which it masks a broader kind of medievalism, one which sees the world as divided into two camps: one rooted in the medieval world and the other rooted in modernity. The repetition of words such as ‘crusade’ in the media thus created ‘resonance’ throughout the news media, in which the implicit logic of colonisation by the powerful came to be naturalised as an inevitable state of affairs, and the zero-sum logic of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, of Good against Evil, ceased to be challenged. In this respect, Bush’s neomedievalist worldview can be analysed in four distinct phases, each of which naturalised the crusade as a logical response to an inevitable clash of civilisations. These were, first, to emphasise the essential dualism between the West and the Middle East; second, to emphasise the ways in which ‘they’ were medieval; third, to suggest by implicit comparison that ‘we’ in the West were therefore modern; and fourth, to harness the power of the myth of progress to reframe the crusade as a liberation from medieval barbarity. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, explores these four phases in more depth through the prism of banal medievalism. Phase One: If You’re Not With Us, You’re Against “Us” The first priority of the Bush administration’s War on Terror was to demonstrate the necessity of an armed invasion into the Middle East as a visible retribution for the attacks. The way that this demonstration was achieved was through exaggerating the threat by creating an idea of an organised group dedicated to destroying freedom in the West – a process which has been well documented elsewhere – and by establishing a fundamental and irreconcilable dualism which drove an ideological wedge between a perceived ‘us’ and ‘them’. In part this was fulfilled in the manner discussed above by the reports emerging from the White House, almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, which asserted the existence of only two default positions (“you are either with us, or with the terrorists”) whose zero-sum rhetoric left little room for manoeuvre between the two extremes of the ideological spectrum.77 Such a primordial dialectic of Us/Them, established from the very outset, was based on a dichotomous alignment of the west as unequivocally ‘good’ and the terrorists as irredeemably ‘evil’. By 12 September 2001 Bush had already began to articulate this fundamental dualism in his televised messages expressing the impossibility of any middle ground in the imminent war on terror. His essential message, that “you’re either with us or against us”, was communicated to reporters as a battle which would become “a monumental struggle between good and evil”.78 The reaction of the media, amid the shock and fear of a nation in mourning, was atypically compliant and unanimous. Both the mainstream media and even the US government seemed to have interpreted this polarisation as a licence to vent racist invective almost with impunity. In practice, this meant that all manner of public figures, including right-wing journalists and comedians but also politicians, could 77 Lawrence Pintak in Elizabeth Poole and John E. Richardson, Muslims and the News Media (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 188. 78 Andrew J. Bacevich and Elizabeth Prodromou, ‘God Is Not Neutral: Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy after 9/11’, Orbis, 48.1 (2004), pp. 43–54 (p. 48).

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be found espousing the same fundamental hatred of the Other. As Rahul Majahan writes, this dualism afforded extreme reactions: Ann Coulter, writing in the National Review Online, said, ‘We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,’ […] Representative John Cooksey (R-La.), speaking about airline security procedures, said, ‘If I see someone (who) comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.’ Coulter was fired and Cooksey was forced to apologise, but lesser figures went uncensored, like the comedian who quipped on TV that what we need is a ‘beard-seeking missile’.79

That Coulter’s argument is exactly the same as that of al Qaeda or Islamic State (as discussed in Chapters 5 and 8) is itself a curious testament to the power of media resonance. The racist invective unleashed by the War on Terror, of course, was by no means limited to the mainstream media but found a natural home among the paranoid and disillusioned across social media websites. A simple Google search is sufficient to bring up a whole host of comments by bloggers and internet trolls asserting that those who do not follow western ideas are backward and medieval, and some of these will be examined in more depth in later chapters. Even in the early days of internet forums, almost any online news site featuring a report on the War on Terror or al Qaeda saw its comments section rapidly hijacked by posts which followed through on this Manichean dialectic, prompting arguments between commenters which demonstrated the widespread acceptance of the Us/Them rhetoric in an often watered-down version of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. Once again, the Us/Them dialectic rapidly began to reflect Ann Coulter’s crusade rhetoric (which advocated invasion of Muslim countries and forced conversion to Christianity) in order to position the ‘enemy’ as doubly alien: not only were these countries irredeemably evil, they were medieval. For example, one commenter on Al Jazeera advocated the following approach: “At this point the only real option facing the civilized world is to isolate Islamic nations until they enter the 21st century. Zawahri is [sic] and his ilk are Islam’s problem, not the worlds [sic].”80 Of particular interest here is the phraseology – “Islamic nations” and “the civilized world” – which suggests the extent to which the rhetoric emanating from the White House at the time had been embedded into everyday speech – especially that of the extreme right, but not only – following which Islam was incorrectly identified as a series of nation-states, rather than a religion, and no distinction was made between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, or between al Qaeda and the states in which they operated. Even if Donald Rumsfeld appeared on Al Jazeera to deny that the war was a crusade against Muslims, the reality of the neomedievalist rhetoric seemed to suggest otherwise. As Rumsfeld insisted, at the outset of the bombing campaign against Afghanistan, “this effort is not against Afghanistan’s people … it’s not against Mahajan, The New Crusade, pp. 73–4. User comments: Peter Combs, ‘Al-Qaeda Leader Issues Jihad Guidelines’, Al Jazeera, 2013, [accessed 17 December 2013]. 79

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any race or any religion, it is against terrorism, and terrorists, and the senior people that are harbouring terrorists”.81 However, Rumsfeld’s seemingly sincere message was instantly undercut by the insistence of the crusade rhetoric that Afghanistan was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks, creating a marked discrepancy between Rumsfeld’s words and the actions of his assistant Paul Wolfowitz, who also insisted that it was not a war against the Afghan people but the “medieval sort of regime that is oppressing the people of Afghanistan”.82 Such crusade rhetoric was frequently combined with any number of alleged historical precedents in support of invasion and occupation to force ‘Islamic nations’ to reject medievalism and to join modernity. In the comments sections and online forums references were made to the British occupation of India, to the Falklands (in which resistance to British rule was, they claim, overcome by armed intervention), to the Turkish genocide (offered as an effective method of stamping out rebellious factions), to the Second World War (claimed to be the moment in which Churchill, apparently single-handedly, beat the threat of fascism) and – most frequently – to the Crusades themselves as a means of countering Islamic expansion. It was, of course, not long before, as Representative Cooksey’s comments suggested, the rhetoric of Crusades also turned inwards, to reject any Muslims as Other, irrespective of nationality. By stressing the impossibility of integration and multiculturalism, and by wrongly describing the UK and the USA as Christian countries, British and American Muslims were thus marginalised as emphatically not “one of us”. The online comments are not, however, isolated extremist viewpoints, but reflect the resonance of a kind of ‘mean Islam syndrome’, to paraphrase Gerbner.83 In this respect, they are not in fact so much extreme views but those which merely reflected mainstream reporting in the British press, with its disproportionate representation of British Muslims in connection with terrorism. One report by the Cardiff School of Journalism suggests that amid an increase of newspaper coverage of British Muslims from 2000 to 2008, over one-third (36%) of the stories related to terrorism, most notably after the 7/7 attacks in London.84 The report continues with a series of case studies which demonstrate that “the bulk of coverage of British Muslims – around two-thirds – focuses on Muslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values) or both (Muslim extremism in general)”.85 As a consequence, the war on terror became “the main lens through which British Muslims are reported”, but the less obvious stories are also important, given that they emphasise cultural differences between Muslims and non-Muslims.86 Consequently, by the very fact of its repetition across all media outlets from

81 82

p. 44.

Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 158. Reported in Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror,

Gerbner et al., ‘The “Mainstreaming” of America’. Kerry Moore, Paul Mason and Justin Lewis, ‘Images of Islam in the UK: The Representation of British Muslims in The National Print News Media (2000–2008)’ (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, 2008), p. 3. 85 Ibid., p. 3. 86 Ibid., p. 10. 83

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the rhetoric of US and UK governments through to respected broadsheets87 and sensationalist tabloids,88 the Us/Them dichotomy created resonance, both playing on and cementing the media portrayal of all Muslims as ‘them’, and consequently strengthening what Elgamri terms “stereotypes embedded in the Western collective imagery”.89 As Debra Merskin terms it, the news media unwittingly incorporated the post-9/11 discourse into broader popular-cultural tendencies to make all Arabs Muslims, and all Muslims terrorists.90 The Us/Them dualism, however, did not stop at denouncing the Arab countries as Muslims and harbourers of terrorists, but was superimposed onto an unchallenged dialectic between good and evil, reflecting once again the ‘crusading spirit’ of the entire campaign. Throughout, the rhetoric, both in the build-up to the Iraq invasion as well as its aftermath, there was a seemingly conscious – or at least alarmingly consistent – effort to emphasise that this was a conflict not only between us and them but between good and evil itself. In a prayer service on 14 September 2001, for example, only three days after the attacks, Bush had already begun to incorporate such binary oppositions into his rhetoric “by referring to the enemy as a dark, faceless, soul-less source of evil, and referencing the forthcoming war as a ‘crusade,’ [which] Bush positioned the retaliation as a battle between the forces of good and evil”.91 One week later, on 20 September 2001, President Bush’s address before a Joint Meeting of Congress argued that “every nation in the region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In a June 2002 address to West Point cadets, Bush told troops “we are in a conflict between good and evil, and American will call evil by its name”.92 Once again, the ideological effect of these claims was not only to simplify the debate into an unreliable dichotomy of good versus evil, us versus them, east versus west, but also to frame it as a somehow inevitable neomedieval clash of civilisations, which transformed Bush into what Mel Gurtov calls “a crusader in the mold of the neocons”.93 As James Carroll presciently pointed out just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, “the crusading mind divides the world between Us and Them”.94 In this respect, it was not only words such as ‘crusade’, ‘martyr’ or ‘infinite justice’ which reflected neomedieval thinking but the ideas which underpinned them.

87 Elzain Elgamri, Islam in the British Broadsheets: The Impact of Orientalism on Representations of Islam in the British Press (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2008); John E. Richardson, (Mis)representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers (Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: J. Benjamins, 2004). 88 Iain Lygo and Marcus Einfeld, News Overboard: The Tabloid Media, Race Politics and Islam ([Anglesea, Vic.]: Southerly Change Media, 2004). 89 Elgamri, Islam in the British Broadsheets, p. 21. 90 Merskin, ‘The Construction of Arabs as Enemies’. 91 Ibid., p. 168. 92 Gurtov, Superpower on Crusade, p. 14. 93 Ibid., p. 38. 94 Carroll, Crusade, pp. 24–5.

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Phase Two: “They” are Medieval The tendency to demonise al Qaeda by framing them dismissively as a medieval outfit unsuited and unprepared for the modern world thus functioned as precisely the “medievalising engine” described by Holsinger.95 The series of banal medievalisms formed part of an important ideological debate which raged from the podia of the White House to the mainstream media, and which inevitably overflowed onto the comments sections of major news outlets. These ideological functions, however, served not only to emphasise the medieval status of al Qaeda but also to anchor them securely outside of ‘civilised’ modernity. The second function fulfilled by the rhetoric was thus to align “them” – here understood as the entire Islamic world, rather than the specific fundamentalist groups which the War on Terror was to target – with the medieval and the Middle Ages. The rhetoric of medievalism associated ‘them’ with a fundamentally medieval mentality which could not be appeased and to which it was worthless to appeal with a sense of modern rationalism. As with the first function, and as will be analysed more closely in later chapters, the association of Islam with the Middle Ages was carried out on a range of fronts ranging from the White House Press Office and mainstream news media through to counterjihadist blogs, social media networks and, later, anti-Islamic grassroots organisations such as the English Defence League (EDL), Stop the Islamisation of America and the German group Pegida. In the context of media resonance, the overwhelming number of assertions that Islam was somehow inherently medieval created an inescapable and immersive media landscape which fuelled paranoia and misinformation.96 The brave new world of patriotic zeal offered the perfect platform for the far-right counterjihadist movement to swing into motion, shifting them from the fringes of the Internet into a position where they found the mainstream news institutions happily sharing their assertions that Islam is a ‘medieval religion’. Instances of the media’s connection of Islam with the Middle Ages are scarcely difficult to find, frequently triggered by specific arguments erupting over, to continue the example from Chapter 3, the burqa, a visible symbol of otherness on which many anti-Muslim groups focus. These arguments take place at all levels, ranging from the British Houses of Parliament, where MP Philip Hollobone called it “medieval, sexist and oppressive”,97 to the comments section of mainstream newspapers like the Telegraph, where a reader commented that it belongs to a “dark ages belief system which disappears them [women] from view in public”.98 Elsewhere, for a supporter of the English Defence League, so entrenched was the connection between Islamic veils and the Middle Ages that it was enough to tweet a photograph of two women in niqabs walking past bikini-clad sunbathers to justify the contention that the two styles of dress reflected a clash of civilisations between the Middle Ages and modernity. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 9. See, for example, . 97 Quoted in Rees-Mogg, ‘Ban the Burka?’ 98 Rees-Mogg, ‘Ban the Burka?’ 95

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So widespread, in fact, is the association between Islam and the Middle Ages that in some instances journalists are able to make jokes based on it, presuming that their audiences will understand the link. Rod Liddle’s column in The Sunday Times, for example, commented on the Iranian decision to commute the deathby-stoning of Mohammadi Ashtiani to execution by other means, suggested that “it is evidence […] that her country is a progressive country, ineluctably moving forward from stone-age Muslim barbarity towards the sunlit uplands of medieval Muslim barbarity, thanks to the intercession of western infidels. Give them a few hundred years and they’ll maybe reach the Renaissance.”99 Likewise, amid yet another controversy surrounding the Catholic Church, political comic Mark Steel was to quip “if you think Islam is medieval, look at Catholicism”.100 Steel’s comments were followed two months later by a report on the Vatican in the South Wales Echo in which reporter Dan O’Neill concludes “… and we call Islam medieval”.101 Given such widespread reporting in the mainstream media, it is scarcely a surprise that the rhetoric so prevalent in political discourse and mass media coverage would filter through to social media, where the lack of editorial restraints gave licence to a much freer – and often more sinister – deployment of the same basic argument. John Gray observes that “in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, al Qaeda was routinely described as a medieval throwback, an army of fanatical religious warriors held together by hatred of modern values”.102 The resonance of such terms in online discourse meant that social media channels were not long in following suit; the counterjihad website JihadWatch, for example, responded to a Daily Mail article on an alleged outbreak of bubonic plague among the al Qaeda terrorist camps in Algeria by labelling al Qaeda “Medieval in All Ways”.103 More problematically, however, such resonance made for the same leap as Bush’s crusade rhetoric by eliding al Qaeda with Islamists and Islamists with Islam as a whole. Armies of commenters could be found on online message boards and forums with assertions that Islam (and note that, by this point, any attempt to distinguish between Islam and Islamism has completely disappeared) is primitive or backwards. One Facebook user joked that “Arabs have devised a time machine to take

99 Rod Liddle, ‘Let’s Stone the Iran-Huggers and See How They like It’, The Sunday Times, 11 July 2010, p. 15. 100 Mark Steel, ‘If You Think Islam Is Medieval, Look at Catholicism’, The Independent, 16 January 2008, p. 28. 101 Dan O’Neill, ‘Silence the Hype and Call “Cut” on This Film’, South Wales Echo, 12 March 2008, p. 12. 102 John Gray, ‘Why Terrorism Is Unbeatable’, New Statesman, 2002, [accessed 17 December 2013]. 103 ‘Al-Qaeda Hit by Black Death Fear as Medieval Plague Kills 40 Terrorists at Training Camp’, Daily Mail, 19 January 2009, [accessed 17 December 2013]; Raymond, ‘Bubonic Plague Killing Al-Qaeda’, Jihad Watch, 2009, [accessed 17 December 2013].

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entire country’s [sic] back to the 7th century … It’s called Islam.”104 Another user, commenting on a picture of al-Zawahiri pointing to the sky in a jihadist symbol of submission to Allah,105 suggests that “Zawahiri needs to shove that finger up his jihad azz, and his holy war fighters can fight amongst themselves. Al-Qaeda but fuggers [sic] need a cave there [sic] caveman [sic] never evolved.”106 Another anti-Muslim commenter suggested a fundamental gap between Islam and the modern world: “it is the medieval world thrust into the 21st century. For all of us, Muslim and the other, it is looking [sic] an intractable situation. We cannot change for we are travelling into the future. The Muslim too cannot change for he is governed by the unchanging words of the Koran.”107 Other comments denied any distinction between followers of Islam and fundamentalists and demonstrated precisely the extent to which the Bush administration’s rhetoric was resonating with populist extremism, claiming that “there are NO radical Muslims or Islamists – they are all followers of the sub-human, medieval cult of Islam, and they are the enemy – Muslims.”108 In other forums the medievalism of Islam is so entrenched that any kind of Western intervention in fact threatens to drag modernity backwards instead. For instance, after an unscripted speech in which the EDL’s leader, Tommy Robinson, declared the group’s objectives to be “to combat militant Islam wherever it raises its ugly, paedophilic, disturbed, medieval fucking head”,109 the English Defence League’s YouTube video was flooded with similar rhetoric alleging not only that Islam was medieval but that it was so medieval it even threatened to take the West back to the Middle Ages. For instance, one post on 19 November 2013 alleges that “we are in the second decade of the 21st century and these people are trying to drag us back to the 6/7th century”. Another post on 6 November agrees, claiming that their “primitive behaviour” “is all perfectly acceptable in their homeland; they aren’t like us, they’re 500 years behind. They are backwards, medieval paeodo [sic] scum and […] are dragging our society back to the dark ages. They just shouldn’t be allowed over here full stop. Send them all back and let them crack on.” In these instances, it is obvious that no distinction is being made between Islam, Muslims and Islamists or jihadists; 104 Facebook user Steve Harris, 11 December 2011 at 12.22 p.m. on the English Defence League’s Facebook page. The joke is of course not original, but can be found on countless sites and social media networks: as of December 2015, a Google search of the joke produces 241,000 hits. Certainly, many more hits exist but do not show up in Google’s results on account of the integration of the text into images to produce memes, or else thanks to the rather idiosyncratic spelling conventions of many commenters. 105 Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 20–21. 106 ‘Al-Qaeda Leader Issues Jihad Guidelines’. 107 Dave S., 30 October 2013 at 12.29 a.m., [accessed 15 December 2013]. 108 Peter35, October 11 2013, 2.29 a.m., [accessed 03 January 2014]. 109 [accessed 15 December 2013].

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rather, the insistence on ‘sending them back’ even negates any possibility of Muslims being citizens of Western countries. The widespread adoption of such rhetoric meant that the distinction between the West and the rest became not only a spatial gulf but a temporal one too. As John Richardson observes, by the adoption of an Orientalist perspective which forces non-Westerners to take their place in a specific temporally determined framework, the Orient’s “‘progress’ is measured in terms of, and in comparison to, ‘the West’”.110 Thus, the same rhetoric that promised to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East relied on an orientalist school of thought which elided the Middle East with a pre-modern Middle Ages precisely as Ganim suggests.111 As Haydock and Risden describe it, the collapsing of the Middle Ages and the Middle East – the former a concept coined by the Renaissance and the latter a political construct realized by the colonial powers France, Britain and the United States after World War I – is the means by which wartime propaganda has skirted charges of racism and religious bias by changing race into region and religion into time.112

As Edward Said argues, “the idea that Islam is medieval and dangerous, as well as hostile and threatening to ‘us’ […] has acquired a place both in the culture and in the polity that is very well defined”.113 Phase Three: “They” are Medieval and Cannot be Modern The logical corollary of the first two points here – first the enforcement of an orientalist Us/Them paradigm, and second the association of Islam with the Middle Ages – thus emerges in the implicit suggestion that if all Muslims are medieval then nonMuslims are, by logical necessity, modern. This suggestion, as Holsinger argues, in fact underpinned much of the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11114 according to which, by rejecting the fundamentalist terrorists as primitive products of a medieval mindset, the War on Terror could be sold as a simple exercise in harnessing superior US firepower to demolish a huddle of radical barbarians operating out of deserts, on the fringes of the civilised world. In fact, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, this process is largely the same as the demonisation of the Middle Ages themselves, in part as a project to denigrate the medieval period but also as a means of emphasising the inherent superiority of the early modern period itself, by a process of polarisation. Its greatest danger, of course, is the one aspect which does not fit into the relentless medievalism of the Richardson, (Mis)representing Islam, p. 6. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism. 112 Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risden eds, Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) p.13. 113 Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 157. 114 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. 110 111

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Bush doctrine, namely the reality that al Qaeda was not dangerous because it was primitive and medieval: its main threat lay precisely in its modernity. This point will be explained in more depth in Chapter 5, but here it is worth mentioning the great irony of the attribution of medieval values to both Islam and, by extension, al Qaeda, since the very event which prompted the neomedievalism of the Bush administration – the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001 – showed us that al Qaeda is far from medieval but in reality ultra-modern, both in its organisation as well as in the technology used.115 Rohan Gunaratna agrees, arguing that “although its ideology is puritanical, al Qaeda is an essentially modern organisation, one that exploits up to date technology for its own ends, relying on satellite phones, laptop computers, encrypted communications websites for hiding messages and the like.”116 Gray continues: … al Qaeda’s organisation is unequivocally modern, [and] so is its fundamentalist outlook. Fundamentalism arises along with modernity, in societies whose traditional ways are no longer viable. In the Middle Ages, the Church was an established institution, with an acknowledged, if sometimes bitterly contested, structure of authority. In contrast, al Qaeda belongs in a distinctively modern revolutionary tradition that rejects all established authority. […] Al Qaeda has far more in common with […] modern European nihilists than it does with anything in medieval times.117

Such nuance, however, seems to have been overlooked in the interest of creating a coherent PR message. During this period, much of the rhetoric emerging from the White House consistently undermined the modernity of al Qaeda by depicting them as ‘medieval’, primitive or the product of a medieval society. Donald Rumsfeld’s description of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for example, overlooked his capacity to co-ordinate an international terror campaign, instead claiming that al-Zarqawi “personified the dark, sadistic and medieval vision of the future – of beheadings, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killings”.118 Phase Four: Crusade as Liberation Having elided the concepts of radical Islam into Islam in general, and then Islam into Islamic countries, the last piece of the jigsaw was to use the supposed primitiveness of those Islamic countries themselves in order to market the War on Terror as a seemingly humanitarian liberation from oppression. It was in this sense that the PR could be seen to operate in full swing during the period between the 9/11 attacks and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. After the first PR disasters over terms such as Crusades and Infinite Justice, the Bush administration finally found 115 John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern (New York & London: The New Press, 2003), p. 76. 116 Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Berkley Books, 2002), p. 113. 117 Gray, ‘Why Terrorism Is Unbeatable’. 118 Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, A Companion to the Medieval World (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), p. 3 (my emphasis).

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its footing in less obvious medievalisms by reframing the conflict as a war against evil in which, as Andrew Fiala argues, the “crusading spirit” is a way of suggesting, in line with the 2006 National Security Strategy declaration, that “we are engaged in a generations-long struggle to end tyranny in our world”.119 Accordingly, the first wave of propaganda comprised attempts to establish the meaning of the tragedy, which, in effect, meant finding the perpetrators and holding them publicly to account. Alternately employing the rhetoric of crime and of marketing, officials and journalists identified al Qaeda as ‘terrorists’, the enemy as ‘terrorism’, and so placed both Osama bin Laden and his jihadists outside the pale of civilized society as a global risk. One purpose of this semantic exercise was to deny the obvious, that the assault was rooted in the anger of radical Islam.120

As the PR machine gathered pace, the rhetoric against bin Laden was gradually transformed from a ‘crusade’ against al Qaeda to a full-scale war against states – not against Islam, as the Bush administration were at pains to point out, but against terrorism in an attempt to elide countries which allegedly harboured terrorists with the terrorists themselves.121 The campaign eventually worked with aplomb, in part because of the resonance of its medievalism, and in part via the simple technique of labelling any dissenters as unpatriotic or traitors. Accordingly, the campaign relied on the full co-operation, tacitly or otherwise, of much of the mass media, which scrambled to avoid accusations of unpatriotic behaviour or of dishonouring the victims of the 9/11 attacks.122 During this period the government imposed an unprecedented level of control over the media. When, for instance, Al Jazeera broadcast a tape of Osama bin Laden on 7 October, it was of course logical that the networks should follow suit, since it clearly represented a major scoop in the news-hungry landscape of post9/11. However, concerned about giving a platform to al Qaeda, the US government scrambled to control bin Laden’s message in the future, with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice persuading executives from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN to accept her suggestion “that any future statements be abridged, with ‘inflammatory’ language removed.”123 While in some senses the PR worked to suppress dissenting voices, it also resulted in a bifurcation of public opinion which Paul Rutherford suggests “provoked one of the most extensive antiwar movements in recent memory, […] not merely dialogue, an exchange of views, but a series of clashing monologues. The competing barrage of sights and sounds amounted to a propaganda war, now waged on a global scale.”124

Fiala, ‘Crusades, Just Wars, and the Bush Doctrine’, p. 165. Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq (University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 25–6. 121 Ibid., p. 24. 122 Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 375. 123 Mahajan, The New Crusade, pp. 86–7. 124 Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion, p. 24. 119

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As Mahajan observes, such a conflicting message was also complicating the message that this would not be a crusade against Islam, since the people of the Arab world were also divided. [Where, in the first Gulf War] the United States proposed to attack one Muslim country in order to defend another, the war could not be presented as an attack on Islam. In this case, however, the attack was made in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, and the proponents of war talked of crusades and infinite justice.125

Despite this confusion, however, there is some evidence of the success of the Bush doctrine in forcing the dichotomy between the modern and the medieval across the globe. Even within the Arab world, those factions aiming to distance themselves from al Qaeda found themselves adopting the same crusade rhetoric. Bilal Saab and Bruce Riedel note in one New York Times article that Hezbollah joined in the widespread condemnation of the medieval attitudes of al Qaeda, allegedly describing it as an “entity trapped in medieval ages and bent on killing innocent Muslims”.126 The final phase of the ideological project, then, becomes surprisingly clear in its objectives when we follow through the logical arguments at work in the War on Terror and its association with medievalism. Operating under the influence of neomedievalism, the War on Terror was sold in this final phase as a battle which would be fought not as a crusade against Islam but as a mission to modernise the medieval terrorists. It is, in fact, only by viewing media coverage of the War on Terror in this light that the gulf between the neoconservative project of the Bush administration and the gung-ho warmongering of many tabloids and fascist organisations makes any sense. Though the two parties do indeed share many objectives in common – the destruction of al Qaeda or al-Shabab training bases, the dismantling of terrorist networks both within Western countries and without, the replacement of Islamic leaders with more secular counterparts sympathetic to the West – the logic underpinning these movements is dependent on two very different ideas about what is, or is not, medieval. Where the clash of civilisation theory identifies the recent terrorist threats as a return of the medieval to the modern day (and thus as a signal of the breakdown of nation states, the confrontation of supra-national religious identities, and so on), banal medievalism’s logic of progress produces an understanding of the world in which one half of the globe is living in modernity, while the other half lies backwards in time behind them and must be brought up to date or else be forced to do so. It is, then, in the media rhetoric’s resonance with a simplified dichotomy that the Bush administration’s medievalism found its most successful home.

Mahajan, The New Crusade, p. 27. Bilal Y. Saab and Bruce O. Riedel, ‘Hezbollah and Al Qaeda’, New York Times, 2007, [accessed 17 December 2013]. 125

126

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Conclusions The worldwide reaction to President Bush’s gaffe, when he described the imminent reprisals against 9/11 attackers as a ‘crusade’, demonstrated the extent to which, despite a pervasive atmosphere of neomedievalism127 which characterised the Bush administration, such banal medievalisms still had the capacity to provoke comment and offence. However, looking more closely at the range of medievalisms in the mainstream press, the UK parliament and across internet forums, it is clear that both before and after 9/11 terms such as crusade were not only uncontested but almost commonplace. The strength of the reaction, and the power of words such as crusade, is thus revealed to be not about the use of the term itself but rather about the context in which they were used, which created ‘resonance’ with media audiences. Analysis of the PR landscape and the rhetoric surrounding the build-up to the Iraq invasion in the light of the theory of resonance demonstrates that Bush’s crusade was successful in generating global support through its use of banal medievalism to suggest an ideological distinction between the West and the new ‘evil empire’ spearheaded by al Qaeda and radical Islam. By establishing a zero-sum rhetoric according to which states were either “with us or against us”, and through their insistence that the terrorists were medieval, the medievalism of the West’s War on Terror shifted global politics away from an overtly orientalist spatial distinction and transformed it into a temporal one. The logic of crusade was thus pitched as a liberation doctrine – if ‘they’ are uniformly medieval, ‘our’ role is to modernise them. Thus, by deploying a series of banal medievalisms to describe the world around us, and by aligning Islam with the Middle Ages, the crusade comment is revealed to be an unintentional part of a broader neomedievalist ideology underpinning the Bush doctrine as a whole. Perhaps equally important, however, was the less-frequently documented detail which emphasised its resonance in the Middle East, namely that the vociferous reaction by al Qaeda to Bush’s medievalism was not rooted in the perceived insult of being described as ‘medieval’, but conversely because it reflected precisely the terms which bin Laden had been using for almost a decade. It is, then, to al Qaeda’s own banal medievalism that we will turn in the next chapter to examine why two seemingly opposed factions might share the same medievalist rhetoric with such alacrity.

127 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror; Fiala, ‘Crusades, Just Wars, and the Bush Doctrine’; Parag Khanna, ‘Neomedievalism’, Foreign Policy, 172 (2009), p. 91.

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this is a war which […] is reviving the Crusades. Richard the Lionheart, Barbarossa from Germany, and Louis from France – the case is similar today, when they all immediately went forward the day Bush lifted the Cross. The Crusader nations went forward. Osama bin Laden, 20 October 20011

A

s demonstrated in the previous chapter, from its earliest days all the way through to the premature declaration of victory in Iraq, the rhetoric of the War on Terror often used medievalism to frame the USA and its allies as rightful and legitimate liberators rather than unjustified aggressors against the Middle East. In this context, both the intentional medievalism of the Bush PR machine and the unintentional, banal, medievalism of the mainstream media recategorised al Qaeda not only collectively as part of an ‘irredeemably medieval’ religion gearing up for an imminent clash of civilisations, but also individually as primitive, medieval barbarians at the gates of civilisation. Indeed, several independent reports indicate that the sustained failure to differentiate between Islamic extremism and Islam itself was so effective that it led to a broader negative depiction of Muslims as a whole in an orientalist shift.2 As Edward Said convincingly argues, “the deliberately created associations between Islam and fundamentalism ensure that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing”.3 The attempt to depict radical Islam as the principal enemy of the UK and the US sustained, as we have seen, a rhetoric of insistent medievalism which served two chief purposes. The first was to suggest that the enemy’s apparent cruelty was somehow inherent in the ideologies and desires of radical Islam (or Islam as a whole, which is the same thing for many social media users). The second, more insidiously, emphasised the primitiveness and lack of sophistication of radical Islam 1 Bin Laden’s interview with Al Jazeera’s Taysir Alluni was conducted on 20 October 2001 and aired on Al Jazeera on 31 January 2002. The entire transcript of Alluni’s interview with bin Laden can be found in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, ed. Bruce B. Lawrence (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 127–8. 2 Moore et al., ‘Images of Islam in the UK’. 3 Said, Covering Islam, p. xvi.

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in order to imply a Western prerogative to introduce modernity and enlightenment into the region. Thus, from the podium of the White House to the ‘below-the-line’ comments on newspaper articles, and through a range of social media and online forums, a similar message – or rather, a pattern of messages – began to emerge which demonstrated the widespread acceptance and assimilation of the ‘us/them’ rhetoric. Such rhetoric, in fact, drew on a long-established binary opposition which, already by the early 1980s, had encouraged the elision of Islamism, Islam and Arabic culture. In news reporting, Islam largely “entered the consciousness of most Americans […] principally if not exclusively because it has been connected to newsworthy issues like oil, Iran and Afghanistan, or terrorism”.4 Such an ideological struggle revealed a largely latent – though occasionally overt – orientalism, that which Roger Scruton notably described as a ‘West and the rest’ mentality5 – which saw its logical telos in the strain of rhetoric which reframed the War on Terror as a kind of liberation doctrine. No longer ‘invading’ but ‘rescuing’, the Crusaders of the West were thus reimagined as liberators, leading the entire Arab world (by which of course they meant fundamentalist Islam) out from the Dark Ages and into modernity.6 Al Qaeda Welcomed Medieval ‘Slur’ In this context it is somewhat surprising to find that, rather than contradicting it, al Qaeda’s reaction to the clash of civilisations rhetoric was an almost unreserved acceptance of it. While, perhaps, al Qaeda might be expected strenuously to deny such division of the world into ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’, as I demonstrate below, the case is in fact quite the reverse. Throughout the height of al Qaeda’s presence on the world radar, and in particular through its access to western news outlets such as Al Jazeera,7 bin Laden and his followers in fact went to great lengths to agree with the Bush doctrine on almost all of its major arguments. Furthermore, analysis of bin Laden’s statements suggests that they not only embraced Bush’s medievalisms but even contributed new medievalisms of their own. Thus, for al Qaeda, the key impact of Bush’s crusade rhetoric was not its successful deployment of banal medievalism as a weapon in the War on Terror, but rather the extent to which it suited their own, equally medievalist, terms. In part, the alacrity with which al Qaeda greeted Bush’s crusade rhetoric might be explained by the desire on their part to mask their technological sophistication, as discussed in more detail below. More importantly for the terrorist group’s purposes, though, is that the banal medievalism that was so entrenched in the West’s orientalist view of Islam was reworked into a deliberate media strategy to further serve their own political agenda. The logic of this agenda was that, if the world’s media were already fearfully predicting an imminent Clash of Civilisations, then the Ibid., p. 16. Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (London & New York: Continuum, 2002). 6 Said, Covering Islam, pp. 29–32. 7 See, for instance, Miles, Al-Jazeera. 4 5

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fundamentally irreconcilable division between radical Islam and the West (as both bin Laden and Bush saw it) suited both Bush’s and bin Laden’s purposes very well. Not only did Bush’s comments reignite a centuries-old clash of East and West but, perhaps more importantly, they confirmed what bin Laden had claimed all along, since, for well over a decade, al Qaeda spokesmen had already been describing interference in the Middle East as carried out by a Crusader–Zionist alliance. The term ‘crusader’ was, in fact, even mentioned in the name of the group, the “World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders”, under which al Qaeda issued a joint statement with other jihadist groups in 1998.8 In bin Laden’s rhetoric, long before September 2001, Western invasions of the Middle East had been criticised as a new crusade in which the West would “take up the cross” and attempt to recapture Jerusalem from Arab hands. In a series of statements over the previous decade, bin Laden in fact makes use of an even more explicit form of medievalism to support his cause. In one letter from 1996, for instance, he claimed that “the people of Islam realized that they were the fundamental target of the hostility of the Judeo-Crusader alliance … The oppressive Crusader campaign led by America”.9 It is noteworthy that, in addition to the same medievalisms, bin Laden too was anxious not to distinguish Islam from Islamism. Likewise, in a 1998 manifesto co-signed by the leaders of Islamist groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh, bin Laden declared a fatwa against the ‘Jews and the Crusaders’ on the grounds that “the Arabian Peninsula has never – since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas – been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts.”10 Closer inspection reveals that not only had bin Laden been referring to the invasions as ‘crusades’, but he had also for several years been espousing precisely the same division of the work into two camps, rooted in equally neomedievalist thinking. In an interview on Al Jazeera in 1998, bin Laden referred to a “global crusader alliance with the Zionist Jews led by America, Britain and Israel” and employed terms from medieval Islamic thought to justify jihad, a furious defence of the umma against the infidel, using precisely the same rhetorical division into ‘us’ and ‘them’. “I say that there are two sides in the struggle”, he argued. On “one side is the global Crusader alliance […] and the other side is the Islamic world [umma]”.11 Indeed, bin Laden was to go further in his use of the division of the world into two opposing, crusading forces. In a statement from 3 November 2001 he summarised the clash as a full-blown religious war between West and East, calling on Muslims as part of a religious duty to rally to his call. It was a war, he said, whose motivations were “fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathised with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders. Those

8 What Does Al-Qaeda Want? Unedited Communiques, ed. Robert O. Marlin (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 18. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 73. The umma to which he refers is the transnational, “global Islamic community, or Islamic supernation”. Ibid., p. 4.

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who try to cover this crystal clear fact, which the entire world has admitted, are deceiving the Islamic nation.”12 So it was that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and during the political fallout from Bush’s crusade gaffe, bin Laden’s rhetoric proved to be somewhat prescient, a fact which al Qaeda tried to use to transmute their rhetoric from direct aggression to one of defensive pre-emption. In a live broadcast on the day the US strikes on Afghanistan began in late September 2001, bin Laden declared Bush to be “the leader of the infidels” in a worldwide war against Islam, warning that “crusader” Bush would lead infidel forces into Afghanistan “under the banner of the cross”.13 Consequently, by the time that Charlotte Beers took office as undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in September 2001, she would find the post-9/11 landscape to be skewed, with “the intellectual terrain in the Middle East already controlled by the enemy. Osama bin Laden had quickly sought to establish the meaning of the war on terror.”14 Exploiting Bush’s gaffe as proof of a global Zionist conspiracy to resurrect the crusades, the history of East–West relations found itself rewritten in support of a direct reversal of Bush’s us/them rhetoric, positioning them as Crusaders and al Qaeda as brave defenders. “Put this way, radical Islam was on the side of civilisation, while the West, and especially the United States and Israel, were the barbaric aggressors. The ‘terrorists’ were transformed into ‘martyrs’.”15 In this sense, the idea that Islam has its roots in the Middle Ages played well into the rhetorical project of al Qaeda, transforming it from the double medievalism suggested by Kaufman into a tertiary, triple medievalism: first, the term ‘medieval’ was deployed by the west to mean ‘backwards’; second, Islam’s medieval roots could be used to suggest its incompatibility with modernity; third, the use of this double medievalism was later harnessed by al Qaeda to suggest an untainted purity of Islamic tradition with which al Qaeda – and later Islamic State – could readily associate themselves. It is thus important to view al Qaeda’s rhetorical medievalism not as purely a response to that of the Bush doctrine but also as their own brand of banal medievalism which was well established for over a decade before 9/11. It was medievalism because it referred to a vague, modern invention of the Middle Ages rather than to specifically medieval history. It was banal not because it was unconscious, as with some of the examples discussed above, but because it was not consciously used as an exercise in historical recovery – the antiquarian impulse, as David Marshall termed it – but as an exercise in historical appropriation. The weight of al Qaeda’s rhetoric was rooted not in the historical crusades but rather in “the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists and Islamists. They shipped the medieval expeditions of every aspect

12 Marlin, What Does Al-Qaeda Want? pp. 34–5; see also ‘Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN’, BBC, 3 November 2001, [accessed 13 September 2011]. 13 Madden, ‘Crusade Propaganda’. 14 Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion, p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 29.

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of their age and dressed them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism.”16 Already by 1994, in a series of interviews and press releases, bin Laden had thus begun to articulate a worldview rooted in medievalism according to which the Islamic ‘caliphate’ and its ‘umma’ had been motivated toward ‘jihad’ by the ‘crusaders’ of the West.17 It was, then, only the explosion of media interest post-9/11 that transmitted this message to a new audience of Western ears and, particularly, it was the successful attack on the World Trade Center (bin Laden’s second attempt on that target after the failed 1993 attacks) which propelled the terrorist group into the limelight and allowed them to capitalise on the Bush administration’s response. As a consequence of such a fraught neomedievalist climate, Bush’s comments were understandably welcomed by al Qaeda as “a propaganda gift”,18 on which subsequent rhetoric sought to capitalise. John Phillips argues that after the 9/11 attacks such medievalism “featured prominently in the utterances of bin Laden and other Islamic terror leaders […] invoked to justify their actions and to attract further supporters to their cause”.19 Speaking of the moment he heard Bush’s ‘crusade’ gaffe, James Carroll claims that his “thoughts went to the elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been, Bush already reading from his script”.20 Indeed, bin Laden was certainly quick to exploit what he saw as a vital blow in the propaganda war between al Qaeda and the Western media, and took full advantage of the sudden media interest. It is during this period that, Hugh Miles suggests, while “America struggled to manage its image, radical Muslim preachers across the Middle East were busy doing all they could to undermine it”.21 Further proof of his attempts to undermine the White House PR efforts can be seen in bin Laden’s various press releases over the winter of 2001, which rarely failed to make explicit references to the coincidence of Bush’s comments and his own. In one interview, for example, he observes that “Bush has declared in his own words: ‘Crusade attack’. The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouth.”22 On 3 November an al Qaeda press release, which was carried by the BBC among others, gloatingly declared that “Bush has carried the cross and raised its banner high and stood at the front of the queue.”23 In the same interview, bin Laden claimed that Bush’s ‘announcement’ of his crusade was only a confirmation of al Qaeda’s own rhetoric:

Haydock and Risden, Hollywood in the Holy Land, p. 16. Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 7. 18 Ruthven, “Shock and Awe, Circa 1095: How Are Today’s Conflicts Linked to the Language of Medieval Holy Wars?” p. 17. 19 Phillips, ‘Terrorists Use Horror of the Crusades to Justify Attacks on West: Why Al Qaeda Still Wages a Medieval War’. 20 Carroll, Crusade, p. 2. 21 Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 175. 22 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 121. 23 , uploaded 3 November 2001 [accessed 13 September 2011]. 16 17

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After the US politicians spoke and after the US newspapers and television channels became full of clear crusading hatred in this campaign that aims at mobilising the West against Islam and Muslims, Bush left no room for doubts or the opinions of journalists, but he openly and clearly said that this war is a crusader war. He said this before the whole world to emphasise this fact.24

A little over a week later, he again explicitly referenced Bush’s comments, observing that “President Bush has used the word ‘crusade’, and the reality is that the Crusader war is still going on.”25 By December, he began to incorporate the backlash (outlined in Chapter 4) against medievalist terms such as ‘crusade’ in order to capitalise on the White House’s PR disasters: When Bush speaks, people make apologies for him, and they say that he didn’t mean to say that this war is a Crusade, even though he himself said that it was! So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.26

As a powerful kind of medievalism, al Qaeda’s acceptance of the medieval slur illustrates neatly a process of manipulation of the media. Their reuse of precisely the same medievalisms as the Bush administration recalls what Robert Cialdini, in his seminal text on influence, calls influence ‘jujitsu’, in which the mass- and (later) the social-media strategies of al Qaeda deployed the medieval slur as a kind of jujitsu to harness the powers of the western media “for use against their targets while exerting little personal force” of their own.27 Rather than trying to fight back and demonstrate their modernity, al Qaeda’s acceptance of their status as a medieval entity allowed them to highlight the failures of modernity and the decadence of secular government, and, moreover, allowed the crusades to emerge as a powerful metaphor for Western invasion. Al Qaeda’s acceptance of the Bush administration’s rhetoric thus used the weight of the West’s own words against itself, forcing it to emerge precisely as the Western, globalising crusader movement on which al Qaeda had insisted all along. Irrespective of subsequent attempts to backtrack, the medievalising engine of 9/11 was in full swing, which meant that the West’s insistence on the polarity between a modern Self and a medieval Other had insinuated itself inextricably. The Middle East was elided with the Middle Ages, and the Axis of Evil with the medieval. In this way, Bush’s remarks, coupled with the various gaffes in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the broader context of neomedievalism, drew their power not only from their resonance to Western ears but also from the fact that for many in the Arab world they acted as a chilling confirmation of al Qaeda’s own medievalist rhetoric, ‘Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN’ (my emphasis). Lawrence, Messages to the World, pp. 143–4. 26 Ibid., pp. 121–2. 27 Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 3rd edn (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 11. 24 25

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transforming bin Laden’s outlandish claims into a “bizarre counterpoint to Bush’s pronouncements”.28 The US response – namely the intensive bombing campaign in Afghanistan – thus became infused into al Qaeda’s own words, confirming their prediction. From the standpoint of a media war, it became clear that al Qaeda and Bush’s bizarre interdependence saw the party without access to a global media outlet using the opponent’s insurmountable weight against them, and, as James Carroll argues, “with the US behaving just as Osama bin Laden would have predicted – and would have wanted”.29 Al Qaeda’s Use of History The use of the crusades as a reference point in its public pronouncements in fact chimes neatly with al Qaeda’s broader use of history as a means of framing, defining and explaining the present. In the same way as bin Laden was to seize on Bush’s gaffe, the al Qaeda publicity machine also began to bear a striking – and wholly unintentional – resemblance to the statements emerging from the White House in that both began to refer back to the medieval past as a way of understanding the present. As Bruce Holsinger demonstrates, and as argued in Chapter 4, for Bush and his neoconservative advisers the past began to be understood as a mine of neomedievalism which superimposed the past world onto the present. For al Qaeda, the medieval past manifested itself rather as a bitter reminder of the West’s interference in Middle Eastern affairs. As Lisa Beyer termed it in an influential article, “on top of its own controversial history in the region, the U.S. inherits the weight of centuries of Muslim bitterness over the Crusades and other military campaigns, plus decades of indignation over colonialism”.30 Nevertheless, it is important to remember that even if banal (in the sense explored above), al Qaeda’s use of medieval history was nevertheless a highly selective one which reconstructed the Middle Ages from a notably modernist stance. It was a blend of medievalism calculated both to tap the vein of Christian guilt in the West and to reconstruct an entirely invented causal chain between the Islamic caliphate at its height and the call to jihad of the late twentieth century. In particular, as the period witnessing the birth of Islam, its rise to prominence though the Caliphates and a halcyon era of pre-national states and pre-colonisation, this modern Middle Ages played on a powerful nostalgia felt by both al Qaeda and some of the wider Arab world. Discussing the role of historical memory in many Islamic societies, Ben Macintyre argues that history plays a crucial role in understanding the present, since, “in collective Muslim memory, the past is present, emotive and powerful”.31 Indeed, a selected and selective medievalism underpins much of al Qaeda’s and radical Islam’s political analysis of the present. Speaking of his experiences in being drawn Mahajan, The New Crusade, p. 18. Carroll, Crusade, p. 33. 30 Lisa Beyer, ‘Roots of Rage’, Time, 10 January 2001, pp. 44–7 (p. 44). 31 Ben Macintyre, ‘The False Prophet Who Tried to Steal History’, The Times, 3 May 2011, p. 21. 28

29

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to radical Islam, Ed Husain described the ways in which his teenage frustrations were awakened by a historically inflected Islamist rhetoric.32 Already in the 1990s Husain recalls seeing one speaker in an East London mosque outlining a version of medieval history according to which the democracy which the Bush administration would later claim was the envy of Islamism in fact came from Islam in the first place, and only later spread to the Western European countries. The speaker’s argument became a historical–religious one that proposed that Islam is the source of all knowledge […] Before Islam the world was in darkness. Today the West is proud of democracy, but where did it come from? The first democracy in the world was Medina, when the Muslims elected caliphs in free elections. So much of what the West has today comes from Islam, especially democracy.33

Despite the obvious revisionism, such a nostalgic view of history exerted a powerful pull on young, disaffected British Muslims like Husain. Elsewhere, the radical preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad used explicitly medieval references in his rhetorical excoriation of the West regarding the attacks in Bosnia. “Where others cited UN resolutions, Omar Bakri cited history. He spoke about the power of the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphs to protect Muslims against non-Muslim aggression.”34 Another leader, Imam Shaikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, used similar historical references to justify jihad, reprimanding “those who adopted modern European political idiom and sought to impose it on a 1,400-year-old tradition”.35 As Yvonne Haddad, Professor of the History of Islam at Georgetown University, summarised it in a 2001 newspaper article, history is “what the terrorists use to recruit people – saying that Christians are on a crusade against Islam. It’s as bad to their ears as it is when we hear ‘jihad’.”36 It is not, however, only crusades and jihad that are harnessed to the yoke of extremist ideologies; in fact, a whole host of medieval references can be found to underpin the rhetoric of al Qaeda and its radical Islamist fringe groups. Mohammed Sifaoui, a French journalist who went undercover to try to infiltrate Islamist networks, recounts one story in which his Islamist would-be recruiter, Karim, tries to flatter a France 2 reporter by comparing the then President Jacques Chirac to Negus of Abyssinia.37 The comparison was clearly intended as a compliment to Chirac, but only makes sense to one who has a detailed knowledge of the Hijarat (flight to Abyssinia) and its centrality to Islamic tradition. As mentioned in Chapter 2, banal medievalism only has power when its users can all agree on its meaning. Karim’s comparison works in the same way as more direct historical references such as a bin Laden press release from 3 November 2001 which compared Dick 32 Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin, 2007). 33 Ibid., p. 33. 34 Ibid., p. 81. 35 Ibid., p. 175. 36 Buzbee, ‘Experts worry that war on terrorism will be seen as crusade against Islam’. 37 Mohamed Sifaoui, Inside Al Qaeda: How I Infiltrated the World’s Deadliest Terrorist Organization trans. by George Miller (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), pp. 77–8.

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Cheney to Hulagu the Tartar, who sacked Baghdad in 1258,38 his voiced concerns in 1998 that “what happened to Al-Andalus will happen to us”,39 or a statement in 1996 that cries “Cavalry of Islam, be mounted!”40 In all of these cases, reported through mainstream Western media channels, the historical references seem rather to target an audience extensively familiar with Islamic history than their purportedly Western audiences. Such a permanently present sense of the past can also be seen to create a parallel form of neomedievalism in the mind of the radical Islamists, which superimposes the medieval past onto the present not only as a metaphor but also as a means to understand current geopolitical issues. Accordingly present identities become manufactured through “the public presence of these memory figures – represented on monuments, statues, or murals, or transmitted via endlessly reproduced carriers of images and meaning, such as posters, banknotes, stamps, coins, political slogans, popular movies, and television programs”.41 In part, clearly, the reason that these are able to draw such emotive power and resonance within a broader community is the centrality of historical scholarship to the study of Islam. It is here, then, that the fundamental conflict between the medieval sensibilities of Islam and the interconnected, globalised modern world most forcibly comes into play. This conflict is manifested through “a resurgence in the age-old rhetoric of the Crusades among fundamentalist political groups and clerics in the wake of the war in Iraq. Websites used by Islamic extremists groan with references to ‘infidels’ and ‘wars of the holy cross’.”42 In the broader neomedievalist context, then, it is perhaps small wonder that Osama bin Laden should have made such consistent use of, and so many references to, medieval history in order both to frame and to validate his terrorist agenda. As Macintyre suggests, as “ludicrous as it may seem, bin Laden regarded himself not just (nor even primarily) as a fighter, but as a historian, a scholar-prophet fulfilling the dictates of Islamic destiny. Like all violent tyrants, he used and abused history to give his barbarity a respectable intellectual veneer.”43 A Modern Saladin The rhetoric of medievalism was, however, not unique to bin Laden and al Qaeda, and nor was it exclusively related to the invasion of Iraq. Already in the 1980s Colonel Gadaffi could be heard describing the USA as ‘Crusaders’44 and, throughout the 1990s, Islamic extremists were “talking of crusades long before Bush”.45 Husain ‘Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN’. Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 92. 40 Ibid., p. 30. 41 Stefan Heidemann, ‘Memory and Ideology: Images of Saladin in Syria and Iraq’, in Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, ed. Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 57–81 (p. 58). 42 Ibid. 43 Macintyre, ‘The False Prophet Who Tried to Steal History’. 44 Phillips, ‘Why a Crusade Will Lead to a Jihad’. 45 Husain, The Islamist, p. 114. 38 39

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recounts that that term was used in a broader rhetoric of medievalism circulating in the East London Mosque in the early 1990s to support the contention by radical clerics that “the umma was in a state of war with the West [… and] our enemies were kafir, not deserving of our honesty or integrity. We employed the scriptural justification for deceiving the enemy that was used in the seventh century.”46 Such terms would lead to a more overt use of medievalist discourse in protests and demonstrations, where chants and placards would declare “Crusader, Invader! Saladin is coming back!”47 Al Qaeda’s use of history thus fits into a broader tradition of medievalism, according to which the past became a means of defining present-day conflicts. The range of Middle Eastern leaders who sought to self-identify with early fathers of Islam fulfils broadly the same function, albeit not always in the context of fundamentalist Islam. The former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad (father and predecessor of the current Bashir Hafez al-Assad), for example, frequently used the figure of Saladin to anchor a modern sense of national identity and as a fixed reference point to reconfigure attacks on the West as resistance to Western intruders.48 For al-Assad, the memory of Saladin “had multiple uses. [… Assad] would frequently be referred to as ‘the new Saladin’, [he] erected various statues to him, named a castle after him and even had a portrait of his victory over the crusaders at Hattin in 1187 behind his presidential desk.”49 The use of Saladin’s legacy proved to be versatile for Assad. His image appeared on Syrian banknotes in the 1970s and 1980s, and again in 1997, and the 800th anniversary of his death was marked in 1993 by the construction of an enormous statue immediately in front of the citadel of Damascus.50 Sometimes the legacy of Saladin was co-opted in support of an emergent Syrian nationalism, which emphasised the hero of the Third Crusade’s connections to Damascus and played down his birth in northern Iraq. At other moments his ‘otherness’ became used to support a wider pan-Arabic identity. As Phillips notes, “the advantage of drawing parallels between Hafez al-Assad and Saladin was that his achievements were so wide that the regime could interpret them as they wished around whichever layer of identity they wanted to promote at the time”.51 It was, however, precisely Saladin’s historical elasticity which offered up so many different uses of the same figure, since his legacy – given its fragmentary post-medieval reconstruction – is sufficiently malleable to allow its deployment in a number of, often contradictory, ways.52 Such elasticity is further demonstrated by the deployment of the same neomedievalist version of Saladin by Saddam Hussein in the service of a fundamentally different agenda of pan-Arab nationalism, fulfilling Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 119. 48 Milton Viorst, Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 122. 49 Christopher Phillips, Everyday Arab Identity: The Daily Reproduction of the Arab World (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 53. 50 Heidemann, ‘Memory and Ideology’, p. 72. 51 Phillips, Everyday Arab Identity, p. 53. 52 Heidemann, ‘Memory and Ideology’. 46 47

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Figure 4  Saladin appears on a Syrian 200 pound banknote. The medieval legacy of Saladin often finds itself co-opted across the Middle East, and here is used in support of an emergent Syrian nationalism.

an important function in both rhetorical and, later, visual facets. Though earlier in Saddam’s regime the confrontation with Iran and Israel led him to favour other leaders (notably Hammurabi, the early Islamic caliphs, or Nebuchadnezzar), by 1987 the 800th anniversary of the taking of Jerusalem refocused the Iraqi propaganda machine in order to “equate Saddam Hussein with the hero of the Crusader period”.53 The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait also shifted the focus away from ur-nationalism and hereditary legitimacy to a “new stress on medieval Arab heritage” in which “Saddam viewed Iraqi resistance against international control as part of the greater Arab struggle of liberation from the Christian ‘Crusaders’.”54 This rhetoric was manifested visually in the construction in the late 1990s of the Qasr al-Salam (The Palace of Peace), where busts of Saddam recall Saladin through the indexical Dome of the Rock helmet. In 2001 a mural in Baghdad even depicted Saddam riding into battle alongside Saladin, and medievalesque statues appeared showing Saddam on horseback with sword drawn.55 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was not too long before, like Assad and Hussein before him, Osama bin Laden was also to join the ranks of those self-identifying with the hero of the Third Crusade. In his role as ‘historian’, bin Laden was eager to see himself as a modern-day Saladin. “I envision Saladin coming out of the clouds”, bin Laden claimed in a video-taped message released on 7 October 2001 to his supporters. “Our history is being rewritten.”56 The major difference, of course, Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 65. 55 All examples taken from ibid., pp. 65–7. The mural is also discussed in Phillips, ‘Why a Crusade Will Lead to a Jihad’. 56 Beyer, ‘Roots of Rage’, p. 47; see also Robin Wright, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 268. 53

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between bin Laden and Assad, Hussein or Gaddafi is that al Qaeda had learned to harness the power of the media. A statue may well be a powerful image for those who see it,57 but al Qaeda had learned how to harness a media institution capable of conveying that same monumentalism to the entire Arab world and beyond. The allusions underpinning such dramatic proclamations and references to Islamic history, however, are not pure rhetorical swagger, but make their mark because of an understanding of the ways in which media messages resonate. It is not that Osama bin Laden claimed to be Saladin that matters – several others had already done as much – but rather it was when he did so. To a public sceptical of yet another Western invasion in the Middle East, and on the days when the US bombing campaigns in Afghanistan were beginning to show massive civilian casualties written off as ‘collateral damage’, a rhetoric which connected the current political situation back to a long history of bloody crusades cemented the link between past and present. Drawing the medieval past fully into the modern era, al Qaeda’s and bin Laden’s medievalisms depict the Western powers as direct descendants of bloodthirsty crusaders eager once again to attack Islam as a whole on the flimsiest of pretexts. In this way, bin Laden’s reference to a familiar, shared, history of the Middle East emphasised the unity of the umma against yet another crusading superpower, so that “history served […] to justify bin Laden’s effort to engage the Muslim public in his planned jihad against an unholy America”.58 It seemed, indeed, to work. As early as November 2001 an internet survey on Al Jazeera’s website indicated that 83 per cent of the participants believed that bin Laden was “a jihad fighter, not a terrorist, and that his indictment against Western and American interests constitute[d] a jihad”.59 As Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA unit charged with hunting bin Laden observed, “bin Laden is seen by millions of his co-religionists – because of his defense of Islam, personal piety, physical bravery, integrity and generosity – as an Islamic hero, as that faith’s ideal type, and almost as a modern-day Saladin.”60 A Recurring Crusade Osama bin Laden’s ideological claims were not purely metaphorical either. Instead, they were designed to perpetuate the belief that the current Middle Eastern invasions were not like the crusades, but were in fact a continuation of them. Bruce Holsinger demonstrates this point when he refers to an interview in October 2001 (on

57 Michael Scheuer, ‘The London Bombings: For Al-Qaeda, Steady as She Goes’, in Unmasking Terror: A Global Review of Terrorist Activities, ed. Christopher Heffelfinger and Michael Scheuer (Washington, D.C.: Jamestown Foundation, 2005), pp. 432–6. 58 Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion, p. 29. 59 Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, ‘The Fight against Terrorism Must Begin with Curricular, Educational, and Media Reform in the Arab World (November 29, 2001)’, in Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 313–15 (p. 314). 60 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. xvii (my emphasis).

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Al Jazeera) in which bin Laden refers to the war as a “recurring war”.61 Osama bin Laden’s analogy consequently: transforms the original pre- or paranational medieval collectivity that launched the Crusades into the postnational formation of NATO. In bin Laden’s implied formulation Bush now raises the cross just as Clement III did in 1189; the United States assumes the mantle of global illegitimacy embodied in the medieval papacy; and America’s European allies, rather than joining the new crusade in the spirit of voluntary servitude in which the medieval crusaders like to cloak themselves, kowtow to the American president’s imperialist whims.62

In his appeal to a prenational collectivity (rather than specific, individual nations), bin Laden’s press release of 3 November 2001 thus explicitly questions “whether this war against Afghanistan that broke out a few days ago is a single and unique one or if it is a link to a long series of crusader wars against the Islamic world”.63 The fact that bin Laden’s statement was released directly to the BBC, rather than through the usual local media channels or Al Jazeera, demonstrates that his rhetoric was designed to connect with audiences beyond the Arab world. In his version of crusade history, bin Laden goes on to talk about the occupation of Palestine and the ‘crusade’ against Chechens, Bosnia, Kashmir, East Timor, Somalia and then Iraq, concluding that, cumulatively, “these battles cannot be viewed in any case whatsoever as isolated battles, but rather, as part of a chain of the long, fierce, and ugly crusader war”.64 Such a chain is thus framed as part of a recurring crusader war, so that, “for bin Laden, history is a tale of permanent war with the infidel, beginning in the time of the Prophet, reaching a crescendo with the Crusades and continuing with Western imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The jihad of the 21st century is simply an extension of that battle.”65 Such rhetoric was also extended to other terrorist attacks in their insistence that it was an ongoing war. On 29 May 2005, two months before the 7/7 bombings in London, the AHMB (Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades: the European Jihad Division) posted an internet statement claiming that “the truth of the Crusader apostasy has been exposed. This is a call to all the mujahidin who are waiting in every place to strike out with the long awaited hit – the hit whose time has come after the infidels have intensified their war against Islam and Muslims.”66 In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings in March 2004, an al Qaeda statement reported in the Express

Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 21. See also Jonathan Phillips, ‘Terrorists Use Horror of the Crusades to Justify Attacks on West: Why Al Qaeda Still Wages a Medieval War’, The Express, 26 March 2004, p. 56. 63 ‘Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN’; also reported in Rubin and Rubin, Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East, p. 258 (my emphasis); and Marlin, What Does Al-Qaeda Want? p. 35. 64 , uploaded 3 November 2001 [accessed 13 September 2011]. 65 Macintyre, ‘The False Prophet Who Tried to Steal History’. 66 Scheuer, ‘The London Bombings’, p. 433 (my emphasis). 61

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proclaimed that “we have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck at one of the bases of the crusader alliance”.67 By reframing the current battle as part of an ongoing war, the realignment of history to create a neomedievalist worldview was positioned to echo that of Bush’s own neomedievalism, and thus implicitly (though in some cases explicitly) suggested that al Qaeda are justified in resisting an “unspeakable crusader grudge”.68 In this way, the Western coalition was aligned with other post-medieval alliances such as NATO or the UN as modern Crusader alliances against the medieval Islamic world, and the terrorist attacks found themselves justified as retaliatory strikes, designed not to kill innocent civilians but to “wreak revenge on Americans for their domination of Islamic space”.69 Such a shift in emphasis thus allows for a secondary medievalism to emerge, too. By linking the attacks to a continuation of the medieval crusades, al Qaeda’s rhetoric triggers a reliance on Islamic law, according to which defensive war is theologically justifiable. Medieval Islamic jurisprudence: distinguishes between offensive war (harb), a campaign of conquest launched under official leadership against the land of the impious, and defensive struggle (jihad), to be waged as a matter of individual obligation by all Muslims when the umma has come under attack. In the latter case it is the dicta of the 14th-century Syrian jurist ibn Taimiyya, who rallied the faithful against the terrifying scourge of the Mongol invasions.70

In the face of such rhetoric, the return of the crusades as a banal medievalism reflects a sophisticated media strategy on the part of al Qaeda, which sought to capitalise on the ‘roots of rage’ of anti-Imperialism: the fact that very few references to a ‘harb’ emerge in the media coverage of terrorism suggest that it was a medieval jihad which became the model for the Islamists. Using medieval history in order to reclassify the War on Terror as an ongoing crusade, bin Laden’s rhetoric not only connected with earlier leaders’ rhetorical identification with Saladin but ultimately reframed jihad as a doctrinally and scripturally justified war against external aggression. Us, Them and the Umma By distorting Islamic scripture and history in this way, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden fulfil a third medieval function in their rhetoric, which is to continue Bush’s own Us/Them rhetoric. Al Qaeda’s version of this rhetoric would perpetuate the idea of a fundamental and irreconcilable division between the West and the East, only reversing the Good and Evil roles espoused by Bush. Ibid. ‘Excerpt: Bin Laden Tape’, Washington Post, 27 December 2001, [accessed 19 October 2016]. 69 Elshtain, Just War against Terror, pp. 94–5 (my emphasis). 70 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. xx. 67

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Bin Laden’s strategy to achieve this division is visible in his attempt to rally the Muslim community together into one, single, pan-Arabic identity under attack – just as in the Crusades – which calls on all Muslims to resist as an article of faith. It was an almost exact enactment of what Freud calls the ‘Narcissism of Small Differences’, by which he argues that “it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness”.71 In the War on Terror’s version of Freud’s theory, both sides could be found insisting on an inflexible separation of the world into two distinct, opposing and irreconcilable parties. Bin Laden’s rhetoric thus aimed at transforming a series of disparate (and, as the aftermath of military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan has proved, internally divisive) cultural groups into a united front against a common enemy by playing down internal differences in order to play up aggression against the ‘invaders’ as a duty of the supra-national umma. One press release, for example, calls on the “men of the radiant future of our umma of Mohammed, [to] raise the banner of jihad up high against the Judeo-American alliance that has occupied the holy places of Islam”.72 Likewise, in the terminology adopted throughout their media campaigns it was to a medieval, and not modern, geopolitical landscape that al Qaeda referred in such appeals. One 1998 declaration begins with a reference to the “blessed greater oath of allegiance at al-Aqaba” as impetus for the jihad,73 an oath of allegiance dating back to AD 622.74 Through various appeals to the umma and not individual states or nations, the Middle Ages thus became superimposed onto contemporary conflicts familiar to most in the region, such as Palestine. In this last respect, the (very modern) issue of Palestine finds itself folded back into medievalism as part of the umma so that, according to bin Laden, “the legal duty regarding Palestine […] is to wage jihad for the sake of God, and to motivate our umma to jihad so that Palestine may be completely liberated and return to Islamic sovereignty”.75 In other instances, the medievalism is made more explicit – though no less banal, in the sense that it was designed to be adopted into everyday presentist thinking and not as a historical reference point. In October 2001 bin Laden announced that “our goal is for our nation [umma] to unite in the face of the Christian crusade – the original crusade brought Richard the Lionheart from England. Today the crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.”76 In this sense, al Qaeda’s rhetoric attempted to sidestep accusations of 71 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), pp. 58–63. 72 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 29. 73 Ibid., p. 81. 74 According to Bruce Lawrence, the oath refers to two pledges “undertaken just before Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Media in 622. The first pledge was a commitment to fight, the second to fight to the death. The one referred to here is the second pledge.” Ibid., p. 81 n. 22. 75 Ibid., p. 9. 76 Phillips, ‘Terrorists Use Horror of the Crusades to Justify Attacks on West: Why Al Qaeda Still Wages a Medieval War’. (No source given in article)

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terrorism by referring backwards to the Middle Ages and insisting on the neomedievalism of the clash of civilisations, and by falling back on medieval Islamic law to reconfigure their actions as defensive jihad in defence of an Islamic nation. It was a medievalism based on the unspoken assertion of a fundamental incompatibility between the post-medieval idea of nation-states and a pre-national, medieval concept of umma, which simultaneously resurrected the Middle Ages even while implying that the Western coalition was itself medieval. Of course, such an insistence on medievalist terminology was rarely particularly subtle. Even the name of the organisation under whose name bin Laden sent out his first statements – the World Islamic Front Against Crusaders and Jews – was conceived from the outset as an integral part of al Qaeda’s recruitment strategy. Created in February 1998, the very name of the group sought to capitalise on the sensitive issue of colonialism as a means “to build working relationships between al Qaeda and other Islamist groups”.77 Thus bin Laden’s statements fit into a broader PR campaign which rarely refers to specific nations (with the notable exception of Palestine) but instead to the umma, and insists on the return of the Middle Ages in the Muslim world’s struggle against the Crusaders. A press release from 21 October 2001 explicitly argued that “the battle isn’t between the al Qaeda organization and the global crusaders. Rather, the battle is between Muslims – the people of Islam – and the global crusaders.”78 Likewise, in a statement on 10 October 2001 Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, an al Qaeda spokesman, repeats this crusader rhetoric: I address this message to the entire Muslim nation [i.e. the umma] to tell them that the confederates have joined forces against the Islamic nation and the Crusader war, promised by Bush, has been launched against Afghanistan and against this people who have faith in God. We now live under this Crusader bombardment that targets the entire nation. The Islamic nation should know that we defend a just cause. The Islamic nation has been groaning in pain for more than 80 years under the yoke of the joint Jewish–Crusader aggression.79

The invocation of the umma consequently serves as an important touchstone in al Qaeda’s medievalism as it gives a broader, pre-modern ‘base’ (to use the literal translation of ‘al Qaeda’) from which to drum up support. As Roger Scruton argues, “with al-Qa’eda, therefore, we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this ‘base’ is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of permanent exile”.80 77 Michael Scheuer, ‘Coalition Warfare: How Al-Qaeda Uses the World Islamic Front against Crusaders and Jews’, in Unmasking Terror: A Global Review of Terrorist Activities, ed. Christopher Heffelfinger and Michael Scheuer (Washington, D.C: Jamestown Foundation, 2005), pp. 3–9 (p. 3). 78 ‘Terror for terror’, 21 October 2001, pp. 106–29, quoted in Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 108. 79 , BBC website, 10 October 2001 [accessed 13 September 2011]. 80 Scruton, The West and the Rest, pp. 127–8.

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The basic medievalism of al Qaeda, then, emerges in its deliberate identification with the Middle Ages and rejection of modernity in the modern – western – constructs of Middle Eastern nation-states.81 In the light of such banal medievalism, once we begin to probe the mind of Islamic extremism we begin to realise that the West’s dismissal of Islamists as ‘medieval’ is, to the minds of al Qaeda, not a slur at all. Such insight can be found, for example, by examining the significance of one of the favoured terms of bin Laden: ‘infidel’. Elshtain rightly argues that one of the problems that Western ears have in understanding the charges laid out against them is that, listen as hard as we might, we simply cannot understand the language; “we are so unused to such language […] that we have a hard time taking it at face value”.82 For radical Islam, an infidel is not just one who follows another faith but one who, for that reason, represents a genuine threat to Islam. Just as a mythology of race and pseudo-scientific theories of race were invoked as a means for slave traders to justify their dehumanisation of slaves,83 so too is medieval Islamic jurisprudence invoked to justify the killing of ‘infidels’, according to which “Islamist fanatics tell themselves that the infidel is a lower order of being and a menace, and they are doing a good deed by eliminating a threat to the purity of their faith and all the faithful.”84 Al Qaeda are not Medieval A second, perhaps paradoxical, motive for their enthusiastic perpetuation of medievalism is potentially explained by the fact that the terrorists’ modus operandi are patently anything other than medieval. In fact, they are relentlessly modern. Despite Bush’s rhetorical pronouncements about their barbarity, or Boris Johnson’s dismissal of them as backward and medieval, Islamic terrorists are not a medieval relic ‘stuck in the Dark Ages’. In fact, it is crushingly obvious that, whatever else it might be, “al Qaeda is an essentially modern organisation”.85 Irrespective of the cruelty and immorality of their various terrorist attacks (which is what seemingly prompts many to dismiss them as medieval barbarians), the logistical requirements of 9/11 alone – the simultaneous coordination of international travel, communication networks, money transfers, cell-to-cell infrastructure and technological prowess – points to the existence of a thoroughly modern network. Looking back at the emergence of al Qaeda, as an organisation born of frustrated mujahidin expelled from Afghanistan who would later find themselves united against a ‘Crusader–Zionist alliance’, its infrastructure reveals origins rooted not in medieval tribalism but specifically in the aftermath of the Cold War, as by-products of proxy wars fought by developed countries in the developing world.86 Their rejecIbid., p. 126. Elshtain, Just War against Terror, p. 3. 83 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’, in The Spectacle of the Other, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997). 84 Elshtain, Just War against Terror, p. 10. 85 Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, p. 11. 86 Summarised from Gray, Al Qaeda, p. 76. 81

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tion of institutions such as the UN and their commissioning of spectacular terrorist plots which guarantee the shocked attention of a global press machine also speak to a thoroughly modern geopolitics. Even ideologically, as John Gray convincingly argues, al Qaeda’s political outlook is “nowhere found in medieval times [… rather] closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe”.87 As Gray goes on to suggest, the closest similarity to their ideology is that of state fascism.88 The modernity of al Qaeda was even clearly acknowledged by the Bush administration in its initial public declarations. Bush’s impassioned address to Congress aligns them not with medieval Caliphs but with modern extremism in his claim that, despite suggesting the previous week that it was a ‘new kind of evil’: “we have seen their kind before. They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.”89 Likewise, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Sub-Committee in April 2005, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged their modernity even while castigating their allegedly medieval ideology: “to the seeming surprise of some, our enemies have brains. They are constantly adapting and adjusting to what we’re doing. They combine medieval sensibilities with modern technology and media savvy to find new ways to exploit perceived weaknesses and to weaken the civilized world.”90 Taking into account both the methods and the underlying ideologies of al Qaeda and the Taliban, it becomes clear that even if some of the attitudes may seem to be close to the barbarically ‘medieval’ (in the sense of the word discussed in Chapter 3), the techniques and beliefs are indubitably modern. As Gray argues, “a glimpse of al Qaeda’s ideology in action was provided by the Taliban regime: […] Women were forced out of employment and education. Homosexuality was punishable by burial under a 15-foot brick wall. Policies such as these are described as medieval, but the Taliban had more in common with Pol Pot.”91 So if al Qaeda are not, as the social media commenters might have it, a bunch of medieval cave-dwellers who are trying to drag the world back to the Middle Ages, then the question arises: why should both sides of the debate work so hard pretending that they are? What benefit do we gain, as Holsinger asks, from decrying “al Qaeda’s supposed ‘medievalism’ rather than its patently transnational modernity?”92 In part, the response lies precisely in the extent to which al Qaeda’s ideologies and methods are inextricably intertwined with modernity, since their existence Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 20. 89 [accessed 19 October 2016]. 90 Quotation taken verbatim from the transcript of the Subcommittee hearing published on the US Government Printing Office Home Page, [accessed 13 March 2014]. Emphasis my own. 91 Gray, Al Qaeda, p. 79. 92 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 6. 87

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is entirely dependent on the kind of modernity and global interconnectedness which al Qaeda purports to abhor.93 In fact, looking at the broader picture, while it might feel satisfying for bedroom and boardroom tacticians to vent their spleen by dismissing Islamic terrorism as medieval, the very fact that those forums are also favoured by sympathisers and jihadists is one of the proofs that they are not confined to the Middle Ages but are a globalised institution reliant on modernity.94 Moreover, if they really are primitive, illiterate barbarians wandering the deserts, then how has a united show of force with the most sophisticated military technology been so emphatically ineffective against them? Evidently, then, it was not only in their ideology that al Qaeda demonstrated a sense of modernity (in their debt to nineteenth- and twentieth-century extremism) but also in their technological capacity. While the Western media were busily screening images of al Qaeda operatives squatting in the dust in their mountain caves armed only with flags and AK-47s, the reality was starkly different. At the most basic level, those caves were not necessarily primitive hovels, but often formed underground networks constructed by the mujahidin to avoid aerial surveillance. Even if their locations were intended to be so, the existence of these networks was no secret. In a 1996 interview Osama bin Laden boasted to reporters that they had built a vast network of tunnels and underground caves, claiming that they managed to move hundreds of tons of heavy equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, including “bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches”. Once there they dug miles of tunnels, some large enough to house storage places and even a hospital.95 Their media policy, too, was far from medieval, but instead demonstrated a genuinely sophisticated understanding of the ways in which messages are communicated most effectively. After all, 9/11 was a success for al Qaeda not only because the plans had worked but because the result was so unexpected, so shocking and so spectacular that the global news networks could not fail to report the images widely and repeatedly as the world looked on in horror. As Philip Seib and Dana M. Janbek observe, “communication is at the heart of terrorism. The principal accomplishment of al Qaeda on 9/11 was not killing several thousand people, but rather terrifying millions more through the reports and images of the attacks and changing the way many people throughout the world live.”96 The choice of targets was anything but accidental; they were designed to form ready-made media fodder, what Gabriel Weimann notably terms the “theater of terror”.97 Accordingly, “terrorism aims to intimidate a particular audience – or sometimes multiple audiences. Victims are chosen not because they are the enemy but because of their symbolic importance.”98 Gray, Al Qaeda, p. 1. Klausen, ‘Tweeting the Jihad’; Philip Seib and Dana M. Janbek, Global Terrorism and New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation (London & New York: Routledge, 2011). 95 Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. 48. 96 Seib and Janbek, Global Terrorism and New Media, p. 1. 97 Gabriel Weimann, ‘The Theater of Terror: Effects of Press Coverage’, Journal of Communication, 33.1 (1983), pp. 38–45; see also Gabriel Weimann, ‘Cyber-Fatwas and Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 34.10 (2011), pp. 765–81. 98 Klausen, ‘Tweeting the Jihad’, p. 2. 93

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Sifaoui’s would-be recruiter to radical Islam, mentioned above, reveals a sophisticated understanding of media semiotics when he explained that when a bomb is placed in the metro, the people are targeted. On the other hand, if it is placed in the Eiffel Tower, it’s the symbol which is targeted, even if members of the public happen to lose their lives. […] We should attack symbols, not civilians. Sheikh Osama wasn’t aiming at the civilians who were inside the World Trade Centre, but the symbol represented by the Twin Towers.99

Michael Scheuer identifies a similar pattern to al Qaeda’s attacks: they are designed to cause large casualties and inflict economic damage, but they are also aimed at symbolic targets in the West.100 Al Qaeda’s use of the media thus makes the group “modern not only in the fact that it uses satellite phones, laptop computers and encrypted websites”.101 Their attacks in New York, Madrid, London and Paris – not to mention the countless other sites around the world – demonstrate at least some understanding of news networks and the news values by which they operate,102 offering irresistibly spectacular attacks which the Western news media could by no means fail to report on rolling cycles. More than modern warfare, Paul Rutherford even suggests that 9/11 represents “postmodern warfare” in which “a low-tech band of warriors scored a massive symbolic victory by appropriating the technology of their foe”.103 To dismiss al Qaeda as medieval is thus not only to misunderstand the fronts on which the terrorists fight but to ignore the extent to which al Qaeda’s conflict is rooted in modernity.104 As Benjamin J. Barber puts it: “Imagine bin Laden without modern media: He would be an unknown desert rat. Imagine terrorism without its reliance on credit cards, global financial systems, modern technology, and the Internet: Terrorists would be reduced to throwing stones at local sheiks.”105 Unlike Bush, from the outset al Qaeda had understood the importance of media outlets in their arms race for global coverage. Throughout the campaign, bin Laden’s

Sifaoui, Inside Al Qaeda, p. 70. Scheuer, ‘The London Bombings’, p. 433. 101 Gray, Al Qaeda, p. 76. 102 The concept of news values represents a large and complex area of media and communication studies. To give a very brief definition, news values dictate which stories get picked up by networks on the grounds of specific characteristics such as relevance, proximity, rank, impact and significance to past or present. An event like 9/11 could not help but score highly in all of these categories and would thus guarantee its place on rolling news cycles. For more on news values see Gans’ classic study, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Vintage, 1980), ch. 5. For more up-to-date discussions of news values, see Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day! A History of Media and Communication in Britain (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy, News Values (Los Angeles, CA, & London: Sage, 2007). 103 Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion, p. 25. See also Lawrence, Messages to the World, p. xvi. 104 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 5. 105 Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (London: Corgi, 2003), p. xvi. 99

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use of Al Jazeera, “the most widely distributed and trusted Arab network”,106 demonstrated an understanding of his audience and how to reach it. His ability to make use of modern media channels and technology was fast becoming another tool in al Qaeda’s battle for support in the Middle East. As Hugh Miles put it, “first he hijacked airplanes, now he had hijacked the airwaves”.107 Where the White House vacillated in its response to Al Jazeera, al Qaeda capitalised on the confused media message emerging from the White House in late 2001, and recognised the importance of Al Jazeera in accessing a worldwide group of Arabic speakers. Moreover, given its large Arabic-speaking audience, bin Laden was able to sidestep the linguistic misunderstandings which continued to plague the Bush administration. His medievalist rhetoric targeted an audience more moved to sympathy by his calls to jihad in the name of pan-Arab unity than by the promise of Western democracy in a region which had seen the effects of such democracy in Iraq and Kuwait only a decade earlier, and Afghanistan for significantly longer. For those viewers, in the climate of post-9/11 and the build-up to war in Iraq, “suddenly to see Osama bin Laden calling for a holy war on satellite TV was dramatic timing par excellence”. As Christoph Günther observes, “in a society like Iraq where the experience of war and existential insecurity is deeply engraved, Jihadist images act as a visualization of the Manichean rhetoric and consistent distinction between the good ‘us’ and the bad ‘others’”.108 So entrenched was the use of channels such as Al Jazeera as part of their media strategy that the terrorists’ spokesman Ayman al-Zawahiri even explicitly acknowledged the role of the media, claiming that al Qaeda was “in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of the Umma”.109 Cyberjihad In addition to their use of satellite and cable news channels and their reliance on press-releases fed through to the mainstream media, another key media strategy for al Qaeda communications came in the form of the internet, a medium which was evolving at more or less the same time as al Qaeda began to emerge on the world stage. As Maura Conway describes it, the advent of Web 2.0 strategies which facilitated user-generated content coincided with rapid advances in broadband and computer technologies, placing the tools required to build powerful communications networks in the hands of ordinary users. The opportunities presented by the internet to connect to users in real time offered a direct challenge to monolithic news providers. The internet thus offered a level playing field in which the voice of the amateur was allowed to compete with that of the professional, making it an important platform to a series of radical new voices. Consequently, the advent of Web 2.0 “offered violent radicals the chance of Miles, Al-Jazeera, p. 131. Ibid., p. 131. 108 Christoph Günther, ‘The Land of the Two Rivers under the Black Banner: Visual Communication of Al-Qa’ida in Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 8.1 (2014), pp. 35–53 (p. 49). 109 James Hider and Stephen Farrell, ‘Al Qaeda Reveals Grand Plan as It Tries to Rein in Sheikh of Slaughter’, The Times, 13 October 2005, p. 42. 106 107

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altering their previously largely broadcast Internet presences”,110 shaping them into meaningful messages which could reach their target audiences directly without the need for established media infrastructures. While al Qaeda had of course heavily relied on the internet and online communications before the attacks in the USA, in the post-9/11 landscape, with its new capacities for decentred communications and user-generated content, they increased their use of the internet exponentially.111 The modern media landscape not only facilitated transnational logistics and planning but also allowed hitherto offline recruitment to shift into online platforms, offering a broader reach of its fundraising efforts.112 Indeed, from the outset, al Qaeda recognised the key role which the internet could play in their ongoing media war, assuring its “internet brothers” that “the media war with the oppressive crusader enemy” was to be a predominantly collaborative, and predominantly online, effort.113 In particular, the decentralised network of the internet worked well as a mode of communication for those who seek to connect with others in a global network without censorship, control, monitoring or restriction – in short, a communications network ideally suited for al Qaeda – in a vast online network ranging from traditional email to chat-rooms, forums or virtual message boards.114 The rapid dissemination networks and copy-and-paste capabilities were thus harnessed by the terrorists on the unpoliced highways of the internet, making it the “favorite platform for spreading jihadi fatwas”115 and offering replication of essentially the same message widely but consistently.116 In the context of ‘cyberjihad’, forums became opportunities to debate ideas and exchange information, while blog sites allowed users to post and repost articles sympathetic to the jihadi cause, offering free publicity and a means for communication across borders and even continents.117 Moreover, unlike traditional media networks, the decentralised internet allowed for a greater reach of terrorists through emails, instant messages, SMS and other means, and “the spread of such content across multiple platforms and in multiple formats mean[t] that it is increasingly difficult to combat”.118 As Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), warned in 2014, social media and communication services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter have become

110 Maura Conway, From Al-Zarqawi to Al-Awlaki: The Emergence of the Internet as a New Form of Violent Radical Milieu (ISODARCO, 2012), [accessed 15 December 2013]. 111 Ibid., p. 4. 112 Steven R. Morrison, ‘Terrorism Online: Is Speech the Same as It Ever Was?’ Creighton Law Review, 44.4 (2011), pp. 963–1002 (p. 963). See also Hsinchun Chen et al., ‘Uncovering the Dark Web: A Case Study of Jihad on the Web’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59.8 (2008), pp. 1347–59 (p. 1347). 113 Scheuer, ‘Coalition Warfare’, p. 81. 114 Weimann, ‘Cyber-Fatwas and Terrorism’, p. 769. 115 Ibid., p. 779. 116 Chen et al., ‘Uncovering the Dark Web’, p. 1348. 117 Conway, From Al-Zarqawi to Al-Awlaki, p. 6. 118 Ibid., p. 7.

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“the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us”.119 This is particularly true in the case of the ‘dark web’. While a relatively unknown concept to many, the dark web (or deep web, Undernet or invisible web, as it is variously called) represents a massive collection of ‘hidden’ data and sites operating beneath the internet, and which cannot be located through a simple Google search. In fact, according to some estimates a traditional search engine reveals only around 0.03 per cent of the total information available on the web: the rest is ‘dark’. The dark web constitutes a hidden underside which, already by 2001, was estimated to be some 500 times bigger than the traditionally understood internet.120 Sites in the dark web use encryption processes which mask the IP addresses of the server and can spoof the locations of both user and host server, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to monitor individual or even mass users. As such, it is obviously ideal for terrorists, since “intelligence from the Dark Web is scattered in diverse information repositories through which investigators need to browse manually to be aware of their content”.121 The connectivity of the internet, coupled with the anonymity of the dark web, thus offers jihadists an unprecedented tool for the expansion and intensification of extremist information and communication networks, comprising both the propaganda and the day-to-day logistics wings of organisations such as al Qaeda. The provision of online content also facilitates initial contact with jihadi networks more easily, meaning that radical ideas and content are no longer restricted to the most committed extremist. Rather, it can be upheld by what Brachman terms “jihobbyists” who, without formal ties to al Qaeda, nevertheless help to extend the reach of their message.122 Far from being relegated to dark corners or to sympathetic parties scattered around what Conway terms the “jihadisphere”,123 cyberjihad is consequently able to take advantage of the internet to overspill into conventional networks and social media platforms. As Weimann describes it: Postmodern terrorists are taking advantage of the fruits of globalization and modern technology – especially the most advanced communication technologies – to communicate, seduce, plan, and coordinate their deadly campaigns. In 1998, less than half of the organizations designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the U.S. State Department maintained websites; by the end of 1999, nearly all these terrorist groups had established their presence on the Net. By now, all active terrorist groups have 119 Robert Hannigan, ‘The Web Is a Terrorist’s Command-and-Control Network of Choice’, Financial Times, 3 November 2014, [accessed 13 November 2015]. 120 Michael K. Bergman, ‘White Paper: The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value’, Journal of Electronic Publishing, 7.1 (2001), p. 1, [accessed 22 October 2016]. 121 Chen et al., ‘Uncovering the Dark Web’, p. 1347. 122 Jarret M. Brachman, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2008), p. 19. 123 Conway, From Al-Zarqawi to Al-Awlaki, p. 5.

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established at least one form of presence on the Internet and most of them are using all formats of up-to-date online platforms – e-mail, chatrooms, e-groups, forums, virtual message boards, and resources like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Earth.124

In Pakistan, for example, it is known that previously it had been networks of madrasas who would form the focal point for terrorist information to spread. In this new online environment, however, “increasingly, many also see Twitter and Facebook as a chance to change their image and recruit members”.125 Another case in point is the emergence in 2004 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who rose from relative obscurity to worldwide fame in a little over four weeks between April and May of that year. By a combination of shocking violence and Internet savvy, Zarqawi was able to achieve what many global brands spend small fortunes trying to do: manipulate a medium to call attention to a brand. The internet allowed Zarqawi to build a recognisable image of al Qaeda very quickly which could both outline extremist ideologies to markedly broader groups of potential sympathisers and capitalise on this greater visibility to further the jihadist ‘brand’.126 Even if they are rooted in the promotion of a medieval ideal of a caliphate, online fatwas and cyberjihad adopt technological communications facilities which are anything other than medieval. Conclusions If, then, al Qaeda is such an obviously modern organisation using up-to-date technologies to spread its medieval message, it is logical to ask why they would accept their dismissal as ‘medieval barbarians’ with such enthusiasm? If they had the attention of mainstream western audiences and the technological capacity to reach them, why would they not resist such accusations by pointing out that, far from being medieval, al Qaeda was a thoroughly modern organisation capable of managing a logistically complex, multinational effort? Likewise, if al Qaeda’s infrastructure was reliant on all of the various tools and mechanisms of a globally connected world, why would they pursue an ideology of self-containment in the Middle East and a forceful rejection of Western intervention? The alacrity with which al Qaeda accepted their characterisation as medieval in fact makes logical sense only when viewed within the context of radical Islam’s broader claims and ideological goals, explored above. In part, the accusations of medieval backwardness serve as a handy means of camouflage, since they help to mask the technological sophistication of al Qaeda, offering an ideologically appealing simplicity, purity and adherence to Islam in its early stages of expansion. Such simplicity also helps to score rhetorical points against the West, too, since the decade-long manhunt for bin Laden seemed to ridicule the inability of coalition forces, with their massive technological superiority, to find and destroy al Qaeda as promised. When the conflict is viewed as one between ‘smart’ missiles, UAVs and a 124 125 126

Weimann, ‘Cyber-Fatwas and Terrorism’, pp. 768–9. Samira Shackle, ‘The Twitter Jihadis’, New Statesman, 9 August 2013, p. 17. Conway, From Al-Zarqawi to Al-Awlaki, p. 5.

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coalition of the best-funded militaries in the world against low-tech warriors allegedly equipped only with petrol bombs, mortars and improvised explosive devices, the ability of al Qaeda to remain unbroken and Osama bin Laden to elude capture for so long played neatly into bin Laden’s longstanding rhetoric that they were fighting a defensive war which necessitated jihad throughout the Muslim nation. Moreover, crucially, it helped to prove bin Laden’s claim that God was on their side and not that of Bush. The insistent medievalism of al Qaeda’s rhetoric, then, and the extent to which the organisation happily played up to Bush’s and the coalition’s various assertions of backwardness, all fit into a broader ideological position of anti-globalisation and anti-modernism which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, also plays up to the counterjihadists’ own fears. Benjamin Barber’s classic study of the central conflict between globalising market forces and traditionally local resistance to Westernisation, which he categorised (long before 9/11) as ‘Jihad versus McWorld’, brings out such a polarisation rather neatly. In the context of globalisation, the practical realities of everyday life mean that there are very few places in the world which are not in daily contact with some aspect of the transnational. As such, in Barber’s view, the forces of jihad are forced daily into contact with those of McWorld.127 In such a globalised, and westernised, world of multinational corporations, the retreat into medievalist isolation must offer significant appeal to the jihadists in their anti-Western ideology. The ‘warriors of Jihad’, then, are medieval not because of their backwardness but because they consciously position themselves in opposition to modernity, and thus stand against the cultural relativism of the modern west in order to align themselves rhetorically with an imagined community of a medieval umma fighting jihad against crusaders. Insistence on al Qaeda’s medievalism thus only strengthens the alleged differences between the West and the Middle East, not condemning but creating the jihadists as a force acting against modernity. “What can these enemies of the modern do but seek to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present?”128 In the context of the Islamic State’s claim to a Caliphate, and their subsequent destruction of both present landmarks and relics of the past, Barber’s words strike a chillingly prescient chord. The great irony, of course, is that the fiery rhetoric of medievalism used by the coalition forces as a means of underscoring a fundamental division leading to an inevitable clash of civilisations was not countered by al Qaeda, but happily embraced and retransmitted to mean precisely the same thing. It was, then, as part of a broader field of medievalist rhetoric that al Qaeda’s medieval slur found its most far-reaching effects. By insisting on a division of the world into a modern west and a medieval east, al Qaeda’s jihadist movement was able to transform the banal medievalisms of Bush’s coalition from slurs and insults into confirmation to his followers and would-be recruits that the world was facing not a new threat but a continuation of the historically rooted threat from the same old crusades and crusaders. As bin Laden himself gleefully declared in a press release from May 2002 which made several references to Bush’s own pronouncements: “We 127 128

Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld, p. 11. Ibid., p. xiv.

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praise God […] that they have announced explicitly that this is a Crusader war, so the banner is clear and henceforth there is only the trench of faith or the trench of unbelief.”129

129

Marlin, What Does Al-Qaeda Want? p. 47.

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6 “The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ”: Anders Behring Breivik and the Templar Knights

Pope Urban II and Pope Innocent III granted indulgence to all future Crusaders. The PCCTS, Knights Templars are Destroyers of Marxism and Defenders of Christendom. We are Crusaders, martyrs of the Church, selfless defenders of the weak and the blind. Anders Behring Breivik, writing as Andrew Berwick, July 20111

O

n 22 July 2011 the streets of central Oslo and the Island of Utøya were subjected to a sudden, violent, co-ordinated attack the likes and scale of which Norway had never seen in peacetime. First, at around 3.30 p.m., a car bomb exploded near the governmental offices on Regjeringskvartalet in central Oslo, killing eight and injuring more than 200 bystanders. A little under two hours later, taking advantage of the resultant chaos and confusion in the city centre, a gunman dressed in a police uniform began shooting attendees at a Labour Party summer camp on the island of Utøya, some twenty miles to the north-west of Oslo, killing a further sixty-nine people (all unarmed, and mostly teenagers) and injuring over 100 more.2 After a seventy-five-minute killing spree on the island, the gunman was surrounded by armed police officers and promptly surrendered, throwing down his weapons before being placed under arrest. Amid the chaos and the confusion, early news reports from the scene were quick to suggest that the attacks were carried out by Islamist extremists,3 not only because they followed a well-worn formula of recriminations and Islamist attacks seen elsewhere in the world but because the operation seemed so much like other Islamic terrorist operations. As Mattias Gardell comments, even if “lethal political violence in Norway has almost exclusively been perpetrated by far-right extremists,

Anders Behring Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, 2011,

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p. 1346.

2 For a full description of the brutal attacks, see Aage Borchgrevnik, A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Pages 1–6 cover the explosion, while pages 226–46 cover Breivik’s seventy-five-minute killing spree. 3 Indeed, several of the reports continued to assert links to Islamic terrorism even after Breivik’s arrest and confession. The front page of The Sun newspaper the following day, for example, clearly assigned the blame to al Qaeda.

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[…] terrorism experts, media, and politicians instantly blamed Islamic terrorists” for the attacks.4 Several contemporary commentators raced to speculate on what precisely had precipitated the latest terrorist attack. Immediate reports, such as that of Kristen Lowe of the Norwegian national newspaper Verdens Gang, which is headquartered near the explosion, suggested that it might have been retaliation for the controversial lampooning of the prophet Mohammed in a series of Danish cartoons that had been connected to Norway,5 or perhaps the presence of Norwegian troops in Libya and Afghanistan. The New York Times reported on the same day that Islamist group Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (Helpers of the Global Jihad) had claimed responsibility for the attacks. However implausible and vague their claim might have been, and even if the group might not actually have existed (as the New York Times article openly admitted), the rhetoric of Islamic terrorism seemed to fit the modus operandi – a co-ordinated bomb and shooting spree that targeted innocent civilians and attacked populated city centres with symbolic value.6 Even though an updated version of the New York Times report dismissed such claims as it became clear that Breivik was solely responsible, the article cites intelligence expert Brian Fishman, who claimed that even “if it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda”. Likewise, The Telegraph’s online edition from the same day reported on intelligence sources who, even after the arrest and confession of Breivik, refused to rule out the possibility of al Qaeda, or a sympathetic group, being behind the attacks, citing al-Zawahiri’s explicit threats to Norway in 2007.7 The US online news blog The Weekly Standard similarly reported that al Qaeda were responsible, claiming that “we don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra”.8 The Guardian’s rolling news coverage, fuelled by the necessity for up-to-the-minute coverage, enrolled a series of terrorism and security experts who speculated on the probable causes and responsible groups long before any real facts began to emerge. The 4 Mattias Gardell, ‘Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22/7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 26.1 (2014), pp. 129–55 (p. 130). 5 Jo Macfarlane, ‘People Were Jumping into the Water to Try and Escape the Norwegian Massacre Gunman’, Mail Online, 24 July 2011, [accessed 23 January 2015]. 6 Elisa Mala and J. David Goodman, ‘At Least 80 Dead in Norway Shooting’, The New York Times, 22 July 2011, [accessed 23 January 2015]. 7 Duncan Gardham, ‘Norway: Was Far-Right Group behind Attacks?’ The Telegraph, 22 July 2011, [accessed 23 January 2015]. D. Parvaz, ‘Blaming Muslims – Yet Again’, Al Jazeera, 23 July 2011, [accessed 22 January 2015]. 8 Thomas Joscelyn, ‘Terror Strikes Norway (Updated)’, Weekly Standard, 22 July 2011, [accessed 20 November 2015].

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consensus of the experts, even hours after the arrest of Breivik, continued to point to Islamic terrorism, posting links to other sites that explained why Norway might be targeted.9 In perhaps the most far-fetched explanation, amid several live reports that continued with their assertions of Islamic terrorist involvement, the bizarre claim was made by Gardham and Evans in The Sun that Breivik might have been a sleeper, “engaged by al Qaeda and put to sleep until he was ordered to commit the acts of terrorism”.10 In the face of these and other assumptions, Al Jazeera’s online site published an article by Dorothy Parvaz bemoaning the tendency of the Western press institutions to apportion blame to unspecified Muslims, observing that “moments after the explosion […] pundits and analysts alike had assigned blame to al Qaeda or an al Qaeda-like group (a close approximation will do, one can suppose)”.11 Despite the early reports of Islamist extremism, over the course of the afternoon both domestic and international news were scarcely able to mask their surprise at revelations that the gunman was a white, blond Norwegian. While, in response to perceived Islamic terrorist involvement, the press response had initially fallen back on a well-rehearsed formula in their news coverage, the arrest and immediate confession of Anders Behring Breivik prompted a new, and somewhat frantic, kind of questioning, based around a quest for explanations. “Without a Muslim perpetrator, columnists and pundits suddenly were less confident about labelling the act as terrorism or even politically motivated. Mainstream media overnight replaced their Islamic terrorism experts with psychiatrists.”12 As Penny notes, “no longer was the killer a criminal mastermind, part of a sinister ‘terror’ network – he was simply a ‘madman’, a ‘psycho’, a ‘lone nutter’”.13 Where news reports unquestioningly accepted the obvious motives of an attack by al Qaeda, Breivik’s killing spree was dismissed as the act of a madman “acting alone, and by that logic had absolutely nothing at all to do with the rise of far-right extremism in Europe and of popular Islamophobia across the West”.14 Over the following few days, as the dust began to settle and eyewitness accounts began to be collated, a nation in mourning found itself at the centre of a global media furore collectively trying to understand what precipitated the attacks. Breivik himself offered wildly inconsistent testimony to the police, but overall insisted that his actions were in defence of his country and thus politically motivated. He insisted to the police that he had acted as merely the first wave in a much wider – global, he even suggested – movement of Templar Knights. 9 Haroon Siddique and Hannah Godfrey, ‘Norway Attacks Rolling Coverage: Friday 22 July 2011’, The Guardian, 2011, [accessed 20 November 2015]. 10 These reports are recounted in Çitlioğlu, ‘Terrorism Prejudice Perception Management’, in Capacity Building in the Fight Against Terrorism, ed. Uğur Gürbüz (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2013), pp. 28–38 (p. 29). 11 Parvaz, ‘Blaming Muslims – Yet Again’. 12 Gardell, ‘Crusader Dreams’, pp. 130–31. 13 Laurie Penny, ‘Calling Breivik Mad Lets the Far Right off the Hook’, The Independent, 29 July 2011. 14 Ibid.

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However, once it became clear that Breivik was not, despite his protestations to the contrary, part of a vast terror network spanning the western world, it was even more difficult to understand his motivations. His attacks on his own compatriots made it clear that a new paradigm was needed in order to understand how a Norwegian national might have become so radicalised without coming to the attention of the authorities, and how he was able to carry out such horrific attacks on his own country, in whose name he was ostensibly operating. A Medievalist Manifesto In fact, Breivik had already offered such an explanation to the world in the form of what he rather grandiosely called his ‘manifesto’, a long document (part confession, part political manifesto) written under an anglicised version of his name – the Templar Knight Andrew Berwick – which he had attempted to distribute by email to 8,000–10,000 addresses immediately before his attacks.15 He had even, he boasted, contemplated sending his ‘book’ not only to fellow ‘patriots’ (other members of Far Right organisations whose contact details he harvested through Facebook) but also directly to parliamentary deputies themselves, with the justification that it was “important that our enemies know how we see what they are doing”.16 Rather than the major contribution to serious political thought which Breivik envisaged, his ‘manifesto’ was in reality a rambling, semi-coherent compendium comprising some 1,500 pages of angry and frustrated rants, diary entries, bomb recipes and attempts at serious political analysis, the majority of which was simply copied and pasted from online sources. As proof of Breivik’s desperation to achieve fame as an intellectual and celebrity, the manifesto even includes a rambling sixtyfour-page ‘interview’17 in which he asks himself pompous and grandiose questions such as “what should be our civilizational objectives for a perfect Europe?”18 At one point in his ‘interview’ he even compliments his own prowess as an interviewer (responding twice to his own question, in apparent sincerity, “that’s a good question”).19 After his interview, he concludes his online journal by mulling over his legacy, where he reassures himself that, despite an inevitable smear campaign by the “cultural Marxist propaganda” machine: I will always know that I am perhaps the biggest champion of cultural conservatism Europe has ever witnessed since 1950. I am one of many destroyers of cultural Marxism

15 Jacob Aasland Ravndal, ‘Anders Behring Breivik’s Use of the Internet and Social Media’, Journal Exit-Deutschland. Zeitschrift Für Deradikalisierung Und Demokratische Kultur, 2 (2013), pp. 172–85 (p. 182); Breivik, 2083, p. 1418. His attempt at mass distribution failed, according to Ravndal, because of a spam filter on his account preventing him from sending more than 1,000 emails per day; it was a delay which Ravndal claims might have saved the lives of many who had already left the building by 3.30 p.m., when he began his attacks. 16 Breivik, 2083, p. 1418. 17 Ibid., pp. 1349–413. 18 Ibid., p. 1385. 19 Ibid., pp. 1353, 1362.

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and as such; a hero of Europe, a savior of our people and of European Christendom–by default. A perfect example which should be copied, applauded and celebrated. The Perfect Knight I have always strived to be.20

What is immediately obvious from his manifesto is both his narcissism and his insecurity, witnessed by his determination to be remembered as an expert and an intellectual who deliberated avoided formal education in order, as he claims, to preserve ‘the purity’ of his philosophy.21 This philosophy is in reality a kind of pseudo-scholarly analysis of international relations which appears throughout his compendium as serious attempts at political theory (he lists political analysis, as well as snowboarding and Free Mason (sic), among his hobbies and interests).22 In reality, as he would later admit at trial, his ‘masterpiece’ was in reality more of a compendium of internet sources, of which he had written only around one-third. Forced into acknowledging the pompous tone of his manifesto, during his trial, when “pressed by the prosecution […] he was forced to admit that less than 40% of it was written by him. Most was copied and pasted from material on far-right blogs and Wikipedia.”23 Similarities between Breivik and Al Qaeda One curious aspect, however, of Breivik’s manifesto and his attacks is how strikingly they resemble al Qaeda, in terms of both his persistent medievalism and his ideology, a resemblance which highlights the great irony of both his, and the Far Right’s, use of medievalism. Referring to the long section of Breivik’s manifesto devoted to the exposition of his imagined army of counterjihadists, Hegghammer describes how: Breivik’s ideology has less in common with counterjihad than with its archenemy, al Qaeda. Both […] see themselves engaged in a civilizational war between Islam and the West that extends back to the Crusades. Both fight on behalf of transnational entities: the ‘ummah’ […] in the case of al Qaeda, and Europe in the case of Mr. Breivik. Both frame their struggle as defensive wars of survival. […] Both call themselves knights, and espouse medieval ideals of chivalry. Both lament the erosion of patriarchy and the emancipation of women.24

Indeed, Breivik openly acknowledges in his manifesto that the Knights Templar movement aims to operate in similar ways to al Qaeda,25 even suggesting that they had considered working in tandem since they both share the same ideology as Ibid., p. 1435 (my emphasis). Ibid., p. 1400. 22 Ibid., p. 1398. 23 Bojan Pancevski, ‘Loser Who Lived with His Mum; the Pathetic Life of Mass Killer Anders Breivik’, The Sunday Times, 22 April 2012, p. 20. 24 Thomas Hegghammer, ‘The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists’, The New York Times, 30 July 2011, p. SR5. 25 Breivik, 2083, p. 1261. 20 21

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“enemies of the EU/US hegemony”.26 In court on 17 April 2012 he openly expressed his admiration for the “cult of martyrdom” of al Qaeda,27 and under cross-interrogation on 18 April he revealed that, given that EU laws made it difficult to manufacture bombs, he had used the internet to study al Qaeda attacks, as well as Inspire magazine, to obtain knowledge about explosives and their use.28 He makes frequent references to these attacks, and particularly their beheadings and executions, throughout his compendium.29 Such a morbid interest in al Qaeda’s modus operandi might also partly account for his original plan to time his attack on the island with the arrival of Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Labour prime minister of Norway, whom he apparently intended to handcuff and execute with the bayonet of his rifle, filming the execution on his phone.30 According to Pidd’s documentation of the court records, he explained that he had planned to behead Bruntland with the bayonet while reading a text, before posting the film online, a plan with extraordinary similarities to the series of well-publicised al Qaeda, and more recently Islamic State, beheadings in the name of a jihadist medievalism. The fact that much of the rhetoric and ideology of the counterjihad movement operates as a mirror image of al Qaeda and IS offers an obvious irony. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recognised only one week after Breivik’s attacks, “in Breivik’s nostalgic view of the medieval world, Knights Templar resembles nothing so much as al Qaeda, another terrorist organization that is fundamentally opposed to the modern world”.31 Likewise, Suzanne Moore, writing in The Guardian, points out the similarities in many of Breivik’s core tenets. His quest for absolute values, his abhorrence of homosexuality and his anti-democratic political views, and most particularly his assertion of a dominant, patriarchal brand of masculinity and the repeal of women’s rights, offer close parallels with al Qaeda as an outdated mode of thinking “driven by an urge for purity and an absolute certainty”.32 As Hegghammer concludes, “Breivik’s worldview does not fit squarely into any of the established categories of right-wing ideology, like white supremacism, ultranationalism of Christian fundamentalism. Rather, it reveals a new doctrine of civilizational war that repreIbid., p. 959. David Charter, ‘I Was Inspired by Al-Qaeda to Expand Boundaries of Terror, Breivik Tells Court’, The Times, 18 April 2012, p. 25; David Blair, ‘“They Were Not Innocent. I Acted in Defence of My Culture. I Would Do It Again”’, The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2012, p. 13. 28 Helen Pidd, ‘Breivik: I Shot Utøya Victims Because EU Law Made It Hard to Make Bombs’, The Guardian, 19 April 2012, [accessed 29 July 2014]; Ravndal, ‘Anders Behring Breivik’s Use of the Internet and Social Media’, p. 179. 29 Breivik, 2083, pp. 66, 104, 109, 386, 430, 449, 554, 780. See also the table on pp. 423–5, which lists Islamicist attacks. 30 Pidd, ‘Breivik’. 31 Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN News, aired 31 July 2011. Transcript available at [accessed 15 June 2014]. 32 Suzanne Moore, ‘Breivik’s Ideology Is All Too Familiar: That’s Our Big Problem’, The Guardian, 18 April 2012, [accessed 29 July 2014]. 26 27

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sents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of al Qaeda.”33 Daniel Wollenberg similarly observes that “the goal of Breivik’s ‘crusade’ is not to conquer the Holy Land nor to subdue Islamic sovereignties but to establish a kind of European sacral wholeness”.34 In some ways, the Christendom of both Breivik and the counterjihad movement is thus a white, western version of Osama bin Laden’s umma, enlisting resistance fighters in the defence of a pan-national entity believed to be under threat and redeemable by unquestioning faith.35 Thus, just like the banal medievalism of Bush and al Qaeda, Breivik and the counterjihad movement use the medieval as a rallying point to gather together likeminded ‘cultural conservatives’. “This particular Christian Europe”, observes Roger Cohen, “is just as fantastical as a restored 7th-century dominion of the caliph. Bin Laden inveighed against ‘crusaders’. Breivik attended a 2002 meeting to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order.”36 In appealing to the Knights Templar as an attempt to offer historical justification for his planned attacks, Breivik tried to reinvent a medieval institution into which he projected his own medievalist fantasy. Anders Breivik’s Medievalism As far as medievalism is concerned, of particular interest was not only the similarity between the methods of the extreme right and those of al Qaeda, which many of the commentators on the live coverage observed, but also Breivik’s extensive use of medievalism and medievalist discourse throughout his manifesto in order to frame his worldview of a white, Christian Europe struggling against a new Islamic invasion. His ‘manifesto’, pretentiously entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence37 and released online to coincide with his attacks, begins in the present by focusing on the present-day threats to this white, Christian Europe. He identifies the major enemy to Europe – ‘Category A traitors to the nation’, as he terms them – not as al Qaeda but as the adherents of ‘cultural Marxism’,38 a term originating with the Frankfurt School which has later been reprised by the right wing as, some suggest, a catch-all term “to account for things they disapprove of ”.39 Hegghammer, ‘The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists’. Daniel Wollenberg, ‘The New Knighthood: Terrorism and the Medieval’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 5 (2014), pp. 21–33, p. 28. 35 Roger Cohen, ‘Breivik and His Enablers’, New York Times, 25 July 2011. 36 Ibid. 37 The title 2083 refers to Breivik’s belief, also copied from other bloggers, that this date would represent the moment when the ‘Cultural Marxists’ whom Breivik believes to be in power will fall after a ‘Cultural Conservative’ uprising, bringing about mass deportation of Muslims. See Breivik, 2083, p. 803. 38 Ibid., pp. 4–5. See also pp. 11–60, in which he uses a cut-and-pasted copy of William S. Lind’s Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology to offer an ‘intellectual’ history of the Frankfurt School as ‘cultural Marxists’. 39 Jason Wilson, ‘“Cultural Marxism”: A Uniting Theory for Right-Wingers Who Love to Play the Victim’, The Guardian, 19 January 2015, [accessed 26 January 2015]. 33

34

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It is under the umbrella term ‘cultural Marxism’, the liberal multiculturalist agenda which allegedly seeks to undermine European identity, that Breivik rails about the so-called Islamisation of Europe, which threatens to turn the continent into “Eurabia”.40 In his introduction, to quote only one example, Breivik identifies political correctness and multiculturalism as the greatest threat to Europe, arguing that: multiculturalism (cultural Marxism/political correctness), as you might know, is the root cause of the ongoing Islamisation of Europe which has resulted in the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe through demographic warfare (facilitated by our own leaders). This compendium presents the solutions and explains exactly what is required of each and every one of us in the coming decades. Everyone can and should contribute in one way or the other; it’s just a matter of will.41

It is, however, in the rambling incoherence of his manifesto that Breivik’s medievalism really begins to emerge most clearly. Having begun in the present, he very quickly jumps back into the medieval to root the current Islamic threat as part of a broader medieval project. His writing suggests a recurring interest in the Middle Ages: his attempted political analysis comprises vague ideas about the Crusades (such as a forty-page section called Islam 101 which identifies the roots of Islamism in the Crusades, but which was copied in its entirety from extremist websites such as Citizen Warrior and JihadWatch) and his discussion of jus primae noctis42 demonstrates a rather superficial understanding of the period. In his manifesto he writes: “I am one of many destroyers of cultural Marxism and as such a hero of Europe, a savior of our people and of European Christendom – by default.”43 Outside of his manifesto, too, his various discussions in the years before the attacks also point to a reliance on medieval worldviews which meld vague ideas about Christian knights with his neomedievalism. In his study of Breivik’s earlier years, Aage Borchgrevnik recounts one alleged conversation between Breivik and a well-known TV star in a bar in downtown Oslo in 2010 in which he “immediately began lecturing about Muslims and immigration policy. The celebrity tried to signal that he was not interested. Breivik spoke about crusades and Knights Templar.”44 On another occasion in October 2010 at the Palace Grill, he reportedly boasted to one customer that he was writing a book (presumably his manifesto) about knights (which it wasn’t), claiming to “be inspired by chivalric literature”, though, when pressed, his knowledge of the Middle Ages once again proved to be somewhat sketchy. “He had never heard of The Song of Roland, but he knew that Ivanhoe was a 40 Again, this concept is not original, but is copied from blogger Fjordman, a regular contributor to the counterjihad blog Gates of Vienna. 41 Breivik, 2083, p. 9. 42 Ibid., p. 158. 43 Ibid., p. 1435. Also quoted in Catherine E. Shoichet, ‘Ancient Knights Templar Name Used in Modern Criminal Crusades’, CNN, 29 July 2011, [accessed 10 May 2012]. 44 Borchgrevnik, A Norwegian Tragedy, p. 9.

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novel about knights.”45 He also bought the domain names thenewknighthood.com and thenewknighthood.net, but seemingly never got around to setting them up.46 According to Borchgrevnik’s account, as well as details given in the manifesto, Breivik’s preparations deploy a range of medievalisms which perpetually confuse Christian knighthood, Norse warriors, cinematic cowboys and modern soldiers. He wanted to take his last communion before the operation at Frognar Church, which he called his “martyr’s mass”.47 On the day of the attack, duly cleansed like a Christian knight, but dressed as a policeman, he wore boots with Black & Decker drill bits cut into the soles like spurs (for close combat, which he named ‘melée fighting’ after a term from World of Warcraft). However, he fused his pseudo-Christian knighthood with references to Norse mythology, calling his outfit “Loki’s Armour” and carving the name Mjolnir, after Thor’s hammer, in runic letters onto his Glock. Likewise, his motorbike was called Sleipner after Odin’s eight-legged horse, and his Ruger rifle Gungnir, after Odin’s spear.48 In a curious (though probably unintentional) twist, even the van which Breivik rented for the bombing was from a company called Viking rentals. In court, he outlined his preparations with reference to another wellknown medieval hero, explaining that his process of naming weapons came from “El Cid [who] was the biggest hero in Spain and he had a sword that he gave a name to: he is not the only one. I did the same.”49 These deliberate medievalisms are then interspersed with long sections copied from Wikipedia and online sources such as the conservative thinktank the Free Congress Foundation, hate group websites or other dubious sources, which he uses to offer a reclassification of Islamic terror as the familiar clash of civilisations between East and West. His assertion of the clash of incompatible civilisations thus reinterprets contemporary multicultural Europe as a culture embroiled in a continued struggle against an Islamic ‘invasion’ within a purportedly ‘Christian’ Europe. His assertions are thus used to offer both context and historical legitimacy for the counterjihad movement of which he claims to be part. According to such logic, counterjihad is established not as a modern resistance but – given the apparent longevity of the struggle between Christians and Muslims – a logical continuation of an initially medieval project, using precisely the same medievalist rhetoric as that used by al Qaeda (see Chapter 5). As Breivik ambitiously claims, “The PCCTS’s [the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, or Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the original name of the Knights Templar] history is a journey of sacrifice, spanning almost a thousand years. Through it all, certain characteristics have remained consistent – strength and honour, courage and martyrdom. The 45 Ibid., p. 12. It is unclear whether this is the same occasion recounted by Breivik in his manifesto in which he is accused of ‘idealism’ at a party. Breivik, 2083, p. 1417. 46 Ravndal, ‘Anders Behring Breivik’s Use of the Internet and Social Media’, p. 181. As of 2015, the websites continue to be defunct. 47 Breivik, 2083, p. 1424; Borchgrevnik, A Norwegian Tragedy, p. 23. 48 Borchgrevnik, A Norwegian Tragedy, pp. 141, 168, 174, 180. See also Breivik’s curious CV on p. 1397–400 of his manifesto in which he lists the names of his weapons. 49 David Charter, ‘Breivik Reveals Plot for Beheading Labour Leader’, The Times, 20 April 2012, p. 32.

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current need for these principles has lead [sic] to the re-founding of this ancient Christian European military order.”50 However, while discussing the proposed war to be waged on Islam, Breivik reframes his crusade as a self-defence issue, in a reversal of racism typical of the far right, as will be discussed in Chapter 7: Our current struggle is based on a pre-emptive struggle (self defence). […] This involves a Crusade, or to use a more modern phrase; an anti-Jihad campaign, preventing the continuation of the genocides against the Maronite, Assyrian, Coptic and other Middle Eastern Christian peoples and restoring parts of Anatolia under Greek and Armenian rule once again. Launching crusades to counter ongoing Jihads (there are 20+ Jihad fronts around the world) is acceptable …

Breivik’s various medievalisms, therefore, seek to frame his planned attacks as a justified continuation of an anti-jihadist struggle in the modern world, placing himself (as a self-titled Templar Knight) as part of a broader struggle against a perceived Islamic threat. Closer examination of both his manifesto and his trial records suggest the extent to which a neomedievalist worldview offered him a way to explain current world events. The banal medievalism of Crusades, Templars and jihad thus offered Breivik a parallel fantasy world of shared heritage, a myth of racial purity and a false sense of national identity. The PCCTS and the Knights Templar It was his allegations, however, that he was engaged in a powerful transnational network of Poor Soldiers of Christ which generated a great deal of press coverage both after his bombing and shooting spree and again during the trial. Breivik insisted, both in his compendium and in various social media comments, on the existence of “a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties”51 in which he played an important part as “Sigurd the Crusader, a modern-day knight of an ancient order on a mission to ‘cleanse’ Europe of Muslims”.52 It is, then, in the context of the rise of the radical right in online platforms, the proliferation of social media networks (and their ability to sidestep traditional, mainstream media platforms) and the interconnected medieval language used by the counterjihad bloggers that Breivik’s banal medievalism, carried out in the self-styled role of a latter-day Templar knight, assume a new significance. The association between the far right and medievalist fantasy is in fact a

Breivik, 2083, p. 816. Andrew Brown, ‘Anders Breivik’s Spider Web of Hate’, The Guardian, 7 September 2011, [accessed 6 December 2011]. 52 Ryan Parry, ‘EDL Brit: I’m Not to Blame for Oslo Horror; Blogger “Inspired” Breivik Manifesto’, The Mirror, 30 July 2011, p. 9. 50 51

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longstanding one.53 Alan Sykes’ 2004 book The Radical Right in Britain54 features on its cover a knight bearing a large shield emblazoned with St George’s Cross, and Helen Solterer demonstrates traces of medievalism in the French Far Right as early as the 1930s.55 Even so, it was not the quest for legitimacy typical of the far right that interested Breivik, but a desperate desire to be a knight and prove himself to the counterjihad movement that he admired so deeply. It was thus in the context of a new, online, ‘network of hatred’ that Breivik’s own, ultimately murderous, medievalist ideology was forged.56 Brought about by a mixture of paranoia and the belief in an ineluctable Clash of Civilizations between a homogeneous Christian West and an inscrutable Muslim East, Breivik’s beliefs are not necessarily born of, but clearly emerge within, what the Guardian’s Andrew Brown terms a “spider’s web of hate”.57 In Breivik’s mind, he was not a lone wolf and sole exemplar of the perfect knight; rather, his attacks were to form part of a broader crusade to be undertaken alongside his fellow brothers-in-arms, whose approval he so desperately seeks throughout his manifesto. His fervent belief in the existence of the reawakened Order of Knights Templar seemingly began a decade earlier, as a result of an indistinct meeting with three men in London to which he vaguely alludes in his manifesto, and which he sometimes identifies as the launch of the new Templars.58 His manifesto describes his first meeting with the then nascent ‘Knights Templar’ movement back in 2002, where he met his ‘mentor’, an Englishman named Richard, who allegedly asked him to write the compendium to outline the duties of the perfect knight.59 The group was made up of what Breivik called ‘like-minded’ cultural conservatives, whom he describes somewhat improbably as “some of the most brilliant political and military tacticians of Europe”.60 His belief in the existence of this group of PCCTS thus came to inform much of his manifesto and court testimony, in which he claimed to belong to a European-wide group of knights of which he was a “cell commander”. As Daniel Wollenberg describes it, in one of the most insightful articles on Breivik’s medievalist fantasy, his banal medievalism of the Knights Templar does not resurrect the medieval Knights Templar but instead “uses their name, history and symbology as a legitimation of his positions, a moral defense of his goals, and a cementing of group cohesion, attempting to bring together like-minded cohorts”.61 53 For a detailed discussion of the logic underpinning the right-wing uses of the crusades, see Wollenberg, ‘The New Knighthood’, pp. 28–31. 54 Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 55 Helen Solterer, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2010), pp. 2–4. 56 It is worth emphasising at this point that I am by no means attempting to lay the blame for Breivik’s actions at the door of any single group. Instead, my argument is that it was the self-referential ‘bubble’ of the online counterjihad movement which furnished Breivik with the proof necessary to prop up his own beliefs. 57 Brown, ‘Anders Breivik’s Spider Web of Hate’. 58 David Blair, ‘I Was Inspired by a Brilliant English Mentor, Says Breivik’, The Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2012, p. 20. See also Breivik, 2083, p. 1414. 59 Breivik, 2083, pp. 1378–9. 60 Ibid., p. 1378. 61 Wollenberg, ‘The New Knighthood’, p. 24.

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In his video manifesto, Breivik sets out a longwinded and grandiose explanation of the purpose and objectives of his imaginary group of Templars: The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, referred to as the Knights Templar, was re-founded in April 2002 in London, England as a PanEuropean Crusader Movement, as a European indigenous Rights Movement and as a War Crimes Tribunal. KT acts as a War Crimes Tribunal through its independent and self-sustaining single cell network of Justiciar Knights whose purpose it is to target Category A and category B multiculturalist/cultural Marxist traitors.

According to Breivik, then, the purpose for the resurrected order of knights is not, or at least not only, to fight an ongoing war against Islam itself. In any case, a war with Islam itself would have been one which Breivik was certainly not in a position to fight – the journal section of his manifesto recounts his failed attempts to connect with the criminal underground of Prague, a project which he would eventually abandon.62 Instead, his objectives were to attack soft targets within Europe whom he accuses of being ‘traitors’ in the Knights’ capacity as a self-appointed War Crimes Tribunal. As such, the medieval order of knights becomes transformed into some kind of grotesque reversal of the Nuremberg trials. Following these trials, Breivik sets out his vision for the future of the Knights Templar in Europe: The primary objective of the Knights Templar Europe is to seize political and military power from the multiculturalist elites of Western Europe for the purpose of banishing Islam from Europe and to implement cultural-conservative doctrines. The ongoing European civil war between the multiculturalist elites on one side and their people on the other whose resistance is manifested through revolutionary conservatives is estimated to last through phase 1 (1999–2040), phase 2 (2040–60) and phase 3 (2060–83).63

Breivik’s written manifesto and his descriptions of his plans are thus riddled with vague medievalisms, but come to centre on the existence of his alleged group of Templar Knights. So entrenched is his belief that he is not acting like a knight but has actually become one that he consistently refers to his planned attacks as preparatory missions for martyrdom, and weaves his vague medievalisms, recounted above, into an elaborate story of self-deception in which others around him are “egotistical career cynicists” obsessed with material possessions,64 while he himself is enacting a kind of modern-day contemptus mundi.65 Long sections of the online diary in his compendium recount his fears that his actions might not be in keeping with his self-styled role as a Perfect Knight, or that other (unnamed and probably fictional) members of the PCCTS might approve or disapprove of his personal crusade or his decision Breivik, 2083, pp. 1421–2. 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence by Andrew Breivik, 2013, [accessed 29 July 2014]. 64 Breivik, 2083, p. 659. See also his dismissal of his friends (p. 1424) and his sister, Elisabeth (p. 1387, p. 1118), and his criticism of consumer culture which overlooks nationalist politics (pp. 804–6). 65 Ibid., p. 1118. See also p. 1396. 62 63

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to host “two high class model whores” and drink a bottle of Château Kirwan 1979 as part of his “last martyrdom celebration”.66 The court trial, however, would seriously undermine both his compendium as well as his assertion of a broader network of knights. As Arthur Bright reported, initially the reference to the group was taken seriously. Bright’s coverage of Breivik’s arrest reported that “the [Templar] organization that Breivik claims to be a member of is equally mysterious. Breivik describes the organization as ‘a leaderless network, made to be self-driven cells’.”67 Even so, during questioning, he was unable to name a single other member of the group, though he did suggest that his ‘English mentor’ could be found living in London.68 Throughout the trial his assertions slowly began to unravel. In its early stages, on 6 April 2012, he immediately denied the existence of the Knights Templar, insisting that “the description of the Knights Templar with the medal system, uniform, rituals, principles and titles is nothing more than a suggestion for a future – it does not exist”.69 However, on 17 April he returned to his earlier stance, claiming that the Knights Templar “amounted to three active cells, each of one person, of which he was one”.70 The following day in court, he again asserted the existence of the Knights Templar, claiming to have “helped ‘refound’ the ancient military order as a force to fight immigration and multiculturalism in Europe”.71 Later on the same day, under further questioning, he retracted his earlier testimony in which he admitted that the network didn’t exist, this time claiming “I haven’t made up anything. What is in the compendium [his manifesto] is correct.”72 Warming to his rhetorical theme, he went on to describe himself as “rising to be ‘commander of a cell’ of the Knights Templar” but later changed his mind again and “admitted that he was the sole member of the cell he commanded. There were, apparently, two other ‘one-man cells’ in Norway.”73 Finally, after a long sequence of retractions and about-turns, he finally admitted that most of his information about the Knights Templar came not from secret meetings of the Knights but rather from Wikipedia.74 Over the course of questioning and trial, then, the only consistency was Breivik’s inconsistent testimony. Throughout “he gave conflicting evidence about the group and his role within it. […] He also failed to explain how he came up with his estimation that there were 15 to 80 members in KT but insisted there were more than

Ibid., p. 1434. Arthur Bright, ‘Why Does Norway’s Breivik Invoke the Knights Templar?’ Christian Science Monitor, 18 April 2012, [accessed 23 July 2014]. 68 Bright, ‘Why Does Norway’s Breivik Invoke the Knights Templar?’ 69 ‘Breivik: Terrorist Group Lies’, The Sun, 6 April 2012, p. 34. 70 Charter, ‘I Was Inspired by Al-Qaeda’. 71 Bright, ‘Why Does Norway’s Breivik Invoke the Knights Templar?’ 72 ‘Breivik “Inspired by Christian Knights”’, The Mirror, 19 April 2012, p. 14. 73 Blair, ‘They Were Not Innocent’. 74 Ibid. Indeed, the sections of his manifesto which are not directly lifted from other sources do contain a series of references, the bulk of which are to Wikipedia articles. 66 67

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15.”75 Having alternated between vehement insistence on the group’s existence and subsequent admission of his fabrication, on 22 April he even made the surprising claim that he himself had founded the Knights Templar movement.76 Paul Ray and Richard the Lionheart Among all of his equivocation, however, one consistency in Breivik’s testimony was to set alarm bells ringing across the online counterjihad groups which will be discussed in Chapter 7. Throughout his manifesto, and again in police questioning, Breivik’s attempts to corroborate his membership of the Knights Templar network centred on his connection with his ‘English mentor’, whom he mentions in his manifesto as “Richard the Lionhearted” or elsewhere coyly says “let’s call him Richard”, and who, Breivik claims, invited him into the network in April or May 2002.77 Newspaper coverage began to report on Breivik’s claim that the meeting in London was designed “to reconstitute the Knights Templar” and his boasts of being named as ‘The Crusader’ by the group.78 In his first court appearance he once again told the courtroom that “he and three other right-wing fanatics, including a Brit called ‘Richard the Lionheart’, founded an anti-Muslim network”.79 Given the international attention paid to the Norway attacks, of course, it was not long before Breivik’s insistence on a connection with the British Lionheart led to a fairly obvious candidate in Paul Ray (real name Paul Adam Cinato), a British expatriate who hosts a far-right, anti-Muslim blog under the pen-name Lionheart. Though once affiliated with the English Defence League (though there is some confusion about whether his role in the EDL was as a founding member or merely an early adherent), in 2009 Ray left both the organisation and the UK, settling in Malta. According to his blog, his departure was to avoid persecution from jihadist crusaders, though a 2011 article in The Telegraph suggests that his departure was in fact a response to inquiries on behalf of the Luton police.80 Claims of concrete links between Breivik and Ray quickly spread across the mainstream UK media in the days and weeks following Breivik’s attacks. The meeting to which Breivik refers was described by Matthew Taylor in The Guardian as “the 75 Helen Pidd, ‘Anders Behring Breivik Trial, Day Three – Wednesday 18 April’, The Guardian, 18 April 2012, [accessed 10 May 2012]. 76 Pancevski, ‘Loser Who Lived with His Mum’, p. 20. 77 Breivik, 2083, pp. 1379, 1414. 78 Ryan Parry, ‘Norway Massacre: Anders Behring Breivik Plotted Killing Spree for Nine Years’, The Mirror, [accessed 10 May 2012]. See also John Stevens, ‘Anders Behring Breivik Posted YouTube Video 6 Hours before Norway Attacks’, Mail Online, [accessed 10 May 2012]. 79 ‘Breivik “Inspired by Christian Knights”’. 80 Duncan Gardham, ‘Oslo Attacks: EDL Member Paul Ray Admits He May Have Been Anders Breivik’s Inspiration’, The Telegraph, 29 July 2011, [accessed 18 February 2014].

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founding meeting” for the resurrected Knights Templar.81 Within a few days of the Oslo attacks, police in Malta had already brought in Paul Ray for questioning over his connection to Breivik.82 Speaking to Associated Press reporters, Ray “confirmed the existence of a loose group of anti-Islamic extremists inspired by the Knights Templar, a Crusader-era fighting force known for battling Islam. But he said Breivik is not associated with it.”83 In the same interview Ray also stressed that “he never met Breivik and was horrified by the killings”,84 though he conceded that Breivik might have tried to “follow his lead”, acknowledging the possibility that “his ‘Richard the Lionhearted’ blog inspired Breivik’s rambling manifesto which was published online to justify his terror attacks”. Ray insisted on their connection as a one-sided affair: “I am being implicated as his mentor. I definitely could have been his inspiration. But what he did was pure evil. I could never use what he has done to further my beliefs. Breivik has dressed himself up in that garb but what he has done does not equate to anything I am involved in.”85 Though initially instrumental in the early days of the EDL, Ray’s current involvement in the counterjihad movement seems to be conducted largely online, coming in the form of his Lionheart blog and as the self-styled leader of the AOTK (Association of Templar Knights). Despite his protestations to the contrary, his Lionheart blog clearly outlines many of the same medievalisms and political ideas as Breivik’s manifesto. In one blog post, entitled “Knights Templar – 21st Century Christian Crusaders”, Ray labels his ‘army’ of new Templar Knights as “Gods [sic] Army on Earth”, calling for “a revival and resurgence of the legendary Army of Christian Warriors, the ‘Knights Templar’s’ [sic]”.86 Ray goes on to suggest that Europeans are in fact witnessing a direct replay of the Crusades, claiming that: The World has entered a new phase in human history with Moslem’s [sic] soldiers on the march across the entire Globe, seeking to conquer our lands and take our civilized World back into the ‘Dark Ages’ under the suppressive dark demonic force of Islam. The call for Holy war against non-Moslem’s [sic] has gone out to the entire Islamic world and is being answered with Moslem’s [sic] around the world uniting as a global ‘Islamic Religious army’, rising up against the entire non-Moslem world. They are seeking for [sic] the total destruction of our Judeo/Christian way of life so that they can enforce Allah’s will – ‘Islam’ upon the World. Their aim is to conquer our lands,

81 Matthew Taylor, ‘More Britons Face Questions over Links to Utøya Killer Anders Breivik’, The Guardian, 1 September 2011, p. 7. 82 Parry, ‘Blogger “Inspired” Breivik Manifesto’; Gardham, ‘Oslo Attacks’. 83 Simon Haydon, ‘“Knights Templar” Says No Norway Tie’, Yahoo News, 2011,

[accessed 29 July 2014]. 84 Taylor, ‘More Britons Face Questions’. 85 Parry, ‘Blogger “Inspired” Breivik Manifesto’. 86 Paul Ray, ‘Lionheart: Knights Templar – 21st Century Christian Crusaders’, Lionheart, 2007, [accessed 28 July 2014].

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enforce Islamic Law (Sharia law) upon our Nations and take our wives and children as their ‘spoils of war’.87

His various posts, often long, rambling and with only a passing knowledge of the history on which he relies, rewrite the history of the West as one characterised by a clash between the “West and the Rest”.88 Thus, Ray-as-Lionheart invokes a new Christendom as a league of “Civilized Nations”, in a long speech which seems to be an attempt to rework Pope Urban II’s 1095 speech at Clermont. Such fraught geopolitics, he argues, call for a ‘re-awakening of the Templar Order’ (overlooking the relatively minor role played by the Templar movement in England). In an extract worth quoting in full, he combines the modern ‘struggle’ with its medieval reflection in the crusades: It is now time to shake the dust off of our rich military Templar history, embrace it and except [sic] the ‘mantle’ given from God to the European people centuries ago, the mantle and mandate to become a Christian Army who will serve Him their Master in defense [sic] of the Holy Land and the Christian world. The Christian world must never let there [sic] light that shines brightly ever be stamped out until the time in the future that the end is revealed and Our God is victorious. We must stand together and let His light shine through us until the end. The Knights Templar’s [sic] are the people God chose and anointed to be His Army on Earth, they are the torch bearers who have carried the mantle throughout the ages. They have been the guardians and protectors of the Christian civilized world during this time, but as our World stands on the brink of destruction at the hands of Moslem’s [sic], my question is: “Where are the ‘original’ Knights Templar’s, Gods [sic] Army on Earth now, it is time you came out of the shadows and helped your fellow country men [sic]? Where is the support from within the ranks of the Templar Army in Britain?89

The similarities between Ray’s call here and Breivik’s invocation of the Templars in support of his ‘martyrdom’ are striking. What is perhaps equally alarming is the enthusiasm of Lionheart’s online supporters. Comments and responses to the call to arms varied, but were overwhelmingly supportive, such as one user who reiterated the “need to awaken the crusader spirit or perish”. Likewise, one respondent suggested that “a little Templar action on your part over there [i.e. in the UK] now would be good so that we in the US don’t have to deal right yet with the crap you lads are putting up with because you laid down too early”. In the same post he asks “Where is the spirit of the original Lionheart when you need him, except in the person of the present-day Lionhearts who are being railroaded by your PC government speech police.” Another found solidarity in his claim admitting that “while I have had thoughts similar to yours and Highlander’s [another commenter who also Ray, ‘Lionheart’. Scruton, The West and the Rest. It is interesting to note here that Roger Scruton was also one of the distinguished guests invited to a Traditional Britain Group (TBG) event held on 20 February 2015. The TBG are another organisation forming part of the online counterjihad movement, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. 89 Ray, ‘Lionheart’. 87

88

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seems to run a counterjihad-inspired blog] for years, I had not found many who held the same ideals, values, and thoughts like I do. In the past few months, I have learned that there are many of us who willingly wish to take up the Cross.”90 Others were more pragmatic, such as one who proposed that “all of us crusaders or new Knight Templars […] pull [sic] our money together buy a couple thousand squar [sic] acres in South Dakota, Wyoming or Montana, build a legitimate castle and start our Templar state once more.”91 Another anonymous poster suggested that “At least we can form a modern order of warrior monks like the Templars to protect Chrisitans [sic] now and maybe fight Saracens in the future.” Tyler “totally agreed”: “I am a Christian and I think there needs to be a Crusade soon. We need to arm ourselves and fight back […] call a Crusade and kill all of them. Deus Vult.” Another commented “I agree that the day is coming when we Christians are going to have to take up arms to defend our selves [sic] as well as our religion from the redical [sic] muslims. Our holy book the Bible calls it the Armagedon [sic] and it is coming.”92 In fact, in the context of overwhelming support, even those opposing Ray’s proposal for a new order of Templars objected not to the (essentially genocidal) declarations that all Muslims should be killed, but in many cases to Lionheart’s claim to be a new Templar on the grounds that they believed themselves to be the legitimate inheritors of Templar knighthood. In some cases such claims were founded on rather implausible heritage, such as the US militiaman mentioned above, who drew his authority from alleged genealogical links to Richard I, “a real ‘Uncle’ (through the Henry’s [sic]) of 800 years ago”, and by dint of being “a member of the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne”.93 FitzAlan, too, claimed to have “ties to the Templars and to the man responsible for their demise, Philip the Fair”. In other cases, however, the objections came from those who quibbled not with the politics but with Ray’s allegedly erroneous understanding of modern knighthood. This included one who suggested that his Order of New Knighthood attempted to do the same thing, directing readers to his own blog, anewknighthood. blogspot.com.94 Another was Luis de Matos, an active blogger, amateur historian and photographer who contributes to a range of sites claiming to offer evidence for the continuation of the Templars after their dissolution,95 who accused Lionheart of being not a Templar but “at most […] an ill informed [sic] crusader”. Ibid. Ibid. 92 Comments all drawn from