The seemingly fantastical world of the Middle Ages has held western popular culture in fascination since (at least) its nostalgic reimagining by Victorian antiquarians.
European medieval imagery or narratives, partly popularized in the early to mid-20th century, with works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, still permeates popular culture. “The medieval” is used to evoke both magical stories for all ages, and mature stories featuring senseless violence.
Unfortunately, there is also a sinister side to our collective love affair with knights and dragons of yore. White nationalist and alt-right groups have taken up the stories, imagery and histories of what is popularly imagined in the West as the Middle Ages to visualize the existence of a homogeneous white Europe, whether imagined as fully Christian or neo-pagan Europeans.
Read more: Understanding the Crusades from an Islamic perspective
Revisiting the meaning of the Middle Ages, and how medieval imagery and narratives are appropriated and understood today, is therefore necessary for an accurate snapshot of the European and global historical period, and its misuses.
As a scholar raised as a member of the Métis Nation in B.C. (though my current documentation is insufficient for citizenship), some of my work has been concerned with what it means to decolonize medieval studies. With literature professor Elizabeth Edwards, I have examined how medieval studies can gain insight from Indigenous worldviews and perspectives.
Here, I consider the impact of white supremacy on historical and contemporary scholarly and popular understandings of the Middle Ages, and focus on how scholars are shifting the narrative with critical race and Indigenous approaches.
White nationalism
Critical race scholars like Dorothy Kim and Eduardo Ramos have highlighted the colonial histories of medieval studies and its associated myths and stereotypes.
As critical race literature scholar Matthew X. Vernon notes in The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, white supremacist theorists have seen medieval England as “available for being imaginatively constructed as an era of racial purity and military subjugation on ‘foreign peoples.’” Such “extrapolations of the Middle Ages” have served to “racializ[e] bodies and then fi[x] horizons of expectations for what a race could achieve.”
Medievalist scholars Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade note that some American and English writers rebranded “Anglo-Saxon” to include false narratives around white racial superiority. This use has perpetuated false ideas of what it means to be “native” to Britain, and by extention to claim special “white” belonging and rights in settler colonial societies.
Indigenizing approaches to the Middle Ages
The idea of the Middle Ages is arguably tightly interwoven with settler colonial ideology. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars with a decolonial focus have begun to understand the European medieval period through global historical and Indigenous perspectives.
How have Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars approached the Middle Ages from a decolonial lens?
1. Red Reading
“Red Reading,” a form of literary analysis that uses Indigenous approaches and methodologies to read non-Indigenous texts, was first coined by Jill Carter (Anishinabek), and simultaneously developed by Scott Andrews (Cherokee).
In my own work, I read texts like The Book of Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century text of a mystic’s life and personal relationship with Jesus Christ, to understand how authors incorporated elements of oral storytelling into their written work, not as a an accident of progress but as a purposeful, artistic choice.
2. Examining settler colonialism emerging in premodern history
Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish), a literature scholar, revisits origins of colonial narratives. Her scholarship examined male heterosexual and patriarchal control over women in the English poem of The Wife’s Lament written around the 10th century, and how this cultural impulse would manifest in the sexism of the 1867 Indian Act.
Read more: Disenfranchising Indigenous women: The legacy of coverture in Canada
She’s focussed on legal and literary artifacts from before 1100 from the North Atlantic alongside stories or documents from Turtle Island (North America).
3. Deconstructing Norse contact on Turtle Island
The field of medieval studies had long considered itself immune to the need for decolonial work, as it imagined itself to exist prior to European contact with Indigenous societies beyond Europe — other then a brief interaction between the Indigenous peoples of Newfoundland and the Norse.
This contact was immortalized in the archaeological site of L’Anse-Aux-Meadow in Newfoundland, now a national historic site, and sagas (such as the Greenlander Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red). Literature scholars like Geraldine Heng have examined interactions in the saga to interrogate how notions of race were developed and depicted in pre-modern times.
Christopher Crocker, a Qualipu Mi’kmaw scholar of medieval and modern Icelandic literature, notes how the fascination with Norse contact dominates Newfoundland tourism and historical research — at the expense of pre-colonial Indigenous studies and representation.
4. How colonial rhetoric imagined Indigenous Peoples as “medieval”
Some scholars, like sociologist Daniel S. Goh or post-colonial medievalist scholar Helen Young, examine how discussing and framing Indigenous people as “medieval” (backward) has been key to colonial projects. Medievalism was used to justify racist colonial projects as necessary to allow the “medieval” Indigenous societies to “catch up” with supposedly superior European societies.
5. Indigenous adaptations of medieval literature
English literature scholar Jonathan Hsy’s Antiracist Medievalism highlights how Indigenous poets have appropriated medieval poetry styles, as part of decolonial literary movements.
Hsy showcases the work of Osage medievalist, Carter Revard, who studied, translated and wrote in the Old English Riddle style. This style was a popular form, written from the perspective of an object, such as a sword or book, to reveal itself to the audience.
Alongside his translations, Revard wrote some riddles from the point of view of an eagle fan or birch canoe, as an act of reclaiming both halves of his identity — the Osage and the European.
Shifting the public perception
Work related to decolonizing the study of the Middle Ages is beginning to take root.
I hope this thinking, and the thinking of other scholars, can inform what is taught in classrooms. This can help students carry forward new understandings as they both create and consume medieval-themed images, games, videos and narratives.