National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century: Switzerland and Britain 9781843846574, 9781805430629, 9781805430636

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Constructing Continuity: Four Nations Imagine Their Beginnings
Part I The Politics of Autochthony
2 For Freedom Alone: The Scottish Independence Referendum
3 2016 and All That: Brexit
4 Freiheit statt Vögte: The Swiss National-Conservatives
Part II The Others of National Medievalism
5 Masculine Middle Ages: Gender
6 In Strange Lands: Race, Ethnicity, Immigration
Conclusion: The Demands of the Past
Afterword: National Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Volume XXV

National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century

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 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 [email protected]

Professor Chris Jones Department of English University of Utah LNCO, Rm 3500 255 S Central Campus Drive Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA [email protected]

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

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

National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century Switzerland and Britain Matthias D. Berger

D. S. BREWER

© Matthias D. Berger 2023 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 Matthias D. Berger 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 2023 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN-13: 9781843846574 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 9781805430629 (ePDF) ISBN-13: 9781805430636 (ePUB) D. S. Brewer 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 Cross references refer to page numbers in the print edition

To my parents, Hans and Margrit, with love

Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Author’s Note xiii List of Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

1

Constructing Continuity: Four Nations Imagine Their Beginnings

32

Part I  The Politics of Autochthony 2

For Freedom Alone: The Scottish Independence Referendum

80

3

2016 and All That: Brexit

96

4

Freiheit statt Vögte: The Swiss National-Conservatives

112

Part II  The Others of National Medievalism 5

Masculine Middle Ages: Gender

139

6

In Strange Lands: Race, Ethnicity, Immigration

172



Conclusion: The Demands of the Past

208



Afterword: National Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19

213

Bibliography 217 Index 241

Illustrations Table 1.

Dunsinane’s English–Scottish dichotomy.

203

Figures 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Rudolf Weiss, ‘Friedensinsel’, 1916. Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern. Photograph by Stefan Rebsamen. 24 The Great Tapestry of Scotland, Panel 157: ‘Parliament of the Ancestors, Parliament for the Future’, 2013. © Live Borders Ltd. 41 Albrecht von Bonstetten, Superioris Germaniae confoederationis descriptio. In Historia Eremi sanctae Mariae in Helvetiis, 1481. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. MS Lat. 5656, fol. 8r. BNF Gallica. 70 AUNS, ‘Widerstand!!!’, 1992. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. QS 82.3. 117 Ruedi Wälti for the Comité romand oui à l’EEE, ‘Oui à l’Espace Économique Européen’, 1992. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. QS 82.3. 119 Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Wilhelm Tell, 1896–97. Oil on canvas. 256.0 x 196.0cm. Kunstmuseum Solothurn. Bequeathed by Mrs Margrit Kottmann-Müller in memory of her husband, Dr Walther Kottmann, 1958. 120 Operation Libero, ‘Nein zur Selbstbestimmungsinitiative’, 2017. Poster. © Operation Libero. 135 Interessengemeinschaft Schiessen Schweiz (IGS), ‘Nein zum Entwaffnungsdiktat der EU’, 2018. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. DS 1608. Detail. 137 The coat of arms of the Guild of the Moor, 2021. Author’s photograph. 184 The house crest of the Guild of the Moor, 2021. Author’s photograph. 185

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11.

Illustrations

Billboard displaying a poster sponsored by Afimag that reads ‘Keine Willkür, keine Diktatur’, 2021. Author’s photograph.

216

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 publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements All the happy debts I have incurred while writing this book would have made it worth writing quite apart from anything else. I gratefully acknowledge the Swiss National Science Foundation for nearly four years of project funding of which I was a beneficiary. The Berne University Research Foundation kindly paid towards a research stay at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne in 2018, whose directors and members I am likewise grateful to for the welcome and their willingness to discuss my research. My sincere thanks go to the Walter Benjamin Kolleg for a sixmonth scholarship in an early project phase, and to the Berner Mittelalter Zentrum for a generous prize they awarded to part of my work in 2021. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Annette Kern-Stähler, who nurtured and championed my research from the beginning, and whom I cannot thank enough for always being there for me when I needed her judicious advice, warm praise – and sternness when it came to reminding me of the deadlines I had set myself. Stephanie Trigg was kind and generous beyond measure, offering guidance and support at a point where I could not possibly have had anything to show that would have justified it, and I benefitted enormously from her insight and wisdom as the project meandered towards the finish line. Thanks are due also to Virginia Richter for her critical eye and for truly awakening my interest in the politics of culture in a memorable seminar so many years ago. The series editors at Boydell & Brewer, Karl Fugelso and Chris Jones, have been very good to me indeed, and I am deeply grateful for their confidence and encouragement. The same goes for Caroline Palmer, who watched over the process with generous care and gave this fledgling author both sharp-eyed feedback and elastic deadlines as the book hit the home stretch. As something of a neophyte in the field, I have been delighted to find that scholars of medievalism are a warm and welcoming bunch. I am grateful to all who have made it so, many of whom I have got to meet and exchange ideas with over the past few years. I am extremely lucky in the wonderful friends I made along the way, who included me, taught me the ropes and lifted me up. I am especially grateful to Usha Vishnuvajjala, who was a role model and steadfast friend through it all, and Andrew (B. R.) Elliott, whose good cheer and guidance were critical in the later stages of preparing this book for publication, and whose generosity has been nothing short of inspiring. Louise D’Arcens very gamely read several essays of mine and made me think a great deal more clearly about my subject in just the space of an extended

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Acknowledgements

conversation in a busy Sydney restaurant. Among many others, I am deeply grateful also to Richard Utz, David Matthews, Nadia Altschul, Sabina Rahman, Pedro Martins and Karl Alvestad, each for their own different shows of support and interest. Special thanks go to my non- or part-time medievalismist readers and friends. The most sedulous of all was Sam Röösli, who made countless suggestions for material to include and arguments to improve in our delightful, weird and wide-ranging conversations. Besides their intelligent and actionable comments on various drafts, I am indebted to: Ricarda Wagner, for sending me music to feed the soul and poetry to keep the demons at bay; Rory Critten, for telling me that success starts with ‘yes’ and for warning me against putting up straw dragons to fight; my old classmate Kilian Schindler, for fun and challenging chats over meat and drink; and Shefali Lal, for all the emotional support over the years, and for bringing that bottle of mead to celebrate the completion of my first draft. Others who read partial drafts and commented generously include the people at the Department of English at the University of Bern and its brilliant team of medievalists; a special mention goes to Nicole Nyffenegger and Hannah Piercy. They also include my anonymous readers of material submitted for publication. I am thankful to my audiences and fellow panellists at international conferences, and especially to those who gave me the opportunity to test ideas and find new ones in guest lectures or colloquia: Indira Ghose, Ursula Schaefer, Katrin Rupp, Valentin Groebner and the directors of the Berner Mittelalter Zentrum. Finally, I am very happy to acknowledge the stimulating conversations about several books I discuss here with the bright and questioning participants of a seminar of mine at the University of Bern in autumn 2018. You have all made me a better writer and the book a better read. My biggest thanks go to my natural and chosen families. To my old friend David Geiser, for being a rock and offering sound counsel when the night was darkest. To Matthias Landolf, for the hours spent away from the computer and happily building worlds together. To my sister, Anna, for her uplifting company, pep talks and tea and sympathy. And to Hans and Margrit, for being my parents, for countless delicious meals and for always being in my corner. Thanks, Mum, for passing me all those clippings of the outrageous stuff the politicians had come out with.

Author’s Note The tide waits for no one, and it certainly waits for no book to be published. Two seismic events have rocked Europe and the wider world since the original research for this book was concluded. Even though they both very much relate to my subject, I have decided against integrating them more closely into my analysis. This decision is due to issues of feasibility – this has been a book long in the making – but even more so to my conviction that these events mark a watershed in twenty-first-­ century society and politics, including memory politics. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic. While I decided, as the manuscript underwent its first major revision, to largely cordon off from the main body of my analysis my thoughts on what implications the pandemic might have for medievalism, I do offer some examples of mid-pandemic medievalism and a speculative outlook in an afterword to the book. The second is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022 and smashed any remaining delusions about the international accountability of Vladimir Putin’s rogue state. The reason I mention the war here is that Putin’s attempts at justifying the crime seem to rely on a warped take on medieval history. In effusions of self-serving revisionism, Putin has used the history of Kyivan Rus’ to deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation separate from Russia and to claim that, due to their shared medieval ‘roots’, the Ukrainians are but the ‘Little Russians’ to Russia’s ‘Great Russians’. Books are bound to be written soon about Putin’s murderous medievalism; this is not one of them. Nonetheless, it must be said that Putin’s propaganda is but the most extreme form of the resurgence of national medievalism I trace in this book. The war in Ukraine is neither Brexit nor the Swiss national-­ conservatives’ anti-EU polemics. But what all these things share is an obsession with the kind of medievalism that betrays a belief that the past makes the present, and that the deepest roots are the only roots that matter.

Abbreviations AfD AL AUNS BBC BNP EC ECHR EEA EU HLS IGS ISIS MEP MP NATO NHS NTS NZZ OECD OED RSI SiM SNP SP SRF SRG SVP

Alternative für Deutschland/Alternative for Germany Alternative Linke/Alternative Left Aktion für eine unabhängige und neutrale Schweiz/ Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland British Broadcasting Corporation British National Party European Community European Court of Human Rights European Economic Area European Union Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz Interessengemeinschaft Schiessen Schweiz/Interest Group for Shooting in Switzerland Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Member of the European Parliament Member of Parliament North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Health Service National Trust for Scotland Neue Zürcher Zeitung Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Oxford English Dictionary Radiotelevisione svizzera/Swiss Radio and Television Studies in Medievalism Scottish National Party Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz/Social Democratic Party of Switzerland Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen/Swiss Radio and Television Schweizerische Radio- und Fernsehgesellschaft/Swiss Broadcasting Corporation Schweizerische Volkspartei/Swiss People’s Party

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TOBS UK UKIP UN UNESCO ZZZ

Abbreviations

Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn/Theatre Orchestra Biel Solothurn United Kingdom UK Independence Party United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs/Central Committee of the Guilds of Zurich

Introduction It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.1

Y

ou would have to turn over a few stones to find the medievalist who has not noticed that the Middle Ages are highly political these days. Many medievalists have, in fact, written insightfully about this.2 However, in focusing on far-right and white supremacist ‘abuses’, the conversation has often been about the floats bobbing on the surface. This leaves considerable room for exploration of the deeper cultural currents, which I attempt in this book. National Medievalism argues that a greater underlying shift back towards national referents is underway in contemporary medievalism: that, after an extended period of abeyance, the link forged in the nineteenth century between the Middle Ages and national identity is reasserting itself once more at the interface of culture and politics. In response to rapid change brought on by the social, economic, political and cultural effects of globalisation and international integration, and in spite of the growth of an ‘international’ Middle Ages over the past decades, the period is increasingly being used again to imagine pedigrees of national distinctiveness and exceptionalism for European societies.

Julian Barnes, England, England (London, 2012, orig. 1998), p. 6. E.g., Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2017); Daniel C. Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (Leeds, 2018); Amy Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto, 2020); Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders, trans. Andrew M. Hiltzik (Leiden, 2020); Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul and Nina Rowe (eds), Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (New York, 2019); Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007); Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002); Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia, 2019); Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018); Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds, 2021); Literature Compass, 16:9–10, Special issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages (2019) [accessed 28 September 2021]; Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 11:4, Race, Revulsion, and Revolution (2020); Paul B. Sturtevant (ed.), The Public Medievalist (n.d.) [accessed 13 January 2022]; Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Bildhauer and Jones, Middle Ages, pp. 1–24, at pp. 9–14. 1

2

National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century

2

This book offers a comparative analysis of contemporary British and Swiss medievalism to exemplify this return to stories of national exceptionalism. Such stories will, ironically enough, often rhyme with those of other nations – as they do in this case. The idea of the nation rests on the belief in a community’s persistence through time.3 Because of this, looking back at the Middle Ages – which many suppose to be the point of origin of nations as we know them4  – is a powerful way for the national community to reassure itself of its own identity and legitimacy. Switzerland and Britain have produced distinctive but equally powerful cultural traditions or mythologies in which continuity with the medieval past is writ large. The new national medievalism that comes into view in this comparison runs the gamut of politicisation and critical awareness, ranging from broad ideas of belonging and heritage expressed in cultural and social practice to particularist and separatist political propaganda. At the same time, medievalist representations increasingly reconsider critically the ways in which national identities have relied on excluding gendered, racial and migrant ‘Others’ in favour of uncomplicated group cohesion. In this, the Swiss and British cases are representative of the way the nationally inflected Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time. A word of qualification before I begin. This book is written from a European perspective, and its primary concern is developments in Western Europe. That said, my hope is that it also speaks on some level to developments in medievalism elsewhere, especially in the context of former European (settler) colonies such as the United States (US) that now form a crucial part of ‘the West’. Many of those well-studied far-right and white supremacist uses of medievalism I mentioned above are from such contexts. Though these countries experienced no Middle Ages in the sense that we currently use the term, members of their far right nevertheless invest heavily in identities based on the idea of descent from medieval European communities. There is no doubt that these ideas of descent are in many ways different – both necessarily and contingently different – from what they are in Europe. Yet there can also be no doubt that all these varieties of the Middle Ages of national identities (as Umberto Eco calls them) have a shared origin and remain in conversation with each other.5 Medievalism and Nationalism in Europe, Now and Then The surge of British and Swiss medievalism focusing on national themes is, then, very much part of an international phenomenon. Like all medievalism, it requires us to look back as well as around us. Firstly, as I have mentioned, this surge amounts to the resumption of powerful cultural trends of nation-centric medievalism that See also Bildhauer and Jones, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. E.g., Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, 1970); Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). The case for an uneven discursive construction of the English nation taking place in the Middle Ages is made in Kathy Lavezzo (ed.), Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, 2004). 5 Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London, 1998), pp. 61–72, at p. 70. 3

4

Introduction

3

reached a first peak in nineteenth-century Europe. Secondly, it is the product of a much broader surge of interest in the European Middle Ages that swept across the West during the final two decades of the twentieth century. The medieval period has held a powerful fascination ever since, to the point of being among the most fertile periods for the historical imaginary of today.6 The mass-cultural phenomenon that is turn-of-the-millennium medievalism has assumed a myriad of forms. In a development typical of this latest phase of widespread interest in the Middle Ages, medievalism now routinely transcends its long-standing connection with nationalism. It is, as Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch argued in 2014, ‘increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca’.7 Reflecting ongoing processes in a globalising world, medievalism is ‘produced in transnational and international contexts with a view to reaching international audiences, some of mass scope’. These international tendencies influence many of the most potent reimaginings of the medieval past in our time. A notable example is the generic and sometimes oblique medievalism that fuels much of contemporary fantasy fiction: it has consistently supplied the bestselling books of the six decades since the late 1960s and provides the substructure for film and television behemoths such as the Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones franchises and their various epigones.8 In another, political, example, international relations commentators have come to use the language of temporality and periodisation to warn of a post-nation-state ‘Middle Ages’. They envision a new (dis)order of diffused and deterritorialised political power and multiple personal allegiances.9 In this way, the Middle Ages have become a readily recognisable presence in different areas of public life internationally. And yet, there is a strong trend of renationalisation that complements and complicates this ongoing internationalisation of medievalism. It is this counter-trend that the book brings to the fore. I discuss it as ‘national medievalism’ and the ‘national Middle Ages’, shorthand terms for those aspects of national memory cultures that are expressed in medievalism. The concept of memory as understood in recent cultural memory studies – and as understood here – stresses the many different ways in which sense is made of the past in narrative (broadly defined), and group identities are made and delimited in the process.10 National medievalism takes cultural, social and political forms and is concerned with group identities defined along familiar national lines: in this case, with Swissness on the one hand and Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness and (more rarely) Britishness on the other. Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, p.  1. For a thought-provoking list of contributing factors see Bildhauer and Jones, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. 7 Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, ‘Introduction: The Medieval, the International, the Popular’, in D’Arcens and Lynch, International Medievalism, pp. xi–xxvi, at p. xii. 8 Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, p. 71; see Helen Young (ed.), Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones (Amherst, NY, 2015). 9 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008); Holsinger, Neomedievalism; Clare Monagle, ‘Sovereignty and Neomedievalism’, in D’Arcens and Lynch, International Medievalism, pp. 1–17. 10 Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in Erll, Nünning and Young, Companion to Cultural Memory, pp. 1–15, at p. 2. 6

National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century

4

Even before the turn of the twenty-first century but more markedly since, there has been a return in Western countries, and in Europe in particular, to notions indebted to what D’Arcens and Lynch have called the ‘conceptually local’ Middle Ages.11 Moulded in nineteenth-century medievalism and Romanticism, these local Middle Ages recast a previously suspect period in a positive light to celebrate national distinctiveness. In this way, medievalism came to play a key role in that century’s swell of nation-building. So effective were they in that role that ideas of nationhood have become more closely associated with the Middle Ages than with any era before or since.12 Although internally diverse as a movement, nineteenth-century medievalism was generally conceived in contradistinction to the ‘universal’, elite cultural model of classicism, which D’Arcens and Lynch point out was ‘acquired by privileged study’ and, for those who lived outside the former hubs of classical antiquity, ‘by travel abroad’. The relics of the Middle Ages were native, closer to home in spatial, temporal and emotional terms: they lived on in ‘buildings, monuments, place-names, political institutions and artefacts’.13 Even the very languages spoken in the modern streets of Europe could be argued to be essentially the same as the vernaculars – the ‘national languages’ – that had gradually come into their own during the European Middle Ages. These and other medieval remains came to be considered the expressions of national character as much as were monuments celebrating national achievements. It is this nexus between the nation and the Middle Ages, which had been mostly dormant following the Second World War, that I argue has become productive once more. Like many other scholars of medievalism, I believe a tension between continuity and alterity is fundamental to medievalism.14 It is key to understanding national medievalism. The Middle Ages were infamously conceived as a ‘dark age’ bracketed by two more enlightened ones; and otherness, whether positive or negative, remains one of the two basic forms the Middle Ages take in medievalism. Valentin Groebner describes this in terms of a horizontal narrative mode that makes the Middle Ages an ‘anti-now, in which everything appears to be more or less equidistant from the speaker’s present’.15 The Middle Ages as exoticised Other act as a contrasting device against which one’s own, modern, identity can be defined. I will refer to this as ‘alterity medievalism’. The other way of narrating the Middle Ages, which Groebner calls the vertical narrative mode and which I will refer to as ‘continuity medievalism’, D’Arcens and Lynch, ‘Introduction’, p. xii, emphasis in the original. Michael Evans, ‘“You Wouldn’t Want to Be Historically Inaccurate”: Online Responses to Race in Medievalist Television’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXVIII, pp.  13–20, at p.  14; Stefan Berger, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 362. 13 D’Arcens and Lynch, ‘Introduction’, p. xii. 14 See for example Nickolas Haydock, ‘Medievalism and Excluded Middles’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 17–30. Carpegna Falconieri combines the idea of medieval otherness with an evocative spatial dimension to distinguish between representations of the Middle Ages as variants of either a ‘before’ or an ‘elsewhere’: Militant Middle Ages, p. 8. 15 Valentin Groebner, Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf: Über historisches Erzählen (Munich, 2008), p. 125. Here and throughout, translations from German, French and Italian are my own unless a published English translation is listed in the bibliography. 11

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Introduction

5

instead sees cultural commonality and persistence. It understands ‘temporal succession as ancestral history’, writes Groebner, and hence makes the Middle Ages appear as ‘something that in a sense is located under the speaker and is referred to as the “root” or “source” or “foundation” of that which is considered one’s own [world]’.16 Unsurprisingly, narratives of early national identity are governed by this principle of continuity. Like all identities, national identity is a fiction of continuity,17 and nationalism is generally at pains to present the nation as a timeless, organic formation.18 Accordingly, as Anthony D. Smith has remarked, ‘nationalists often operate with received conceptual traditions’.19 Stories of national continuity encourage thinking in (often vague) historical analogies. They consistently attract an organicist imagery of roots, germs, growth, flowering, maturing and procreation: these are tropes that run like a thread through my entire study. To varying degrees, vertical narratives of this kind downplay outside influences and gloss over ruptures and false starts to claim essential oneness through an unbroken lineage traced back to the modern nation’s medieval precursor. British and Swiss nationalists as much as most other nineteenth-century nationalists in Europe made continuity medievalism a fixture and core element of their respective ideologies. The Middle Ages were widely validated as the cultural origin of the modern national self: the foundation, root or wellspring of a recognisable and distinct body of people.20 The soul or essence of this body of people seemed to exist outside of history, yet its existence was proved  – paradoxically  – in and by history. Across Europe, medieval cultural and constitutional origins furnished valuable precedents, and accounts of glorious deeds from a more heroic age inspired action in quests for self-determination in the present. Philology and the gradually institutionalised study of the Middle Ages acted as a hotbed for nationalism. In due course, the national Middle Ages came to occupy the rank of state ideology in many countries.21 In Switzerland, medievalist mythologies of unity in the face of Groebner, Mittelalter, p. 124. Richard Ned Lebow, The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves (Cambridge, 2012), p. 9 and passim. 18 Christian Geulen, ‘Identity as Progress  – The Longevity of Nationalism’, in Friese, Identities, pp. 222–40, at pp. 228–32. 19 Anthony D. Smith, ‘History and National Destiny: Responses and Clarifications’, in Montserrat Guibernau and John Hutchinson (eds), History and National Destiny: Ethnosymbolism and Its Critics (Oxford, 2004), pp. 195–209, at p. 201. 20 On exceptions to this general preference for medieval rather than ancient ‘ancestry’ in European national histories, see e.g., Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis, ‘To Whom Does Byzantium Belong? Greeks, Turks and the Present of the Medieval Balkans’, in Evans and Marchal, Uses of the Middle Ages, pp. 139–51. 21 Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam, 2006), p.  179; see also Ian N. Wood, ‘Barbarians, Historians and the Construction of National Identities’, Journal of Late Antiquity, 1 (2008), 61–82, at p. 69. There are numerous publications on the historical link between academic medieval studies and Romantic nationalism, e.g., Richard Utz, ‘Academic Medievalism and Nationalism’, in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 119–34; Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin and David D. Metzger (eds), Studies in Medievalism IX: Medievalism and the Academy (Cambridge, 1997); David Metzger (ed.), Studies in Medievalism X: Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies (Cambridge, 1998); and the “Medievalism and the 16 17

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foreign threats cemented a nation-state birthed by civil war; in Britain, apparently centuries-old constitutional achievements suggested a historical explanation, even justification, for unheard-of global dominance in the present. The violent excesses of ethnic nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, and the inglorious role as propagandists played by European academics before and during the two World Wars, did much to take the shine off the ancestral, national Middle Ages.22 As a result of seismic shifts that European memory culture underwent after the Second World War, the Middle Ages of continuity lost much of their usability for mainstream identity politics in the post-war period. Following the revolutions of 1989 and the end of the conflict between two ideological blocs that had dominated world affairs for over forty years, many commentators believed that what would follow was a time of post-ideological politics, the old medievalising self-aggrandisement now firmly in the past. Francis Fukuyama suggested that humankind had reached the ‘end of history’, and he was not alone in thinking that people everywhere would strive to create societies based on the model of Western liberal democracy and free-market economy rather than the ethno-state.23 This kind of thinking was profoundly influential politically, and particularly so for the deepening of the European project. According to Ivan Krastev, the European Union (EU) is ‘a highly risky wager that humankind will progress and develop in the direction of a more democratic and tolerant society [. . .]. Nineteen-eighty-nine heralded a world where global competition would increase – but among firms and individuals rather than ideologies and states.’24 In an intimately related development, Krastev argues, universalist human rights discourse flourished as the ‘natural ideology for the end-of-history, post-1989 world’, substituting both ‘nation-centered utopias and other internationalist utopias like socialism’.25 Even at the time, Fukuyama’s position had many critics.26 But for a few years, his hypothesis could be argued to have some plausibility for Western Europe at least, where nationalism in its more aggressive forms was mostly a fringe phenomenon until the turn of the millennium. In Switzerland and Britain, the emergence of a multicultural, cosmopolitan and seemingly ahistorical national identity in the 1990s and early 2000s serves as a backdrop for the nationalist revival that has since overshadowed it. Optimistic ‘cool Britannia’ nationalism, in part presided over by the first New Labour government, Academy” section in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (eds), Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 359–432. See also Michelle R. Warren, ‘Medievalism and the Making of Nations’, in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 286–98. 22 Ian N. Wood, ‘The Uses and Abuses of the Barbarian Invasions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Bak, Geary and Klaniczay, Manufacturing Middle Ages, pp. 51–69; Wood, ‘Barbarians’; Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge, 2007), pp.  291–301; Groebner, Mittelalter, pp. 95 and 108–18. 23 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). 24 Ivan Krastev, After Europe (Philadelphia, 2017), pp. 20f. 25 Krastev, After Europe, p. 36. 26 E.g., Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, trans. Patrick Camiller (London, 1992); Krastev, After Europe, p. 24.

Introduction

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emphasised modern British culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, rebranding the nation, and London in particular, as ‘modern, young and diverse’.27 As late as the London Olympics in 2012, that brand was a recognisable feature of British self-­ representation that spoke for a large constituency. The lavish opening ceremony, staged by award-winning film director Danny Boyle, was widely applauded (though also criticised) as celebrating a multicultural and egalitarian Britain. As L. Monique Pittman puts it, ‘in its whimsical, generous-minded excess, Boyle’s representation navigated between Britain’s humane right and its imperialist wrong’.28 Switzerland had its own ‘cool’ moment in the 1990s and early 2000s. As Michael Hermann argues, there were signs, for a short while, of ‘a cheerful patriotism shared by all ideological camps’.29 Tellingly, celebration of Swissness through the old national symbols misfired in 1991, the 700th anniversary of the supposed foundation of the Old Swiss Confederacy in 1291.30 A national exhibition in Central Switzerland was aborted because voters refused to fund it, and prominent cultural actors and intellectuals boycotted the anniversary because it had become public knowledge two years previously that the Swiss state had been spying extensively on its own citizens.31 When a national exhibition finally came about in 2002, it pointedly ‘replaced national pathos with soft wellness’.32 It was particularly at pains to set itself apart from the Zurich exhibition of 1939 (popularly known as the ‘Landi’), which had revelled in traditional symbols of Swissness that centred on the Middle Ages.33 This departure in 2002 was perhaps at its most striking in the way the organisers chose to exhibit a large-scale nineteenth-century panorama painting of the victory against the Burgundians in the Battle of Murten (1476): they put the panorama inside a large rusty cube, which in turn was placed in the middle of Lake Murten. As Peter von Matt argues, this ironic gesture meant that the painting acted ‘not as an identificatory signal [. . .] but as a postmodern quotation from the lost battle discourse’.34 Fukuyama’s critics were not wrong, however. While the gentler, multi-option nationalisms that complemented the new internationalism were drawing the limelight, more assertive and historically minded  – or at least more past-oriented  – nationalisms were regrouping. Again, this has been the case well beyond Britain and Switzerland. Since the turn of the century, ‘old’ nationalisms thought to be left behind at the end of history have made a Europe-wide comeback. Responding to 27 Charlotte Werther, ‘Rebranding Britain: Cool Britannia, the Millennium Dome and the 2012 Olympics’, Moderna språk, 105:1 (2011), 1–14, at p. 3, italics removed. 28 L. Monique Pittman, ‘Shakespeare and the Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender and the British Nation in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown’, Digital Commons @ Andrews University: Faculty Publications, 265 (2016), 1–30, at p. 2. 29 Michael Hermann, Was die Schweiz zusammenhält: Vier Essays zu Politik und Gesellschaft eines eigentümlichen Landes (Basel, 2016), p. 58. 30 Valentin Groebner, Retroland: Geschichtstourismus und die Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen (Frankfurt a. M., 2018), p. 104. 31 See Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz [HLS], s.v. ‘Staatsschutz’. All references to the HLS are to [accessed 12 November 2021]. 32 Peter von Matt, Das Kalb vor der Gotthardpost: Zur Literatur und Politik der Schweiz (Munich, 2012), p. 109. 33 Hermann, Schweiz, p. 57. 34 Von Matt, Kalb, p. 144.

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rapid change owed to international integration and globalisation, those nationalisms are part of what Krastev calls a ‘populist recoil from the European Union’ in member states and a ‘reassertion of more parochial but culturally deeper identities’ in European countries generally.35 There are signs of a widespread sense of cultural uprooting, which seems to have taken hold after the 2007/8 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Furthermore, Krastev emphasises the role which mass migration, and the perception of that migration as a crisis, has played in both this renationalisation and ‘the decline of human rights discourse as the dominant discourse in European politics’.36 Whatever its precise aetiology, the ‘return’ of nationalism was accompanied by a return of the national Middle Ages to a host of spheres of public life, suggesting a renewed interest in the ancestry of national communities now supposedly under siege. This has been evident in literature, drama, film, television, video games, commemorative practices and heritage tourism; it has been evident also in the way political actors of varying degrees of closeness to the levers of state power have woken up again to the attractiveness of boasting an organic link to a deep national past. Even now, it seems, the Middle Ages remain the preferred locus of Europe’s national memories. As I show in the ensuing chapters, national medievalism comes in different degrees of earnestness or playfulness, with or without missionary zeal and political agenda. The specific aims of the nationalist movements that propel the current crisis of the international order vary from country to country. Nevertheless, it is this context of a wide ideological renationalisation of politics that raises with new urgency questions of the uses and effects of historical periodisation and of the status of the medieval as a cultural category today. To be sure, nowhere – and that includes Switzerland and Britain  – do the national Middle Ages enjoy anywhere near the level of official support that they did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, if national medievalism is less pervasive in the early twenty-first-century political landscape, it is still very broadly based and often just as insistent in character. The renewed use, over the last three decades, of medievalism specifically by nationalists has not gone unnoticed. Scholars such as Patrick Geary, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri and Andrew Elliott have each drawn attention to important aspects of the phenomenon, highlighting especially its most extreme forms.37 In The Myth of Nations (2002), Geary observed that after the end of the Cold War, nationalists had once again started to resort to notions of a medieval ‘moment of primary acquisition’ of territories and identities by ‘their people’.38 The Middle Ages and the ‘barbarian migration’ in particular had once again become, Geary argued, ‘the fulcrum of political discourse across much of Europe’.39 His verdict on the medievalist politicking by such demagogues as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Slobodan Milošević was

Krastev, After Europe, p. 80. Krastev, After Europe, p. 35. 37 Geary, Myth of Nations; Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages; Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. 38 Geary, Myth of Nations, p. 156. 39 Geary, Myth of Nations, p. 7. 35

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withering: ‘It is the story of political appropriation and manipulation of inherited names and representations of pasts to create a present and a future. It is a history of constant change, of radical discontinuities, and of political and cultural zigzags, masked by the repeated re-appropriation of old words to define new realities.’41 Geary is right, of course, to condemn the political weaponisation of medieval history. But his book has a historicist bent where mine has a presentist one: he is concerned with the historical realities of the ‘old words’, whereas I am interested primarily in the ‘new realities’ they are made to contribute to. Furthermore, while this book is very much a critique of the anything-goes hermeneutics often involved in national medievalism, my main emphasis is not on debunking medievalist falsehoods. Rather, I aim to show the motivations behind, and the effects of, such medievalism, as well as the means and strategies chosen to stage its ‘truths’. Carpegna Falconieri’s The Militant Middle Ages (2020, originally published in Italian as Medioevo militante in 2011) is closer to my study in the way it focuses on more or less contemporary uses of the medieval, and the politics of these uses.42 Pointing out the strong connection between invocations of the Middle Ages and public action, Carpegna Falconieri argues that the medieval has catered to statements of identity at all levels of society over the last half-century or so, from the local to the mega-identity of ‘Western culture’.43 According to Carpegna Falconieri, the unifying factors of the most recent of these identity medievalisms are their involvement in a politics of memory that resorts to a largely mythical, nineteenth-­centurystyle Middle Ages.44 He rightly points out that there have been many sightings of medievalism in the context of the nationalist revival in Eastern Europe, where the break-up of the Eastern Bloc has been followed by what Carpegna Falconieri calls ‘a medievalizing neo-Romanticism’.45 In Western Europe, however, he sees mostly marginal equivalents of this kind of memory politics, such as the medievalisms connected to the independence efforts of small, stateless nations or regions within 40

40 Le Pen is a French far-right politician and the former president of the Front National; he has a conviction for dismissing the Holocaust as a ‘detail’ of history and continues to spread racial animus against Jews and Muslims. He has frequently appropriated the national heroine and saint Joan of Arc for his cause. Milošević was a Yugoslav and Serbian president during the Yugoslav Wars; he was put on trial at The Hague on charges of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo but died in prison in 2006 before a verdict could be passed. In 1989, he infamously referred to the Serbian strategic defeat against the Ottomans on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, stoking Serbian feelings of victimisation and defiance amid tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo that would soon after boil over into murderous conflict. 41 Geary, Myth of Nations, pp. 156f. 42 See also my review of the English edition: Matthias D. Berger, ‘Tommaso di CarpegnaFalconieri. The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders. Trans. Andrew M. Hiltzik. Leiden, 2020’, in Leah Haught and Richard Utz (eds), Medievally Speaking (2020) [accessed 23 September 2020]. 43 Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, p. 2. 44 Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, p. 76. 45 Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, p. 190.

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larger states. Rather, Carpegna Falconieri argues, the Middle Ages are now ‘a metaphor for the non-state’ in Western Europe.46 While East and West clearly do differ in the prominence they give to medievalism in politics, I believe this argument requires some qualification, which I hope at least to begin to provide in this book. Switzerland and Britain offer numerous and prominent examples of political national medievalism, many of them state-centric, in the early twenty-first century. Not all are tied to separatist projects, though many Scottish examples and the English ones produced before and after the Brexit vote clearly are. Even in the separatist cases, however, Swiss and British medievalisms give the lie to the claim that the medieval no longer symbolically shores up Western European notions of statehood in any significant way. A few additional examples of the national medievalist revival in other Western European countries may provide something in the way of context. They suggest that even though the British and Swiss cases are particularly pronounced, we are dealing not with some isolated medieval references but with a more broadly based return of the national Middle Ages to Western European thinking about political nationhood. In Spain, the Middle Ages now form an important part of mainstream conservative ideology. According to Alejandro García-Sanjuán, nationalist interpretations of medieval history, and specifically of Muslim-dominated al-Andalus as an ‘un-­ Spanish’ hiatus, were endemic among the Spanish right even before the turn of the century.47 In these interpretations, the Christian ‘Reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula is understood as a ‘struggle of national liberation’.48 The Islamist terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004 in Madrid greatly boosted this rhetoric. In the aftermath, conservatives argued that Islam had ‘posed a continuous threat to Spain throughout history’, and the soon-to-be-ex-President José María Aznar of the Partido Popular claimed that Spain was ‘a nation made against Islam’.49 As García-Sanjuán shows, conservative academics as well as Church and media figures espouse similar views of medieval Iberian history, as do supporters of the Spanish far right.50 This conservative reading of al-Andalus increasingly clashes with a progressive one: an amendment Bill passed in 2015, for instance, grants the descendants of Sephardic Jews the right to citizenship, thus signalling that their part in Spanish history is officially being acknowledged. Significantly, however, today’s descendants of the moriscos – Muslim converts to Christianity and their families, who were expelled from Spain in 1609 – have received no such acknowledgement.51 The medievalist predilections of the French far right are by now well known. The National Rally (Rassemblement National, formerly Front National) in particular Carpegna Falconieri, Militant Middle Ages, pp. 191–3 and 178. Alejandro García-Sanjuán, ‘Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 10:1 (2018), 127–45. See further Christina Civantos, The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (Albany, 2017). 48 García-Sanjuán, ‘Rejecting al-Andalus’, p. 127. 49 García-Sanjuán, ‘Rejecting al-Andalus’, pp. 133 and 134. 50 García-Sanjuán, ‘Rejecting al-Andalus’, pp. 135–40. 51 García-Sanjuán, ‘Rejecting al-Andalus’, pp. 133 and 137. 46 47

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has long used the Middle Ages, and especially the quintessential French heroine Joan of Arc, in support of a nationalist and racist politics.52 And yet, it is clear that Joan of Arc is not the exclusive mnemonic property of the right even now, and the seventh centenary of her birth in 2012 saw her legacy fought over by the left and the right.53 Similarly, it was a significant detail of the presidential election of 2017 that the future president Emmanuel Macron and the Front National candidate Marine Le Pen made use of the same medieval symbolism when they each chose to visit a cathedral on the final day of campaigning.54 Richard Utz has shown how cathedrals became ‘national supersignifiers’ in the nineteenth century.55 It is a role that they are still to shed completely and that both the centrist and the right-wing populist leveraged in an attempt to project ‘deep’ Frenchness. A third example, from Germany, is slightly more complicated. Unsurprisingly, given Germany’s distinctive post-war memory culture – not to mention the way the Nazis had used medievalising propaganda for their horrific purposes56 – celebratory medievalism continues to be relatively rare on the contemporary national political stage. However, the German historical consensus that emphasises the need to continually and collectively ‘come to terms’ with the Nazi past is increasingly under attack from the nostalgia-minded far right. Figures within the insurgent Alternative for Germany (AfD) are on record lamenting a supposed German ‘cult of shame’ and demanding that long national continuity be celebrated instead. In some instances, the AfD have, in fact, staked direct claims to the national Middle Ages. In 2018, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of AfD Saxony-Anhalt’s parliamentary group, accused ‘establishment politics’ of ‘misappropriating our cultural heritage’.57 The reason for his ire was that the social-democratic Minister of State Michelle Müntefering had welcomed the UNESCO listing of Naumburg cathedral by saying that it showed ‘how important cultural exchange and the mobility of artists was for Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, pp. 1f. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, ‘Les Médiévalismes politiques: Quelques comparaisons entre la France et l’Italie’, Perspectives médiévales: Revue d’épistémologie des langues et littératures du Moyen Âge, 40 (2019), 1–13, at p. 6. 54 Carpegna Falconieri, ‘Médiévalismes’, p. 6. 55 Richard Utz, ‘The Medieval Cathedral: From Spiritual Site to National Super-Signifier’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, 15 (2000), 73–82, at p. 76. 56 E.g., Wood, ‘Barbarians’; Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo, 2017), pp. 43–50; Fabian Link and Mark W. Hornburg, ‘“He Who Owns the Trifels, Owns the Reich”: Nazi Medievalism and the Creation of the Volksgemeinschaft in the Palatinate’, Central European History, 49 (2016), 208–39; Peter Lambert, ‘The Immediacy of a Remote Past: The Afterlife of Widukind in the Third Reich’, British Academy Review, 22 (2013), 13–16; Annelies Amberger, ‘Reichskleinodien und Hakenkreuz: Heilige Insignien und bildhafte Symbole im Dienste der Nationalsozialisten’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 38 (2011), 271– 334; Jeremiah Garsha, ‘Dictating the Past: The Capture of Medievalism in Nazi Cinematic Propaganda and the Roots of the Holocaust’, EX POST FACTO: Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University, 19 (2010), 131–47; Joshua Hagen, ‘Parades, Public Space, and Propaganda: The Nazi Culture Parades in Munich’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 90:4 (2008), 349–67. 57 ‘Naumburger Dom ist Zeugnis eines deutschen Mittelalters’ (2018) [accessed 25 August 2020]. 52 53

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social and artistic development in Europe’. Tillschneider was outraged: Müntefering was requisitioning the work of the medieval craftspeople in an attempt to justify ‘the 21st-century “culture of welcome” and a European politics hostile to nations’. The AfD would resist such ‘reinterpretation’: ‘The Naumburg Cathedral, with its history and its artworks, [. . .] expresses a deeply German Middle Ages’. While this example is not representative of any large-scale return to national medievalism in Germany, it tells us something about the way the AfD and like-minded forces are increasingly waking up to the charms of the Middle Ages as a pathway to celebrating German cultural identity. Examples from other Western European countries could be added to this. There are, of course, a number of (partial) exceptions to the trend, but, as in Eastern Europe, the Middle Ages are, generally speaking, a reference point for political communities once again.58 Some of these communities are stateless nations like Scotland or would-be national polities like Catalonia,59 but, crucially, others are long-­established nation-states. What seems to link Eastern and Western political medievalism even now is precisely the conceptual localness that the original nationalist movements of the nineteenth century inscribed in it. We are witnessing a confluence of the more general medievalist revival since the 1980s with an urgent and slightly more recent desire for political-cultural downscaling. This appears to be in reaction mainly to the heady days of ascendant globalisation and internationalism following the end of the Cold War. The scope of the downscaling varies from place to place according to local, regional, national and imperial histories, which define the scope of the respective notion of cultural ‘localness’ in the first place. The basic pattern is perfectly comparable, however. Members of a self-identified collective urge an inward turn to ensure greater ‘self-­determination’, seeking to reduce or avert the (political, legal, economic, etc.) complexities which international integration inevitably causes to filter through to smaller collectives under the national umbrella. Medieval history legitimates the argument for downscaling by supposedly encapsulating the essence of an old cultural identity in pristine form, preserving a desired simplicity from a vaguely defined time before international economic, legal, political and cultural entanglement.60 The canny politician can make this medieval history exert normative force on the collective, for example by suggesting that ancestral nationhood should be matched by modern statehood. Thus, many Eastern European countries, anxious to assert the historic legitimacy of their statehood, turn to the Middle Ages both against the backdrop of the recent communist past and in the face of a Russia whose turn to international destabilisation tactics and imperialist interventionism would segue into the shocking war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022. In Western Europe, the impulse to downscale to smaller sovereignties often takes the guise of Euroscepticism, whose advocates A particularly interesting partial exception is the case of Italy: Carpegna Falconieri, ‘“Medieval” Identities in Italy: National, Regional, Local’, in Bak, Geary and Klaniczay, Manufacturing Middle Ages, pp. 319–45. 59 Michael A. Vargas, Constructing Catalan Identity: Memory, Imagination, and the Medieval (Cham, 2018). 60 Bildhauer and Jones, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 58

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(in both EU member states and third countries) are among those most likely to invoke the national Middle Ages in the early twenty-first century. The parallel trend, in some Western European countries, towards emphasising regional and/or local ties follows the same basic logic of downscaling and may well take on a nationalist dynamic in regionalist cases. I am convinced that local and regional medievalism can be profitably discussed alongside national medievalism, and I will highlight such examples at various points in the narrative – not, to be clear, to suggest one-toone correspondences with nationalist ones, but to draw attention to the considerable overlap that often exists between them. This is particularly true for Switzerland, where local and regional identity mostly work in concert with, or at least complement, national identity when it comes to uses of the medieval past. A third book besides Geary’s and Carpegna Falconieri’s that needs to be mentioned here for having advanced our understanding of medievalism in the context of the new nationalism is Andrew Elliott’s Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media (2017). It is mainly concerned with ‘banal medievalism’, a type of medievalism Elliott identifies in analogy to Michael Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’, the everyday and often subliminal manifestations of nationalism in well-established nations.61 Elliott argues that an increasingly vast number of banal medievalisms, facilitated by the rapid shifts towards participatory media, display primarily lateral relationships to other medievalisms rather than looking to the historical Middle Ages. Crucially, a significant portion of this kind of ahistorical online medievalism is being appropriated by the racist and ultra-nationalist fringes of the far right and Islamist extremists. Elliott shows the web of medievalism which radical political figures share with online hate-mongers and conspiracy theorists.62 National Medievalism adds to these findings by documenting the revival also of more mainstream forms of political medievalism. This revival is in many ways more surprising than the extremist uses Elliott describes so cogently precisely because it follows on a period of relative abeyance, whereas extremist subcurrents and fringe movements had been invoking their identitarian Middle Ages in some form or other for decades. Strikingly, the mainstream medievalisms do not come exclusively from the political right, although they are at this point much more likely to. Unlike the ahistorical online medievalisms, they furthermore tend to be self-conscious about being part of longer traditions. They do not primarily owe their existence to the social media revolution: the (party-)political appropriation of Scottish, English and, most insistently, Swiss medievalisms discussed in Chapters 2 to 4 are all cases in point. This is not to say that there are no points of contact between them and extremist medievalism, however; there are, as I show on several occasions. Mainstream political medievalism thrives in an environment of increasingly culturalised politics and frequently appeals to what I propose to call a ‘politics of autochthony’. I explore its manifestations in depth in a dedicated thematic section. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995). For further discussion of the most extreme examples of contemporary reactionary, nativist medievalism, see e.g., Kaufman and Sturtevant, Devil’s Historians; Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery; and the special series on ‘Race, Racism and the Middle Ages’ on Sturtevant, Public Medievalist. 61

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For the time being it is enough to say that it is an essentially reactionary, proudly particularist set of beliefs: in its most uncompromising forms, it all but denies meaningful cultural change and exchange and instead encourages a turn to the deep national past for precedents in politics, law, society and culture. The concept of the politics of autochthony builds on Geary’s critique of the alleged early medieval moments of primary acquisition of nationhood. Again, however, my analysis does not focus exclusively on overtly political examples. National Medievalism is about medievalist explorations of national identity that come in vastly different degrees of politicisation. The boundary between culture and politics is an unstable one. With a concept as readily politicised as national identity, all my sources are ultimately somewhere on a political spectrum that ranges from the explicit to the vestigial, whether they are drawn from the realms of constitutional politics or light entertainment (mixed forms being very much conceivable). The trend towards national themes in medievalism cuts across discursive fields as well as national borders, and it yields a great deal more than just political propaganda. A unifying characteristic of many of my primary sources is that they draw on feelings of nostalgia, but nostalgia is not invariably reactionary reverie, nor does it always uncritically seek to restore the past.63 This book is alive to the issues that arise from the uses of the British or Swiss Middle Ages by political reactionaries, and I critique the nefarious exploitation of medieval history at various points. That said, it is important to bear in mind that national medievalism both expresses and engenders legitimate feelings of identity and belonging and facilitates policies of exclusion or even xenophobic and racist bigotry and violence. Against the backdrop of the Europe-wide renationalisation of medievalism, then, this book examines the different roles played by the national Middle Ages in Britain and Switzerland since the turn of the century. In each country, the return to the local Middle Ages has been marked and multiform. Insularity and Separatism: ‘Unique Continuity’ in Britain and Switzerland The comparison between Britain and Switzerland is not an immediately obvious one. For several reasons, however, I believe the pairing is particularly well suited for exemplifying the broader shift in medievalism towards national referents. In this part of the Introduction, I want to lay out this comparison and set the overarching objectives pursued in the chapters that follow. A first thing to say about the comparative approach more generally is that it is all but a necessity if the object of discussion is nationalism. Without exception, nationalism claims exceptionalism; comparatism is the only way we have of avoiding the trap set by the nationalist framework and taking such claims to exceptionalism at face value.64 Britain and Switzerland are obviously very different in size, constitutional make-up, geopolitical history (including imperial, colonial and post-colonial A point Alice Chandler makes for the ‘Burkean’ kind of British medievalism from the time of the French Revolution: A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London, 1971), p. 102. 64 See also Goebel, Great War, p. 6. 63

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history), social structures and cultural traditions. Their very difference allows me to put any claims to uniqueness and exceptionalism into perspective when dealing with medievalist negotiations of national identity. Though the two cultural regions are in some ways parallel sites of medievalism, the idea is therefore not to overemphasise the homology between them. Having developed their medieval imaginaries largely independently of one another, Britain and Switzerland exhibit both thematic and structural similarities and significant complementarities in terms of their national Middle Ages. Nor do I imply that Swiss and British medievalisms are homogeneous in themselves, since that would be reifying the very identities I hope to interrogate. In both cases, medievalism reflects a plurality of constituent cultures rather than any monolithic ‘national culture’. Although expressions such as ‘Welsh national memory’ remain a useful shorthand, Wertsch and Billingsley are right to insist that the object of study can be memory in, but not of, the group.65 Totalising gestures towards a ‘collective’ memory are common in statements of national identity, but my discussion will show not least how many-voiced and conflicting national memories of the Middle Ages can be. Cultural pluralism is, in fact, a first contextual factor that works in favour of the British–Swiss constellation. Although the public (self-)image arguably still fails to reflect this adequately in either place, neither is a unitary entity in cultural terms. The largely unacknowledged multilingual composition of the United Kingdom (UK) is a case in point and makes for an interesting contrast with the openly celebrated plurilingualism of Switzerland. At the same time, even though it constitutes the bulk of a nominally united kingdom, Britain in some ways is a less close unit than Switzerland. The difference is one of national identification, with the unitary state of the UK barely masking the fact that the identities of its constituent nations – even just those in Great Britain, which make up one half of my comparison – are only imperfectly covered by the descriptor ‘British’. Linda Colley has written persuasively about the emergence of a distinct British identity between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. In the late twentieth century, however, British cohesion began to weaken markedly, a process that is due to both the loss of empire and the decline of Protestantism as an object of national identification: ‘the re-emergence of Welsh, Scottish and indeed English nationalism [. . .] can be seen not just as the natural outcome of cultural diversity, but as a response to a broader loss of [. . .] British [. . .] identity’.66 National medievalism tends to be centrifugal in Britain in the sense that medievalist statements of pan-British national identity remain the exception. English and Scottish medievalisms claim pre-eminence instead, though the English case is often complicated by the fact that the referent ostensibly is all of Britain. Welsh national medievalism is less prominent than either of the others but still an increasingly significant cultural and (more tentatively) political force. 65 James V. Wertsch and Doc M. Billingsley, ‘The Role of Narratives in Commemoration: Remembering as Mediated Action’, in Anheier, Isar and Viejo-Rose, Heritage, pp. 25–38, at p. 30. 66 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, with a new preface by the author (London, 2003), pp. 6f.

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Northern Ireland is a case apart. What national memory it receives from the Middle Ages is obscured, as Byers, Kelly and Stevenson have argued, by ‘the contested context [i.e., Nationalist–Unionist antagonism and the Troubles] and more insistently urgent contemporary debates in which it is invoked’.67 In fact, the very nationhood of Northern Ireland is highly controversial in the first place and thus does not readily lend itself to comparison with the established nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Switzerland. Most importantly, Byers, Kelly and Stevenson have shown that, on the Unionist side of the Northern Irish conflict, what is at stake in medievalist imagery such as representations of Cú Chulainn and the Red Hand of Ulster in murals and other political art is not so much an extension of British identity as a distinct Ulster identity set against the south of the island of Ireland.68 A study comparing national medievalism in contemporary Northern Ireland with that of the Republic of Ireland would be a highly desirable complement to this study’s discussion of Britain. As it is, Northern Ireland will play only a very minor part in my analysis. Federalist Switzerland is in many ways a more close-knit entity than the devolved unitary state of the UK. Its German, French, Italian and Romansh language areas may be very different in size and cultural clout, but this plurilingualism is actually an important part of Swiss national symbolism. Nothing commensurable to Scottish or even Welsh separatism exists in Switzerland, whose constituent parts have long thoroughly embraced a single political national identification. The only substantial instance of separatism in Switzerland in the last fifty years has been regional in nature: the so-called ‘Jura question’. The French-speaking Jura region had been apportioned to the canton of Bern at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which resulted in the Jura becoming a neglected linguistic, cultural and political minority inside the German-speaking canton. Jurassic separatist thought can be traced back to about 1830. Tensions rose in the 1960s, and Jurassic independence from Bern was achieved in 1978, with all but three Jurassic districts opting to become the youngest canton inside the Swiss Confederation. Only tiny pockets of Jurassic irredentism targeting those remaining districts exist today. The unquestioned national identification of all Swiss language regions is noteworthy, given the fluctuations in territory that ‘Switzerland’ has undergone historically, and given that it was a confederacy of more or less autonomous states (Orte) and their subject territories until the 1790s. The Swiss regions’ stakes in medievalist negotiation of national identity are unevenly distributed, with the German-speaking (central, northern and eastern) areas easily dominating the others by the measure of original ‘ownership’ of identity medievalism. But even though regional identity is very strong in Switzerland, Swiss medievalisms have tended to stress federal unity. The Wilhelm Tell and Rütli Oath myths and the Old Confederate victories in battle against more powerful foreign 67 Eamon Byers, Stephen Kelly and Kath Stevenson, ‘The North Remembers: The Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages in Irish Political Culture’, in Bildhauer and Jones, Middle Ages, pp. 45–72, at p. 47. 68 Byers, Kelly and Stevenson, ‘The North’, pp. 57f. On the murals, see also Gregory J. Goalwin, ‘The Curious Case of Cú Chulainn: Nationalism, Culture, and Meaning-Making in the Contested Symbols of Northern Ireland’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 19:3 (2019), 307–24.

Introduction

17

armies – myths I will come back to repeatedly in this book – have had strong unifying power and have been bought into by all language areas.69 Since the 1990s, however, these traditional stories have been appropriated most visibly by German-speaking national-conservatives. The tendencies, broadly speaking, towards federal unity in Swiss medievalism and towards separatism in British medievalism are real enough but should not be overstated. Arguments have been made that a trend towards re-regionalisation is underway in early twenty-first-century Switzerland that directs attention to cantonal histories, occasionally at the expense of national ones.70 In this, Switzerland resembles  – if in far less virulent form  – the fragmented state of identity medievalism in Britain. As my analysis will show, however, the regional and the national mostly share a primarily symbiotic relationship in Switzerland, and attempts by political actors at restoring the standing of national history have been significant, especially after the mid-2010s. Still on the note of shared context, there is the question of my chosen time frame. This study aims to provide an up-to-date account of national medievalism in Britain and Switzerland. The focus on the 2000s and 2010s is mainly due to the momentous national, international and world political developments that took place in that time span (some of which I have already referred to above). Even so, the year 2000 is a guideline rather than a strict temporal boundary, and I do consider developments that either began in the 1990s and have since proved crucial for conceptions of national identity or triggered a counter-reaction in the new millennium. Clearly, the heightened profile of national medievalism builds on a more general ‘memory boom’ that began already in the final decades of the twentieth century.71 Even so, the usually arbitrary marker of the turn of the century provides a useful boundary in delineating my subject because events and developments have taken place since then that have already profoundly affected discourses of national identity in all countries concerned. For the purposes of this Introduction, a very brief overview of some of the most salient events and developments should suffice. In Britain, this time frame coincides with a period of political decentralisation and rumblings of fission. Although the UK remains a unitary state, the creation of The shift from a regional/cantonal to a national cultural memory that integrated all four language regions took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Andreas Suter, ‘Nationalstaat und die “Tradition von Erfindung”: Vergleichende Überlegungen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 25 (1999), 480–503, at p.  497 n. 46. See also Georg Jäger, Bündnerisches Regionalbewusstsein und nationale Identität: Untersuchungen zur politisch-ideologischen Integration Graubündens in die Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Basel, 1991) and Sandro Guzzi, ‘Die Nation als fixe Idee: Vom schwierigen Umgang der Tessiner Kultur mit den helvetischen Sinnbildern’, in Marchal and Mattioli, Erfundene Schweiz, pp. 353–68, at p. 362. 70 Georg Kreis, ‘Schweizerische Nationalgeschichten im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 59 (2009), 135–48; Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte: Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2007), p.  173; Peter von Matt, Die tintenblauen Eidgenossen: Über die literarische und politische Schweiz (Munich, 2004), p. 128. 71 E.g., Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, 12 (2000), 21–38. 69

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devolved governments, parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland after 1997 under Prime Minister Tony Blair has significantly changed both the UK’s model of governance and its political self-understanding. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has been the governing party four times in a row since 2007 and has formed majority governments since 2011, all the while agitating for secession from the union. In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the ‘Ayes’ achieved a respectable 44.7 per cent of the vote. Welsh separatism is still a minor force, but the devolved Welsh parliament, the Senedd, has increased in powers since it was first created as an Assembly in 1999, and Welsh nationalism is tentatively making public inroads. Already in 1977, Tom Nairn spoke of the possibility of a ‘break-up of Britain’. Twenty-five years later, he observed that devolution, whose original purpose was ‘to continue, or even to strengthen, the Union state and its Crown’, had instead become a ‘tentative start’ towards its dissolution.72 The accentuation of separate national identities in Britain certainly proceeds apace in interplay with political devolution. More than anything, however, the break-up of Britain may become likelier to the degree that English nationalism continues its revitalisation. As Fintan O’Toole notes, political Englishness has made a dramatic comeback over the last two decades, its proximate cause being, precisely, devolution and especially the Scottish Parliament.73 At union level, the Human Rights Act was approved in 1998, incorporating into UK law the rights prescribed by the European Convention on Human Rights. The relationship between Britain and ‘Europe’ comprehensively dominated the headlines after the 2016 referendum on EU membership, which resulted in a surprise victory for the Leave side, with a narrow majority of 51.9 per cent of voters approving a ‘Brexit’ from the EU. A majority of Scottish and Northern Irish voters voted to remain but were outvoted by English and Welsh voters. At the time of writing, the UK is no longer a member of the EU but is still undergoing the momentous process of disentangling forty years’ worth of constitutional, economic and social enmeshment. Brexit escalated into full-blown constitutional crisis in 2019 when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ruled by the UK Supreme Court to have unlawfully suspended Parliament. In the context of the strengthening separate nationalisms within Britain, Brexit heralds a particularly challenging period for British cohesion. Already, it has emboldened Scottish voices calling for another independence referendum, and the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol – the protocol to the Brexit withdrawal agreement that averted the re-erection of a physical border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – has effectively created an internal customs border to the rest of the UK instead. At the time of writing, the UK government is threatening to unilaterally tear up the Protocol. On the world stage and under the auspices of a ‘liberal interventionism’, the UK participated in various conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa in the 2000s and early 2010s, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which was a spuriously justified war of aggression. The wars in the Muslim world 72 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 3rd expanded edn (Altona, 2003), pp. xvi and xxx. 73 Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (Croydon, 2018), p. 187.

Introduction

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and the national political developments surrounding devolution and Brexit have occasioned some of the most febrile soul-searching Britain has seen in decades. In Switzerland, the period is characterised by increasing international integration and resistance to that integration. In 2002, Switzerland joined the UN as one of the last members to date. The electorate approved bilateral agreements with the member states of the EU in 1999 and 2004. These provided a comprehensive legal framework for political and economic relations after a decade’s uncertainty following the Swiss refusal to join the European Economic Area (EEA) in 1992. Swiss membership of the Schengen and Dublin Agreements (2005) and the extension of the freedom of movement to workers from Bulgaria and Romania (2009) were confirmed in national referenda. After that, the Swiss relationship with the EU was repeatedly put to the test, particularly by the Swiss voters’ surprise acceptance, by a wafer-thin majority of 50.3 per cent, of a popular initiative ‘Against Mass Immigration’ in 2014. It caused relations with the EU to sour considerably until its eventual legal implementation turned out to be toothless. Negotiations about a game-changing Institutional Framework Agreement between the EU and Switzerland faltered in 2022. The meteoric rise of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the national-conservative, right-wing populist and Eurosceptic party that had launched the initiative Against Mass Immigration, falls within the period 1999–2015. The party had already made significant gains in the national elections of 1995, bolstered by its triumph in the EEA membership referendum of 1992. However, the SVP’s big leap on the national stage came in the 1999 elections, when it achieved 22.6 per cent of the vote (up from 14.9 per cent in 1995). The party has since plateaued at upwards of 25 per cent – still comfortably the largest share of the vote – after a high-water mark of 29.4 per cent in the 2015 national elections. They dominated the national conversation on such topics as immigration and relations with the EU at will until the late 2010s, when several flagships of their European policy foundered at the ballot box. Their electoral fortunes, too, waned somewhat in the 2019 elections. Nevertheless, the national-conservative movement and the SVP in particular have been instrumental in refocusing national discourse on the theme of national identity and state principles such as federalism, sovereignty and neutrality in the early twenty-first century.74 In sum, the period under scrutiny here is one of significant political and constitutional shifts in both Switzerland and the UK. It is also a period of increased activity for national medievalism, which has been responsive to each country’s now less-than-certain relations with their European neighbours and to the reassertion, and questioning, of traditional national identities that come with this uncertainty. So much for the comparison’s context. The thematic and structural similarities exhibited by Swiss and British national medievalisms involve some of the respective dominant national ideologies and identity stories. A first characteristic is typical also of many other countries’ narratives of national identity: the ideal of liberty from tyranny, which occupies a place at the heart of virtually all the nationalisms considered here. The freedom topos focuses on struggles for independence (whose André Holenstein, Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte (Baden, 2014), pp. 17–20. 74

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20

historicity varies) fought against foreign aggressors. It has led to the embracing (and production) of charismatic national heroes including Hereward the Wake, William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Owain Glyndŵr, Wilhelm Tell and Arnold Winkelried. King Arthur, at various times a Welsh, British and English hero, has similarly fought defensive battles countless times over the centuries, and in post-Walter Scott versions of the Robin Hood myth, the outlaw, too, is sometimes a defender of the fatherland against foreign interlopers. To this day, these heroes remain choice protagonists for medievalist identity stories centring on (frequently vague) notions of freedom, independence and autonomy. In many cases, they have weathered considerable ironic treatment along the way. A second characteristic, though increasingly contested at the dawn of the 2020s, is the idea of the ‘propositional’ nation united by common values and institutions rather than by ethnicity. This is particularly relevant for Switzerland, which defined itself as a Willensnation (‘voluntary nation’ or ‘nation of the will’) during the time of European nation-building and made this quasi-official national policy during the Second World War and the Cold War. The so-called ‘Spiritual Defence of the Homeland’ (Geistige Landesverteidigung), a cultural movement initially carried by intellectuals and institutions from across the political spectrum, made heavy use of a memory politics built on medievalist histories and symbols to claim an ancient tradition of Swiss distinctiveness and independence. The claim to propositional Swiss nationhood has often been reinforced with the ideologeme of (armed) neutrality on the international stage. The traditionalist argument sees these principles propagated by the hermit and national saint Niklaus of Flüe in the fifteenth century and painfully relearnt by the Confederates with the lost Battle of Marignano in 1515. That ‘battle of the giants’ (battaglia dei giganti) was a military disaster at the height of late-medieval expansionism by members of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Nowadays mostly a national-conservative shibboleth, the notion of half a millennium of neutrality since Marignano dovetails with a more widely shared ‘propositional’ self-conception of Switzerland as possessing a unique tradition of federalism and democracy. Key examples of this tradition include the will to communal self-­ determination supposedly expressed in the so-called ‘Federal Charter’ from 1291 and the spurious Rütli Oath of alliance of mutual defence, as well as in the medieval direct-democratic institution of the Landsgemeinden (cantonal assemblies). As will become clear in later chapters, however, the drivers of the culturalisation of politics are reintroducing ethnic elements into these conceptions of Swiss identity, diminishing the emphasis on the propositional and civic aspects. A similar process of culturalisation has become observable in the ‘state-nation’ that is the UK.75 In theory, however, time-honoured institutions undergird a British identity that anyone may join who buys into the required values and precepts. A powerful English-dominated self-image of Britain as a beacon of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy looks to medieval institutional precedents much older than the Swiss ones: notably the witenagemot (the meetings of the ‘wise men’ who

Linda Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together – and What Is Dividing It? (London, 2014), p. 9. 75

Introduction

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advised the early medieval English kings) and Simon de Montfort’s Parliament of 1265 as early democratic precursors to parliamentary democracy, and to Magna Carta as rebooting the common law tradition nationally in the thirteenth century. Common law famously operates on a precedent-based system, and some of the four clauses of Magna Carta still in force in England and Wales find themselves invoked in common law courts even in the twenty-first century (although never decisively so).77 With the so-called Declaration of Arbroath (1320) from the Wars of Scottish Independence, Scotland too possesses what some view as an early constitutional document and expression of popular sovereignty.78 A third theme that is strong in both Swiss and British national medievalisms is that of ‘the land’ and its connection to, and protection of, the people who inhabit it. That the land shapes its inhabitants is a truism; conversely, the land’s seemingly unchanging permanency lends itself to ideas of a natural witness to, and receptacle for, the spiritual ‘essence’ of its long-term residents. The land has long represented national continuity.79 In our case, it is imbued with national memory reaching as far back as there are traces of the (often generously defined) ‘Welsh’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ or ‘Swiss’ peoples. A tradition extending as far back as the late Middle Ages imagines the Alps as the natural fortress and protective wall of the Swiss Confederates.80 As of the sixteenth century but more strongly since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, the Alps have been linked with appreciative retrospection on the heroic deeds of the Old Confederates, and hence with the fabled ‘freedom of the Swiss’. As Guy Marchal argues, the strength of the link is such that the Alps by themselves can evoke ‘naturally’ the idea of immemorial Swiss independence and self-sufficiency.81 Perhaps 76

76 In this book, I refer to the period lasting from the coming of the Germanic settlers in the fifth century up until the late eleventh century as ‘early medieval England’, and to the people in question as the ‘early (medieval) English’. To speak of the English (irrespective of whether they are ‘Old’ or ‘early’) in this context creates problems of its own, suggesting as it does a national continuity that really is one of the core mythologies being questioned here: see Ursula Schaefer, ‘Linguistics, Ideology and the Discourse of Linguistic Nationalism: Some Preliminary Remarks’, in Lange, Schaefer and Wolf, Linguistics, pp. 1–36, at pp. 26f. However, the alternative – that is, referring to them as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – is increasingly untenable at the dawn of the 2020s. The history of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is inextricably intertwined with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century race ideology. Medievalists who for years maintained a neutral usage of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ face increasing pressure from more critical peers to acknowledge the implications of this terminology for both medievalists of colour and medievalist discourse in wider society: see e.g., Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘AngloSaxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy’ (2018) [accessed 12 January 2022]; Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’ (2017) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 77 Joshua Rozenberg, ‘Magna Carta in the Modern Age’, in Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta, pp. 209–57, at pp. 211f. 78 James Ferguson, ‘Introduction’, in Declaration of Arbroath, pp. 1–2, at p. 1. 79 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 281–324. 80 Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli, ‘Nationale Identität – allzu Bekanntes in neuem Licht’, in Marchal and Mattioli, Erfundene Schweiz, pp. 11–20, at p. 17. 81 Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 429–79.

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a related phenomenon is the common idealisation  – and, indeed, generous state subsidisation  – of the present-day Swiss (mountain) farmer and the wider rural traditions for which he (for it is usually a he) stands. A colourful figure, the farmer tacitly draws much of his original ideological attractiveness from stories of peasant resistance to feudal oppression, from the shaking of the yoke after an alleged bitter conflict with the nobility in the late Middle Ages.82 In the British case, ‘the land’ is inevitably bound up with its counterpart, ‘the sea’, a defining feature of insular British histories centuries before there was such a thing as British polity to rule the waves.83 Even as they were safeguarded by the sea, the various inhabitants of Britain faced, and experienced, seaborne invasion at various points before, during and after the Middle Ages. For example, the simultaneous fascination and anxiety evinced by many modern narratives about the Norman Conquest of 1066 – most recently in the context of Brexit – suggest the continued ambivalence of a sea that also enables contact, both wanted and unwanted, with the European mainland. Meanwhile, topography has been culturally and ideologically charged in ways comparable to the Swiss case. Certain ‘typical’ landscapes including littoral spaces such as coastal white cliffs, but also Scottish Highlands, Welsh mountains and English meadows, yield national meanings, drawing significance from being envisioned as past time made tangible. The primitivism implicit in much medievalism since the eighteenth century84 means that these landscapes, much as the Swiss Alps, can readily evoke a particular nation’s deep past and lend easy authenticity to visual and textual representations of the national Middle Ages in Britain. A popular line of thinking in England and Switzerland in particular links these thematic cornerstones  – liberty from tyranny, cohesion across ethnolinguistic boundaries, and deep rootedness in a land that doubles as a natural fortification – with a recent history of political standoffishness in a European context. The result is a revivified self-perception as insular nations. To different degrees people in Scotland and Wales, too, have staked claims to a national exceptionalism that relies on a relationship to the deep past which can be described as ‘unique continuity’. The phrase has been used previously to describe a British relationship to the medieval past which solidified in the nineteenth century. Utz argues that, in pointed contrast to many continental nations, the general tenor in Britain favoured seeing a relatively unproblematic, unique continuity between the country’s medieval heritage and its present-day government and culture [. . .]. The perceived absence of the kind of disruptive events that shook the continent in 1789 (France) or 1848 (Germany; Italy) explains why Guy P. Marchal, Das Geschichtsbild vom Bauernvolk und der Mythos vom Tell: Alteritätsbehauptung und Auskristallisierung eines Identifikationkerns (Würzburg, 2001), p. 127. German ‘Bauer’ renders both English ‘peasant’ and ‘farmer’, which makes it easier to identify the supposed embodiment of modern Swissness by today’s rural population with the supposed heroic self-liberation of the medieval Swiss peasants from the corrupt second estate. 83 Colley, Acts of Union, pp. 11–20. 84 Chandler, Dream of Order, p. 23. 82

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in Britain the only major early modern revolutionary event could be enshrined as ‘Glorious’ or ‘Sensible’ or ‘Bloodless’. [. . .] For the imagined community of Britain, not only did the monarchy survive but ever new re-imaginations of Britishness could find their inspiration in manifold medieval traditions.85

In this interpretation of history, the Norman Conquest was the ‘last successful invasion of Britain’86 and gave rise to a nation that subsequently evolved organically and more or less independently from continental Europe.87 The ‘Whig interpretation of history’ (so termed by Herbert Butterfield), whose modern echoes I will discuss in subsequent chapters, is a particularly influential version of this worldview.88 The Anglocentrism of the claim to unique continuity and the slippage between notions of Britishness and Englishness which it entails should be noted: they, too, will be recurring themes. A similar ‘continuist mentality’89 underlies persistent notions of an age-old Swiss Sonderfall (‘special case’ or, indeed, ‘exceptionalism’). Its clearest expression is the seemingly absurd but powerful idea of Switzerland as landlocked island.90 Though it originated in earlier centuries, that idea was particularly popular during the two World Wars:91 the wartime postcard reproduced in Fig. 1, whose title translates as ‘Island of Peace’, shows the Swiss Federal Palace as an island in a stormy European sea. As Von Matt points out, notions of a Swiss special case flow from the idea of unique origins in the seclusion of the Alps and the autarky this implies.92 More specifically, these origins are located, as in the British case, in the Middle Ages. Enlightenment historian Johannes von Müller articulated an influential version of the exceptional Swiss tradition of freedom, which was at the core of his conception of the Swiss ‘national character’. According to Von Müller, that freedom had to be defended time and again by the Alpine Swiss against foreign overreach.93 Variations of this master narrative persist in popular history to the present day.94 Post-­ nineteenth-century versions minimise Ancien Régime history and the upheavals of the French invasion of 1798, the Helvetic Republic, mediation, restoration and civil war (the so-called Sonderbundskrieg, or Sonderbund War) in 1847. Instead, Swiss cultural memory tends to suggest a longer continuity by stressing the nation’s supposed medieval origins on the one hand and its more recent, post-1848 past on the 85 86

p. 41.

Utz, ‘Academic Medievalism’, p. 122. Siobhan Brownlie, Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 2013),

87 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000), p. 128. 88 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965). 89 Utz, ‘Academic Medievalism’, p. 122. 90 See Stefan Howald, Insular denken: Grossbritannien und die Schweiz. Facetten einer Beziehung (Zurich, 2004). 91 François Walter, ‘La Suisse comme île’, in Armin Heinen and Dietmar Hüser (eds), Tour de France: Eine historische Rundreise. Festschrift für Rainer Hudemann (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 419–28. 92 Von Matt, Kalb, pp. 55f. 93 Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 81f. 94 Guy P. Marchal, ‘National Historiography and National Identity: Switzerland in Comparative Perspective’, in S. Berger and Lorenz, Contested Nation, pp. 311–38, at p. 314.

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Figure 1. Rudolf Weiss, ‘Friedensinsel’, 1916. Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern. Photograph by Stefan Rebsamen.

other. In such a view, confederation and liberation in the late Middle Ages allowed for the development of a constitution and mentality that even now set Switzerland apart from the rest of Europe. Current nationalisms in Switzerland and Britain thus share a sense of exceptionalism based on unfounded but powerful notions of an uninterrupted national past stretching back to the Middle Ages. One important factor to bear in mind as I compare Swiss and British national medievalisms is their wildly different international visibility and impact. The currently almost exclusively domestic interest in Swiss medievalist identity narratives stands in stark contrast to the international prominence of their British counterparts. Because of that prominence, I have not strictly observed state boundaries in my selection of primary sources; medievalism does not observe them either. Several of the English-language medievalisms I consider are international, often US-A­merican, (co-)productions; this is particularly true of film and television medievalisms produced collaboratively. Interest in British (English, Scottish, Welsh) identities on the one hand and larger, ‘Anglosphere’ or even just US-American, identities on the other is not always easy to untangle. Here, HBO’s Game of Thrones is a prime example,95 as are many of the cinematic Robin Hoods and King Arthurs of this century and the last. At a very basic level, the global, American-powered diffusion of British and, especially, English identity narratives in medievalist garb 95 Game of Thrones, television series, dir. David Nutter et al. 8 seasons. USA: HBO, 2011–19. Elsewhere, I argue that Game of Thrones at its peak achieved a status of ersatz grand narrative of the West on the strength of its blending of civilisational identity narratives of

Introduction

25

is significant in itself. But also, the sheer extent to which the insular identity narratives have become immediately recognisable global templates and – putatively – common cultural property opens up an illuminating perspective on the state of the ‘originals’ of these identities. I am not the first to argue that these originals are in crisis, particularly so in England. It should further be noted that Swiss medievalism is not particularly widely known in the field of medievalism studies either, whereas British medievalism is traditionally one of its mainstays. My aim is for the less widely known variety to shed new light on the more familiar variety, and for the more familiar variety to facilitate the placement of the less widely known variety in the international canon of medievalism. The study is structured as follows. In Chapter 1, I consider the various ways in which national continuity to the medieval past is being constructed after the turn of the millennium. I adopt a broad perspective here to show the emphases of the respective negotiation of English, Scottish, Welsh and Swiss identities across a set of thematic categories. Medievalism concerned with English identity is burgeoning across the board, with one important qualification: it is not always declared as such but frequently merges with, or poses as, a concern with British identity. Scottish medievalism too is diverse thematically, with a toned-down celebration of military victories and a relatively new focus on the origins of state institutions, specifically Parliament. Swiss medievalism exhibits a slightly narrower range in terms of themes and media, but it is all the more deeply entrenched in the form of widely supported origin myths and variants of ‘total’ national history. Welsh national medievalism is more tentative than the others, but an interest in resistance to English domination and the use of symbolic gestures in a constitutional-political context (notably at the Senedd) also suggests a renewed interest in medievalist self-representation. The three chapters that make up the first thematic section focus on the use of medievalism in contemporary politics, considering one national context at a time. In each case, the Middle Ages are valued for their originary autochthony. The Scottish Independence Referendum, discussed in Chapter 2, was preceded by only tame resort to the history of the Wars of Scottish Independence on the part of the SNP, but the Scottish cultural scene engaged more insistently, and more inventively, with medieval material, collapsing the literary, scholarly and political spheres to make a pro-independence point. Brexit, which is the subject of Chapter 3, has spawned a host of Anglocentric medievalisms, and the Norman Conquest in particular emerges as a projection surface for the anti-European anxiety and resentment which characterise a reinvigorated, although still mostly unarticulated, English nationalism. One particular strand of Brexiteer medievalism reactivates the ‘Whig histories’ of continuous constitutional development, thus explicitly resorting to the ideology of a unique British, or English, continuity to the medieval past. Yet politicisation of medievalism is clearly at its strongest in Switzerland. As I show in Chapter 4, the national-conservative movement has a firm hold of narrative traditions that used to be wider Swiss reference points, deploying them to frame their Eurosceptic Western identity with a synthetic but ultimately English-derived ‘Anglo’ nationhood: ‘The West Remembers (Its Premodern Self): Nation, Civilization, and the Insular Middle Ages in Game of Thrones’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXX, pp. 157–72.

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discourse. A mid-2010s flurry of anniversaries saw the national-­conservatives ascendant in the field of memory politics. Medievalism is being used only tentatively by other political camps to combat national-conservative ideology. The second thematic section is concerned with the ‘Others’ of national medievalism: groups of people who are sidelined or meet with hostility as the nation pursues transhistorical wholeness. I argue in Chapter 5 that women are under-represented in medievalism in both the British and Swiss contexts, though more markedly so in the latter. The problem in both places is an inherited structural defect of historiography: national history has a deeply entrenched focus on male figures, so that even when female figures are the focus for a change, it is relatively rare for them to be represented in ways that do not derive female agency from male authority figures. Clearly, however, attempts are being made to counter this, and some succeed in broadening the scope of national history to include spheres of life other than those of ‘great men’ and the ‘great events’ they shaped, thus redrawing to an extent the boundaries of the national past. Other examples show that representations of violence against women, while frequently part of a retrograde celebration of violent masculinity, sometimes disrupt nationalist nostalgia. Chapter 6 treats the intersection of race, ethnicity and immigration, attributes which mark non-normative groups as being outside the nation more strongly than gender does. Increasingly, however, producers of medievalism express inclusive outlooks, criticising exclusion and whitewashing in historical representation. Their endeavours are frequently up against complaints of political correctness. The theme of immigration is reinterpreted in a positive light in several cases I consider, but while national medievalism offers a platform for progressive critiques of racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, it, too, comes with structural hurdles. It is comparatively rare for contemporary medievalisms to fundamentally question the national category, and national medievalism may simply be made to expand its scope without challenging the principles by which the nation excludes or co-opts Others for its sense of self. Communities of Memory Thus far, I have put to one side the question of what precise mechanics are at play when people share ‘memories’ of a distant age to create national identities in the present. So, before I proceed to my case studies, it bears taking a moment to clarify such key concepts as the nation, nationalism, identity and cultural memory, as well as their interplay in medievalism. Firstly, this book’s outlook on nations and nationalism can be described as modernist, constructivist and subjectivist (positions championed most prominently by Benedict Anderson), although it is tempered by ideas of a cultural longue durée developed by ethno-symbolism (following Anthony D. Smith).96 With the ethno-symbolists, I accept that the nation did not emerge 96 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London, 2006); Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH, 2000). For an overview of the various theories of nationalism, see Paul Lawrence, Nationalism: History and Theory (Harlow, 2005).

Introduction

27

suddenly and fully formed in the sixteenth century. There was often considerable longevity to both expressions of a sense of ethnic solidarity and stocks of cultural symbols (the latter being particularly pronounced in Switzerland and Britain). Such continuities notwithstanding, there is a qualitative difference between modern and medieval nations. This holds especially to the extent that one defines the modern nation as involving mass culture and mass consciousness, as I am inclined to do.97 Similarly, I accept that nationalism emerged only in the nineteenth century but believe nationalism draws on far older traditions of thought. Joep Leerssen describes such earlier ‘national thought’ as a way of ‘seeing human society primarily as consisting of discrete, different nations, each with an obvious right to exist and to command loyalty, each characterised and set apart unambiguously by its own separate identity and culture’. Unlike nationalism, however, national thought lacks a binding political and cultural programme.98 The fact that the broader, looser national thought would go on to furnish source traditions for nationalist ideologies does not obviate the need to distinguish between the two. In emphasising postmedieval adaptation and appropriation of the medieval past, this book is constructivist and subjectivist. That is to say, it accepts the nation to be ‘a product of the human mind and of discursive practices’ and holds that ‘when people believe they are a nation, that nation exists’.99 It is worth noting, however, that in highlighting the top-down nature of nationalist ideology the more stringently constructivist-subjectivist accounts of the nation and nationalism, such as Billig’s, have tended to overstate the passivity of the public in the face of elite-driven attempts to forge national communities. As Maarten van Ginderachter points out, the nation is no false consciousness imposed on ‘passively “receptive” masses’ by ‘“perfidious” elites’.100 Anderson felicitously described the nation as an ‘imagined community’, but to him, ‘imagining’ meant neither ‘fabrication’ nor ‘falsity’.101 This is especially important considering the broad range of authorship we typically find in national medievalism, which involves both bottom-up and top-down initiatives and wildly different degrees of political utilisation. One way of characterising national imagined communities has been to resort to the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism. The ideal type of the ethnic nation is, in Van Ginderachter’s description, a ‘“natural” communit[y] ranging back in time that [is] suspicious of “strangers” and based on race, biology, common descent, language and culture’. The civic counterpart of the ethnic nation is a ‘modern political constructio[n] [. . .] open to outsiders, being based on ties between citizens and voluntaristic choices’.102 These clear-cut types are an oversimplification, however, and Van Ginderachter suggests that a more accurate view of 97 Montserrat Guibernau, ‘Anthony D. Smith on Nations and National Identity: A Critical Assessment’, in Guibernau and Hutchinson, History, pp. 125–41, at p. 128. 98 Leerssen, National Thought, pp. 15 and 14. 99 Maarten Van Ginderachter, ‘How Useful Is the Concept of Ethnolinguistic Nationalism? On Imagined Communities, the Ethnic-Civic Dichotomy and Banal Nationalism’, in Broomans et al., Beloved Mothertongue, pp. 1–13, at p. 2. 100 Van Ginderachter, ‘How Useful’, p. 11. 101 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. 102 Van Ginderachter, ‘How Useful’, p. 5.

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the characteristics imperfectly captured by the ideas of ethnic and civic nationalism is a continuum between ‘ethnolinguistic-cultural’ and ‘civic-political-voluntarist’ poles.103 National medievalism, while generally nearer the ethnolinguistic-cultural pole, is not the exclusive province of fully fledged ethnic nationalism. Underlying all this is, of course, the concept of identity, a concept so ubiquitous in our time that its meaning is usually taken for granted, often at the cost of clarity. In keeping with my constructivist conception of the nation, I consider national identity – and identity more generally – to be constructed and relational, not inherent and invariable.104 As Richard Lebow writes, ‘identity’ should be understood as ‘self-identification’ to acknowledge its malleability and the fact that people have multiple identities: ‘as self-identifications are primarily the result of affiliations and roles, they highlight the social nature of identities, but also recognise the importance of agency’.105 In an incisive description of national movements, Seyla Benhabib writes that the identities in question ‘are not expressed but articulated’.106 I use ‘identity’ as a shorthand for these processes of self-identification. This book is about the way people understand themselves as a nation – and how they go about doing so while looking to the medieval past for guidance. This process of collective self-identification in turn hinges on the complex relationship between culture and memory. That relationship has been the bailiwick of cultural memory studies, a field of interdisciplinary research that has thrived since the 1990s. Memory and identity, for the individual as much as for the group, co-constitute one another. Identity is fundamentally a retrospective construct and hence relies on recall,107 and memory requires an agent and therefore comes with the premise of a stable self that makes sense of the past.108 It is in that context of reciprocity and simultaneity that I am interested in the intersubjective negotiation of national identities and of ‘memories’ of the national Middle Ages. Such negotiation takes place not in some nebulous collective consciousness but in specific, externalised representations of history. These representations derive a significant portion of their meaning from the medium in which they occur, but the narratives that make up cultural memory are obviously not confined to a particular medium. Erll uses the term ‘remediation’ to describe the way in which stories of past events and people are told and retold in different media over the years.109 Cultural memory thus ‘lives’ in a vast range of representational phenomena.110 Accordingly, Van Ginderachter, ‘How Useful’, pp. 1 and 6f. Chris Lorenz, ‘Representations of Identity: Ethnicity, Race, Class, Gender and Religion. An Introduction to Conceptual History’, in S. Berger and Lorenz, Contested Nation, pp. 24–59, at p. 25. 105 Lebow, Politics, p. 17. 106 Seyla Benhabib, ‘Strange Multiplicities: The Politics of Identity and Difference in a Global Context’, Macalester International, 4 (1997), 27–56, at p. 46. 107 Jürgen Straub, ‘Personal and Collective Identity: A Conceptual Analysis’, in Friese, Identities, pp. 56–76, at p. 66. 108 Lebow, Politics, p. 21. 109 Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in Erll, Nünning and Young, Companion to Cultural Memory, pp. 389–98, at p. 392. 110 Ann Rigney, ‘Fiction as a Mediator in National Remembrance’, in S. Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock, Narrating the Nation, pp. 79–96, at p. 79. 103

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the material I consider here ranges from literary ‘high culture’, film and play performances to journalistic and political ephemera to popular history to heritage tourism. Even though the various forms of cultural memory interact in myriad ways, they are not interchangeable but genre and media specific. I will repeatedly refer to lieux de mémoire, or ‘memory sites’, in this book. Introduced by Pierre Nora in the 1980s,111 the memory site has been a key concept of cultural memory studies, but it has also been criticised as vague. I make use of it here precisely because of its ability to cover a wide range of phenomena: ‘from “places” in the literal sense to medial representations, rituals and shared beliefs’.112 Erll and Rigney have usefully described the lieu de mémoire as a notional centre on which multiple remediations of the past ‘converge and [. . .] coalesce’.113 These remediations, Erll and Rigney note, ‘create, stabilize and consolidate, but then also critically reflect upon and renew these sites’.114 Many of the memory sites I discuss have long histories to them, but they all stand and fall with a steady stream of remediations. A less fortunate legacy of Nora’s is the stubborn distinction between ‘history’ and ‘memory’. The distinction is primarily polemical and fails to speak meaningfully to the highly diverse array of representations of the past in culture. With Erll, I prefer to dissolve the opposition in favour of a view of ‘different modes of remembering in culture’.115 Stephanie Wodianka has suggested a model of cultural memory in which ‘myth’ is just such a mode of remembering.116 According to her, cultural memory takes place on a spectrum between ‘historical’ and ‘mythical’ poles. Her model revolves around the perceived cognitive distance between the remembering subject and the remembered object. The mythical mode of remembering involves elastic temporal distance (events of long ago are considered relevant to, even repeated in, the present), close proximity to other members of the same ‘community of memory’ and an uncritical view of the process of remembering as straightforward recall.117 The historical mode, by contrast, insists on rigid, ‘objective’ temporal distance, tends to de-emphasise identificatory proximity and is self-conscious about the processes of interpreting the past as part of its methodology.118 I use the word ‘myth’ in Wodianka’s sense in this book; I do not use it in the popular sense of ‘untruth’. Nor is it synonymous with ‘ideology’: as Wodianka and Ebert suggest, ideology differs from myth by insisting on absolute coherence of beliefs, whereas myth creates only

Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (3 vols, Paris, 1984–92). Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies’, p. 10. 113 Ann Rigney, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal of European Studies, 35:1 (2005), 11–28, at p. 18. 114 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, ‘Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics’, in Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney in collaboration with Laura Basu and Paulus Bijl (eds), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin, 2009), pp. 1–11, at p. 5. 115 Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies’, p. 7, emphasis in the original. 116 Stephanie Wodianka, Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte: Ästhetik, Medialität und Kulturspezifik der Mittelalterkonjunktur (Berlin, 2009). 117 The modal dimension is inverted, however, in what Wodianka calls ‘metamyth’: Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte, pp.  214–16. See my Chapters 1 and 4 for examples of metamyth. 118 Wodianka, Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte, pp. 36–43. 111

112

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partial such coherence.119 This explains why a single myth can easily be interpreted in different and sometimes contradictory ways. There is an affinity between the two, though, and myth can be appropriated (and hence narrowed) by more thoroughly organised ideological thought. In a thought-provoking short essay, Nora describes memory and identity as constituting two-thirds of a conceptual triad that has ‘dominated ideological thinking’ since the 1980s; the third concept is heritage.120 Heritage forms an important part of my own analysis. It is in many ways a kindred concept to cultural memory but has generated a largely separate literature. According to Sharon Macdonald, what sets heritage apart from cultural memory is the way it foregrounds ‘materiality, durability over time and value’.121 It assumes that a specific past is owned by particular cultural groups, be it actual ownership of physical remains or metaphorical ownership of intangible cultural ‘property’. Besides material heritage, then, there are the more subtle forms of ownership of symbols and traditions, the idea being that group identity can be lost if such symbols and traditions are neglected.122 Even in the cases in which heritage is not of the material kind, it is a particularly ‘solidified’, ownable and marketable subset of cultural memory that declares itself a mnemonic consensus and works to bolster the owners’ group identity. While not all medievalism is heritage, any medievalism may, given the right circumstances, become heritage. It seems to me that what makes Nora’s triad of heritage, memory and identity so powerful in the twenty-first century is the promise of ‘authenticity’ it extends to the (post-)postmodern subject. Authenticity tends to be invoked particularly frequently in the context of heritage but guides most uses of the past in national memory. A slippery concept and a major field of research in its own right, authenticity orbits around notions of genuineness, truth and ‘“direct” access to reality’.123 It is a thing consistently desired and permanently endangered in interactions with the past, and it will often be invoked in medievalist visions of a primordial time before the cultural alienation supposedly brought about by modernity.124 Pam Clements, thinking of the myriad ways in which the Middle Ages have been channelled in medievalism, has suggested four intertwined meanings of authenticity. For her, the authentic can be understood to mean ‘historical accuracy’, ‘the 119 Stephanie Wodianka and Juliane Ebert, ‘Inflation der Mythen? Zur Vernetzung und Stabilität eines modernen Phänomens’, in Stephanie Wodianka and Juliane Ebert in collaboration with Jakob Peter (eds), Inflation der Mythen? Zur Vernetzung und Stabilität eines modernen Phänomens (Bielefeld, 2016), pp. 7–26, at p. 15. 120 Pierre Nora, ‘Foreword’, in Anheier, Isar and Viejo-Rose, Heritage, pp. ix–xi, at p. ix. 121 Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (Abingdon, 2013), p. 17. 122 Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Dacia Viejo-Rose and Helmut K. Anheier, ‘Introduction’, in Anheier, Isar and Viejo-Rose, Heritage, pp. 1–20, at p. 9. 123 Virginia Richter, ‘Authenticity – Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn’t Exist’, in Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff with Claudia Perner and Christine Vogt-William (eds), Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities (Amsterdam, 2009), pp.  59–74, at p.  59. See also Thomas Claviez, Britta Sweers and Kornelia Imesch (eds), Critique of Authenticity (Wilmington, DE, 2020); Julia Straub (ed.), Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept (Bielefeld, 2012). On the use of the concept of authenticity in the context of heritage, see e.g., Hyong-Yu Pak, Heritage Tourism (Abingdon, 2014), pp. 60–7. 124 Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford, 1988), p. 160.

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original’, ‘the authorized version’ and ‘believability or verisimilitude’. Clements’s categories are useful in thinking about the disparate but generally forceful claims to authenticity made on behalf of medieval heritage, myths and memory sites. Ultimately, though, all forms of authenticity court the paradox described by Jonathan Culler: ‘to be experienced as authentic it [i.e., the authentic] must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes’.126 Highlighting an object’s authenticity inevitably results in forfeiting that authenticity, whereas not highlighting it means authenticity cannot emerge in the first place. In the former case, authenticity turns into artifice and ostentation; in the latter, a thing merely is, and hence is commonplace rather than authentic. And yet, none of this stops the mass need for authentic history. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder, an effect of recognition above all else: recognition of familiar ‘signposts’ of the authentic.127 In other words, the authentic is that which works for the audience. As I will show, the Middle Ages work as a source of authentic identity – of national identity – for many. At this time of great change and widespread uncertainty, medievalism can root people in their places; as individualism seems to carry all before it in remaking social systems, medievalism can suggest the constancy of communal bonds. Thus, the Middle Ages of today reflect the big questions to which our anxious societies keep returning: where do we come from? Who are we, and who belongs? In some cases, they even ask that most stirring of questions: who do we want to become? 125

125 Pam Clements, ‘Authenticity’, in Emery and Utz, Medievalism, pp. 19–26, at p. 19. For a discussion of ‘authentic’ medievalist place and the complexities and contradictions that arise from modern physical ‘access’ to the past by scholars and non-specialists at ‘original’ medieval cathedrals, see Stephanie Trigg, ‘Walking Through Cathedrals: Medieval Tourism and the Authenticity of Place’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 9–33. 126 Culler, Framing the Sign, p. 164. 127 For the idea of ‘signposts’, ‘signifiers’ or ‘tropes’ that make audiences accept a work as ‘medieval’, see Clements, ‘Authenticity’, pp. 23f. On period markers creating ‘authenticityeffects’ specifically in medievalist cinema, see Sarah Salih, ‘Cinematic Authenticity-Effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox’, in Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (eds), Medieval Film (Manchester, 2009), pp. 20–39. See also Groebner, Retroland, pp. 21–2.

1 Constructing Continuity: Four Nations Imagine Their Beginnings

T

‘You build a country like you build a cathedral, from the ground up!’1

he purpose of this chapter is to provide a sense of the respective breadth and depth of contemporary English, Scottish, Swiss and Welsh national medievalism. The aim is representativeness, not exhaustiveness: while I attempt to make visible the trends and emphases that have emerged in national medievalism since the turn of the century, I explore in some depth those examples I consider particularly relevant to this historical moment. There are many ways the medieval foundations of modern nationhood can be, and have been, imagined. Continuity is, in this context, a narrative strategy designed to make sense of the passing of time and its effect on the national self. The use of continuity in discourses of identity frequently comes with normative claims, spoken or unspoken, such as the claim that unbroken continuity confers validity and authority on those who deploy it, and the longer the continuity, the greater the validity and authority it confers. It is indisputable that besides continuity there was massive change and rupture (cultural, religious, social, political, economic and so on) between the Middle Ages – themselves a highly diverse millennium of history! – and the present day. This chapter is concerned with some of the most effective strategies used today to manage and qualify such change and rupture, clearing the way for memories of the Middle Ages to shape modernity. Eviatar Zerubavel has usefully described a set of common mnemonic ‘bridges’ which people use to ‘integrate temporally noncontiguous manifestations of what we nevertheless consider “the same” entity (person, organisation, nation)’.2 In other words, Zerubavel’s bridges highlight the kinds of techniques that help to maintain a continuous (group) identity. One of these techniques is a thematic focus on the notions of ancestry and descent themselves, which I have argued are fundamental to national medievalism. Another relies on the ability of place to ‘store’ memory and become a physical memory site. Some of the most successful mnemonic bridging operates with the apparent sameness of place, interaction with which promises Robin Hood, film, dir. Ridley Scott. USA and UK: Universal, 2010. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2003), pp. 37–54, at p. 40. 1

2

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direct access to an ‘authentic’ past. A third technique is that of ‘same’ time, which relies on the suggestive power of recurring numbers, with anniversaries enabling a ‘periodic fusion with the past’.3 A fourth, imitation and replication, reproduces or pastiches historical culture. A fifth, discursive continuity, is the manifold strategies used to create an impression of inner coherence in ‘biographical’ narrative: this editing process involves choosing which elements of the past are ‘consistent with [. . .] our present identity’ and therefore need to be emphasised, and which inconsistent elements need to be downplayed.4 A final, closely related, technique is historical analogy, which sees prefigurations and echoes across history. It is particularly marked in political forms of medievalism, whose practitioners will routinely posit lessons and truths for present-day policy to heed. As I discuss the situation in Scotland, Wales, England and Switzerland in turn, I refer both to Zerubavel’s mnemonic bridges and to certain key ingredients from Stefan Berger’s ‘national history stew’, that is, recurring elements from his comparative analysis of national narrative across European historiographical traditions.5 I focus on uses of origin myths, conceived here as myths not simply of ethnogenesis but also of crises and turning points that supposedly mark the beginning of cultural traditions and values considered essential to the nation; and I focus on ‘panoramic’ narrative forms, which purport to condense all national history; on appeals to linguistic and literary tradition; on interaction with physical memory sites; and on invocations of constitutional history. Though these categories may overlap and interact, they are nonetheless thematic emphases of contemporary national medievalism as it varies on the theme of continuous identity. Scotland Contemporary Scottish medievalism has stakes in all these forms of continuity narrative. This reflects the fact that the Middle Ages are very much a living presence in Scottish memory in both the cultural and political domains, and interest in them has been further boosted by devolution. The examples I discuss in this book illustrate not only the range but also the confidence of contemporary Scottish producers of national medievalism, who rarely settle for lazy medievalisms of war at this point. Origin myths from the Wars of Scottish Independence (1296–1357) continue to be at the heart of the Scottish medieval imaginary, but they are less fervently anti-­ English than they were as short a while ago as the 1990s, and the quasi-­constitutional document of the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) proved a strong competitor to the famous victory at Bannockburn (1314) during the campaigning for the 2014 Independence Referendum, as I show in Chapter 2. I begin with an analysis of the on-site commemoration of that battle on the occasion of its 700th anniversary in 2014. Medieval battlefields are particularly informative places to look for negotiations of modern national identity, due to the Zerubavel, Time Maps, p. 46, italics removed. Zerubavel, Time Maps, p. 53. 5 Stefan Berger, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 363. 3

4

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historically strong connection of medievalism, war and nationalism.6 What is more, just as medieval battles are cornerstones of traditional national histories, medieval battlefields are powerful symbols of national continuity. Memory scholars such as Aleida Assmann highlight the ability of place to authenticate and stabilise cultural memory, and thus to embody group identity.7 Memory sites like Bannockburn enshrine a normative national past in quasi-religious fashion: ‘The sanctification of places through the shedding of the blood of martyrs is not only a Christian tradition but also one that was adopted by political nations which, within a secular framework, made the same claim for their soldiers.’8 Added to this, commemoration of a battle that is timed to coincide with its anniversary enacts Zerubavel’s ‘periodic fusion with the past’, creating the impression of continuity necessary for stable collective identities. Repetition is, in fact, crucial to the success of all commemorative culture, with the centenary (or the next best thing, the half-centenary) being a particularly potent form of repetition.9 The cyclical ‘return’ of a date seemingly bridges the temporal chasm between then and now to appeal to an event pictured as particularly representative of an imagined community. In Scottish cultural memory, the Battle of Bannockburn, which saw the numerically superior English army of King Edward II lose to Robert the Bruce’s well-­ prepared Scots on 24 June 1314, has long loomed large as a founding event of the nation. The battle was immortalised by John Barbour in his vernacular narrative poem The Bruce in the 1370s and later by Robert Burns’s ‘Robert Bruce’s Address to His Troops at Bannockburn’ (or ‘Scots Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled’) from 1794.10 Scottish radicals and reformers started invoking the memory site in a newly nationalist vein in the early nineteenth century. The First World War caused Bannockburn to lose in prominence but, following the 650th anniversary of the battle in 1964, it increasingly became a focus for resurgent nationalism as the SNP became a significant political force.11 Since devolution was achieved in 1997, however, Bannockburn has again become less of a focal point of political nationalism. In anticipation of the 700th anniversary, the National Trust for Scotland’s (NTS) long-gestating new Visitor Centre opened its doors on 1 March 2014, soon becoming a success with the public.12 Additionally, in a continuation of the literary tradi6 Linas Eriksonas, ‘Towards the Genre of Popular National History: Walter Scott after Waterloo’, in S. Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock, Narrating the Nation, pp. 117–32, at p. 127; Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), p. 28. 7 Aleida Assmann, ‘How History Takes Place’, in Indra Sengupta (ed.), Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, foreword by Hagen Schulze (London, 2009), pp. 151–65, at pp. 155f. 8 Assmann, ‘History’, p. 160. 9 See Georg Kreis, Der Mythos von 1291: Zur Entstehung des schweizerischen Nationalfeiertags (Basel, 1991); Valentin Groebner, Retroland: Geschichtstourismus und die Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen (Frankfurt a. M., 2018), p. 111. 10 John Barbour, Barbour’s Bruce, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid and James A. C. Stevenson, 3 vols (Edinburgh: 1980–86); Robert Burns, Burns: Poems, ed. Gerard Carruthers (New York, 2007), pp. 126f. 11 Michael Penman, ‘Bannockburn and Popular Politics: Commemorating the Battle, c.1814–1914’, in Penman, Bannockburn, 1314–2014, pp. 165–86, at p. 167. 12 Michael Penman, ‘Introduction: The Battle of Bannockburn. 1314 to 2014’, in Penman, Bannockburn, 1314–2014, pp. 1–14, at p. 5.

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tion centring on Bannockburn, the pre-existing timber-beam ‘rotunda’ monument was inscribed with a poem by Kathleen Jamie entitled ‘Here Lies Our Land’. Her poem had been selected from ten entries submitted by established Scottish poets to a competition sponsored by the NTS. The Centre and the rotunda poem dominate the heavily mediated battlefield presentation devised for 2014. Both affirm continuous Scottish identity while downplaying Bannockburn’s political, anti-English baggage. The creators of the Centre had to make do without any medieval artefacts or structures – even the location of the battlefield is disputed – and so focused almost exclusively on enhanced audio-visual representation and audience interactivity.13 A series of visualisations and simulations such as 3D film projections target visitors’ sense perception. Indeed, the official website refers to Bannockburn as a Scottish sensory victory over the English: ‘The sights and sounds that sent Edward homeward to think again . . .’. Strikingly, this characterisation suggests that universal human sensoriality grants the latter-day visitor direct access to a medieval life-world.14 Lifesized interactive ‘character stations’ allow for interactive learning about social class in medieval society, jobs in the army, weaponry and so on. A virtual, turn-based strategy game lets visitors ‘replay’ the battle in bird’s-eye view on an interactive map. During all this exposure to enhanced audio-visual stimulation and interactivity, Bannockburn as a place remains hazy. The game map is the only clear, but abstracted, view of the place. Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, amid all the technical detail that couches the Centre’s retelling of a prime national touchstone in edutainment, there is very little in the way of an overtly nationalist interpretation of the battle. Thus, even though the Centre is unambiguous in its stance that the battle was a crucial event for an independent Scottish nation, the Centre’s ‘Bannockburn’ never becomes the hallowed ground of national worship. To be sure, like most similar institutions whose target audience is the non-specialist, it stresses the singular event’s importance for nationhood in a way that condenses longer processes and at least flirts with teleology.15 But the enshrining of place that often accompanies such national political history here takes a back seat to a digital framework designed for playful learning about medieval warfare. This disembodied ‘Bannockburn’ is only one half of an efficient division of labour at the commemorative site, however. The Centre’s interior assumes the main responsibility for Bannockburn as a modern-day tourist site; it complements, and relies on, the physical markers of national ‘placehood’ outside. The grounds emphatically are concerned with Bannockburn as a place. A sign by the pathway leading from the Centre to the monuments further uphill reads: ‘The landscape that changed history’. The impression of agency shifting from people to place is confirmed by a reading of Kathleen Jamie’s poem on the rotunda that envelops the commemorative plaza. I visited the Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre on 27 March 2019. For a sceptical account of living museums, whose theoretical premise of universally shared human sensory experience is comparable to the Visitor Centre’s, see Mark M. Smith, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History’, Journal of Social History, 40:4 (2007), 841–58, at pp. 845f. 15 I use the term ‘teleology’ to mean the retroactive explanation and interpretation of events in terms not of their causes but of the ends they would eventually  – sometimes allegedly – contribute to. 13

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The brief given to the poets who contributed to the competition was ‘to evoke the significance of the Bannockburn landscape in ways which will touch and inspire 21st century visitors and enhance the contemporary mood of this place of commemoration’.16 Jamie’s winning poem fully reflects this emphasis on place and its relationship to the humans that use it: Here lies our land: every airt [i.e., point of the compass] Beneath swift clouds, glad glints of sun, Belonging to none but itself. We are mere transients, who sing Its westlin’ winds and fernie braes, Northern lights and siller tides, Small folk playing our part. Come all ye, the country says, You win me, who take me most to heart.17

Just as the battle upstages place in the Centre, place upstages the battle here. Jamie herself states in a note appended to the poem that she meant for it to ‘not concern battles or victories’. Instead, she pays attention to place as both a reservoir of cultural memory and an entity that is radically autonomous from human agency. Place – Bannockburn stands in for all ‘our land’ – coalesces with a long continuity of Scottish culture as Jamie quotes what she calls, in her note, ‘traditional materials’. Imagining the rotunda as a compass, she characterises the four cardinal directions with a quotation each from Burns, Thomas the Rhymer, Violet Jacob and the traditional song ‘Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’. Despite the claim to the land being ‘our[s]’, however, Scottish nature resists being defined fully in relation to Scottish culture. The speaking land has the last word and not only humbles the ‘mere transients’ with its lastingness but sets its own conditions of use. It ‘belong[s] to none but itself ’ and thus conflicts with notions of human ownership, including ownership achieved in battle. Instead, the conditional welcome in its utterance, ‘You win me, who take me most to heart’, insists on a relationship based on reciprocal affection. The connection of the Scots to ‘their’ land is thus shown, at this most ‘Scottish’ of places, to be anything but natural, but, rather, in constant need of loving conquest. By extension, place-derived Scottishness is not a closed category but open to the open-hearted outsider. The poem’s Scottishness thus has a touch of the universal – a touch that emerges as a theme of recent Scottish medievalism more generally. Bannockburn is a profoundly national place in Jamie’s poem, as is witnessed by the cultural tradition she invokes. But that nation cannot afford to be complacent even on its favourite lawn. The ‘Bannockburn’ that came into being with the new Visitor Qtd in Robert Crawford, Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314–2014 (Edinburgh, 2014), at p.  234. All poems are reproduced in Bannockburn: 10 Poems for a Landscape (Edinburgh, 2013) alongside author’s notes. I am very grateful to Sarah Cuthbert-Kerr at the National Trust for kindly providing me with a complimentary copy of the volume. 17 There are no page numbers in the collection. 16

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Centre is representative of its time in proclaiming a confident national identity that no longer has any need to emphasise that the Scottish victory was an English defeat. A second strand of contemporary Scottish medievalism is its treatment of linguistic and literary continuity. Since nationalism swept Europe in the nineteenth century, few elements have been more closely intertwined with the idea of the nation than language and language’s highest form of expression in literature.18 Linguistic continuity and ancient cultural origins were believed to be verified by ‘national epics’ and other early vernacular literary evidence.19 Contemporary medievalism in the four nations reflects their widely differing attachment of importance to linguistic continuity. Though linguistic continuity has its place in contemporary Scottish medievalism, it is rarely central to it. It should also be noted that Scottish Gaelic plays hardly any role in this. Gaelic declined from being the common language of nearly all Scotland in the late eleventh century to being used, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, by a vanishingly small number of speakers (0.628 per cent of the Scottish population, according to the 2011 census).20 Although the discourse of Scotland as part of the ‘Celtic fringe’ is not uncommon even these days, few Scots treat a grasp of Gaelic as a shibboleth of Scottishness.21 By contrast, while competence in Scots may not be commonly considered a precondition for Scottish identity either, its promotion as a distinct, fully fledged language rather than a dialect of English continues to form part of the nationalist agenda.22 There are clear cases of the use of Scots supporting wider ideas of continuous national distinctiveness in medievalism. The tribute volume The Wallace Muse (2005) is one such case.23 This anthology of poetry and art commemorates Wallace’s prominent role in the Wars of Scottish Independence and stresses his importance to twenty-first-century Scottishness.24 The literary part of The Wallace Muse comprises poetry in both English and Scots from the fifteenth century to the present. The use of a geographically restricted minority language such as Scots to write about a medieval national hero reinforces an ideology of national unity and continuity. It constitutes a claim to privileged access to Wallace for a particular community by default, whereas the pan-British and world language English lacks such specificity.

18 On pre-national linguistic identity, see Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam, 2006), p. 267. 19 Leerssen, National Thought, pp. 197–203. 20 William Lamb, Scottish Gaelic (Munich, 2001), pp. 8f.; Scotland’s Census, ‘Scotland’s Census: The Official Count of Everyone in Scotland’ (n.d.) [accessed 15 January 2022]. 21 Richard Haesly, ‘Identifying Scotland and Wales: Types of Scottish and Welsh National Identities’, Nations and Nationalism, 11:2 (2005), 243–63, at p. 255. 22 Haesly, ‘Scotland and Wales’, p. 150. 23 Lesley Duncan and Elspeth King (eds), The Wallace Muse: Poems and Artworks Inspired by the Life and Legend of William Wallace (Edinburgh, 2005). Due to their frequency, references to quotations from primary sources will be given as citations in parentheses throughout. 24 On the long cultural memory of Wallace in the context of wider remembrance of the Wars of Scottish Independence, see e.g., Crawford, Bannockburns.

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It is striking, then, that several Scots poems in the collection imagine a Wallace who partly transcends his connection to Scottishness to become a more universal figure. In these cases, an ‘everyman’s’ Wallace appears as an international symbol of resistance to tyranny even as he is being claimed for Scotland by the poet’s use of Scots. This Wallace emerges most clearly in Andrew McCallum’s poem, entitled simply ‘Wallace’. The speaker talks about a somewhat dubious Wallace in conversational and deliberately anachronising modern Scots: Wallace was ‘an awfu man! / A richt bother, in fact’, whose ‘gang’ used to play a violent cat-and-mouse game with the ‘polis’ (p. 103). The speaker recounts that when Wallace was finally caught and executed, his severed limbs were displayed not in provincial Scotland, but sent to ‘the warld’s fowre corners’ (p. 104). This Wallace defies death, time and geography, however, and is aften tae be seen still fechtin the polis, in Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tianmen Square. . . . (p. 104)

Wallace is a symbol for the global fight against tyranny and foreign aggression. What the use of Scots does is mark the disruptive but necessary Wallace as specifically Scottish – and thus imply that Scottish history epitomises universal values of national self-assertion. The poems explicitly reflecting on language and language history are particularly interesting cases of continuity medievalism. Here, we can contrast Alistair Findlay’s ‘Guardian Gargantuan’ (2005) with James Adam’s ‘William Wallace at Westminster, 1305’ from 1993, which thus precedes the post-devolution historical moment of The Wallace Muse by more than a decade. The older poem is keen to distinguish Scottishness from Englishness and unequivocally reclaims Wallace for the Scots through an act of translation. Adam takes as his point of departure Wallace’s alleged words of defiance to the English King Edward I, which are carved – in English – on the base of the Wallace statue in Aberdeen. In a comment included in The Wallace Muse, Adam claims that ‘graund tho the leid [language] is, we can be shair that Wally wadna hae uised modern English speak’ – and so Adam changes it to modern Scots in order to ‘se[t] [Wallace’s] thochts better’ (p. 71). The linguistic distinction between English and Scots is conceived, anachronistically, in absolute terms already for the early fourteenth century, and the close relationship between the two languages from then to now is tacitly elided. The distinction gives rise to the notion of two different ‘races’: Wallace emphasises ‘our bluid’ and ‘our lang historie’, which differ from those of the English (‘your race’, p. 71). In this miniature narrative of continuity, language anchors the present in the past, serving as a placeholder for stable, inheritable identities that sunder the Scots from the English. By contrast, in Findlay’s more recent, Standard English, poem, linguistic continuity unites rather than separates the two nations. Quipping that Wallace’s executioners omitted to neutralise his tongue along with his skewered head, the speaker stresses the longevity of Wallace’s myth in ‘the leid, the speak the Commons spoke, / the Inglis of Chaucer and Fordun’ (p. 87). These lines play on the fact that Scots was

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known, in distinction from Gaelic, as Inglis until at least the late fifteenth century.25 The vernaculars spoken by Chaucer – who is, as one strain of tradition has it, the demotic ‘Father of English Poetry’26 – and his contemporary the Scottish chronicler John of Fordun – considered by some a Scottish proto-nationalist – are united in opposition to the medieval languages of authority, Latin and French. Rather than being the preserve of the Scots, narrative and linguistic continuities to Wallace empower the oppressed ‘low-borns’ north and south of the border. In this more recent poem, the relationship with the southern neighbour is seen as close and rooted in pre-national experiences of class struggle. These and other twenty-first-century poems in the collection suggest confidently drawn lines of cultural continuity between Wallace and modern Scotland, and the idea of an old national language asserting itself supports an old myth of resistance to tyranny. Again, Scottishness as celebrated in The Wallace Muse is not primarily ‘not English’. As I argue also in later chapters, criticism of and dissociation from English imperialism still is a salient feature of Scottish identity discourse, but this discourse is a little less inward looking, a little keener to see medieval Scottish struggles reflected in other times and places, and hence a little less reliant on the specific contrast with the English. A third technique of suggesting national continuity, one that has enjoyed great popularity in all four nations considered here (and others besides) over the past two decades, is condensed narratives or ‘panoramas’ of national longue durée that enact Zerubavel’s idea of discursive continuity.27 By ‘panorama’ I mean neither a specific medium nor genre of national narrative, but a type of discourse characterised by strong selectiveness that produces histories which focus on ‘representative’ episodes to relay what is suggested to be a comprehensive, total account of the nation’s past. The examples of this that I cite here – documentaries, docufictions and various forms of illustrated historical narrative – all select their episodes by asking: ‘who are we?’ The Great Tapestry of Scotland is a particularly striking example of this. An impressive feat of (literally) embroidered storytelling, this textile medievalism combines visual art and sparse tituli in something resembling an actual ‘panorama’ of Scottishness. Crafted by a thousand – mostly female – volunteers based on designs by Andrew Crummy under the narrative direction of historian Alistair Moffat, the Great Tapestry consists of 160 panels of embroidered cloth of a total length of 143 metres. Even though its visual language is distinct and its use of space often very different, its indebtedness to the Bayeux Tapestry (1066–96) is clear and signalled in the title (neither being strictly speaking a tapestry, but an embroidery). More importantly, the Great Tapestry draws on a particular tradition of reading the Bayeux Tapestry. As I hope to discuss more fully elsewhere, in many English-speaking countries, readings of the Bayeux Tapestry as expressing an early national sentiment are now frequently combined with an interpretation of the ‘tapestry form’ as a visual shorthand for national history more generally. Rendering salient historical episodes 25 Johann Wolfgang Unger, The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language: Education, Politics and Everyday Life (Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 12f. 26 John Dryden qtd in Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, 2002), p. 150. 27 Zerubavel, Time Maps, p. 53.

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in a medieval-coded medium, modern imitations, continuations and adaptations of the Bayeux Tapestry expressly or by implication suggest that they encapsulate a ‘total’ history of the nation.28 Accordingly, the Great Tapestry of Scotland has ambitions well beyond representing a single foreign invasion. Rather, it sets out to represent ‘the story of Scotland’ – in the definite singular.29 It covers an enormous time span and segues from geological time to human historical time up to the twenty-first century. Yet it is an expression of national pride first and history second: Moffat considers the Tapestry to be ‘more than history. This is [. . .] an expression of their [i.e., the stitchers’] love for Scotland’.30 The central place which the Middle Ages hold for the Great Tapestry’s patriotic history is hard to miss: the medieval portion, which among others includes panels on King Macbeth, Duns Scotus, the Wars of Independence and the University of St Andrews, makes up around a fifth of the Tapestry. But it is the ‘medieval’ form itself in which the Great Tapestry presents history that makes this such a striking national medievalism. In appropriating the form of one of the most recognisable medieval European artefacts, it tacitly locates the origins of today’s Scottishness in the Middle Ages and ends its historical trajectory with the crowning achievement of the devolved Scottish Parliament. Three deeply self-referential panels are dedicated to parliament. The last of these, the wide panel ‘Parliament of the Ancestors, Parliament for the Future’, shows historical figures and named and unnamed contemporary Scots sitting in a parliament which several embroiderers are still busy completing (Fig. 2). In fact, the Tapestry was first unveiled and opened to the public inside the Parliament building in late 2013 – that is, in the year before the Scottish Independence Referendum. Though it does not agitate for political independence, the Great Tapestry of Scotland is deeply political in that it puts the genesis of the political Scottish nation into a compelling narrative of becoming. To a degree unusual for the panoramic forms of national medievalism, the Great Tapestry displays awareness of the limitations of national history. National history, which achieved its classic form in early nineteenth-century historiography, organises the past around the telos of the modern nation; hence, the nation becomes the primary measure of what historical information is relevant and what is not. In a consequential move, nineteenth-century historiography declared national history universal history and relegated various other histories – such as class history and women’s history – to the status of ‘specialised’ history.31 In attempting to tell a total 28 On the Bayeux Tapestry becoming a target for nationalist appropriation during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, see Shirley Ann Brown, The Bayeux Tapestry. Bayeux, Médiathèque municipale: Ms. 1. A Sourcebook (Turnhout, 2013), p. lxvii. 29 Alistair Moffat, The Great Tapestry of Scotland, foreword by Alexander McCall Smith (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 1. 30 Historic Environment Scotland, ‘Great Tapestry of Scotland at Stirling Castle’, video (2015) [accessed 12 November 2021]. 31 Karin Hausen, ‘Die Nicht-Einheit der Geschichte als historiographische Her­ ausforderung. Zur historischen Relevanz und Anstössigkeit der Geschlechtergeschichte’, in Hans Medick and Anne-Charlott Trepp (eds), Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektiven (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 15–55, at pp. 34–6.

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Figure 2. The Great Tapestry of Scotland, Panel 157: ‘Parliament of the Ancestors, Parliament for the Future’, 2013. © Live Borders Ltd.

‘story’ of a nation and its identity, the Great Tapestry is, like all the other panoramic works I discuss in this chapter, a successor to this kind of history writing, its tone overwhelmingly celebratory. However, the Tapestry’s makers were expressly at pains not simply to indulge in a history of ‘great men’ and ‘great events’,32 and largely succeeded in this. While it is true that the historical progression is still dominated by capital-e Events (such as the Clearances), notable personalities (Walter Scott) and institutions (the Court of Session), it also includes panels on ordinary Scots such as Hebridean herring girls and washer women, and typical activities and occupations such as waulking, droving and mill working. All of these ‘generic panels’ briefly arrest the Tapestry’s historical progression to dwell on those Scots who did not make history in the conventional sense.33 In expanding its technically aeon-­ spanning but really medieval-to-modern story of national continuity to gesture towards aspects of gender history (witch hunts, the women’s vote) and migration history (Irish immigration after the Famine), this distinctive mixed medium shows signs of being prepared to see Scottish identity complicated. The Great Tapestry’s emphasis on the devolved parliament means it also partakes of what I suggest is ‘constitutional medievalism’. Loosely defined, such medievalisms speak to the ‘state’ in ‘nation-state’, serving to underpin symbolically, or comment on, a particular polity – its governance structures and political system – or operating as a foundation myth associated with that polity. Constitutional history has long been a mainstay of national identity, and today we see in all the British nations an increased interest – albeit starting from very different baselines – in tracing the origins of state institutions to the Middle Ages.

32 33

Moffat, Great Tapestry, p. xv. Moffat, Great Tapestry, p. xiv.

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Rona Munro’s trilogy of James Plays is a particularly noteworthy recent Scottish example.34 The most obvious constitutional origins being explored in the plays are those of the monarchy: each of Munro’s history plays fictionalises central conflicts in the reigns of the early Stewarts James I, II and III. However, parliament also comes into its own. Read in the context of their publication and first staging, Munro’s plays were clearly alive to their contemporary relevance. They were published in 2014 and first staged to bookend the Scottish Independence Referendum in September of that year. In an unprecedented cooperation, they were staged by the National Theatre of Scotland at the Edinburgh International Festival for the first half of their run and at the National Theatre in London for the second. The plays do not comment on the referendum directly, but they are concerned with the theme of an unstable Scotland finding and asserting its identity, and hence resonated strongly with a referendum that was commonly perceived to be a key moment in negotiations of twenty-first-century Scottishness. Contemporary resonance was created especially powerfully in performance, which sought to reduce the sense of cultural and political distance between the present and the past. The costume design was deliberately anachronistic. Downlights reproduced today’s official national flag, the saltire, to fill the entire stage floor, rendering it clearly discernible at key moments and diffuse (or even extinguished) at others. The modern colloquial Scots used by the Scottish characters again conveyed a sense of cultural proximity and continuity. Such signifiers of modern Scottish identity ensured that the plays would be seen through the lens of a highly charged moment of contemporary Scottish history. The James Plays’ titling suggests history plays in a Shakespearean mould, a connection that was readily made in reviews. This royal focus encourages an interpretive slippage between the seemingly continuous institution of the Scottish monarchy (via the later Union of the Crowns), Scottish national history and contemporary national identity. In showing what she has called the ‘lost kings of Scotland’,35 Munro implies that there is a monarchical set to be completed and that gaps in the popular knowledge of the early Scottish kings are gaps in the kind of remembrance relevant to national identification in the present. This implicit premise corresponds with a very long tradition of organising national history in dynastic terms. The identification of the king with the nation is at its clearest in James III’s poignant concluding scene, which sees the young Jamie (James IV) doing penance for having killed his father and usurped the throne. He has to be coaxed into putting on jewellery for the coronation by his great-aunt, Annabella, who invites him to recall the forebears who wore the jewels before him. When she has finished, she equates the nation and the monarch: ‘Now you’re Scotland’ (p. 291). In this deeply self-­referential scene, ‘Scotland’ hinges on an act of remembrance of its origins, just like the one being performed by the trilogy of plays: Don’t worry about what kind of king you’re going to be. Scotland herself doesn’t know what kind of nation she is half the time but I’ve learned that there’s no sense Rona Munro, The James Plays (London, 2014). Rona Munro, ‘The Lost Kings of Scotland’ (2016) [accessed 9 January 2022]. 34 35

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being frightened of what you don’t know. Time to walk out in the world again and find out. [. . .] Scotland will do what Scotland does. Love that. Trust that. Trust that and remember who you are. (p. 291)

The encouragement to remember the past in order to boldly face an uncertain future was apt for the circumstances of 2014. In the pre-referendum half of the play’s run, the phrase ‘time to walk out in the world again and find out’ took on strong contemporary meaning. Perhaps no unequivocal endorsement of independence, this nevertheless suggested a moment of departure for Scotland.36 It is in the concluding moment of the play cycle, showing Scotland personified striding bravely through a door and into the dazzling light of the future, that past and present come closest to merging with one another. What sets these plays apart from royal history plays like Shakespeare’s is their interest in another form of constitutional history, one that emphasises the medieval lineage of a deliberative assembly. The James Plays responded to what had, by the time Munro began working on them in the early 2010s, become a normality again: the existence, after a hiatus of nearly three hundred years, of a Scottish parliament. Arguably, her emphasis on the precursor to an institution that increasingly functions as a symbol of modern Scottish identity creates greater political-cultural proximity to the Middle Ages than the Scottish monarchs ever could. The James Plays do not exactly claim to show an ‘origin’ of the Scottish Parliament – it had existed in some form since the thirteenth century – let alone of Scottish nationhood through the emergence of that parliament. However, Munro plots the rise of an institution that lies dormant at the beginning of James I to become a formidable force in determining the country’s political course in James III.37 In performance, the seating arrangements chosen by the producers assumed a crucial role. As Sarah Thomasson also points out, towering seating banks at the back of the stage created a ‘theatre-in-the-round effect’, so that for the duration of those scenes in which the royals addressed parliament, the audience members encircling the stage effectively became members of parliament.38 Not unlike the temporal short-­ circuiting of past and present in the Great Tapestry of Scotland’s concluding panels, this staging broke down temporal barriers and suggested that all the nation, past and present, was involved in these historic events. In this staging, the late-­medieval Scottish Parliament became a much more representative institution than it historically was by blending into an extradiegetic audience of ordinary people. Significantly, the kings’ political success, and in one case the queen’s, depends on their literally playing to the gallery. This dynamic, too, is rendered most powerfully in James III, when Queen Margaret attempts to appease the raging parliamentarians after the king has outright rejected his duty to rule the country. The Danish-born 36 Sarah Thomasson, ‘The James Plays. By Rona Munro. Directed by Laurie Sansom. Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. 20–21 August 2014’, Theatre Journal, 67:2 (2015), 328–32, at p. 332. 37 On the history of the Scottish Parliament during the reigns of James I–III, and the conflicts that arose between them, see Roland Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates, 1424–1488 (East Linton, 2001). 38 Thomasson, ‘James Plays’, p. 329.

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Margaret – who is at least as much the protagonist of the play as James – gains the parliamentarians’ trust with a monologue that is a complicated declaration of love to a ‘you’ which is, clearly, not just the assembled lords (p. 284). Rather, it is all of Scotland, including, mutatis mutandis, present-day Scotland. Scotland has ‘fuck-all except attitude’, Margaret scoffs, but declares in the same breath that she has come to love it for its warmth, inclusivity and generosity (p. 285). They are equals, and (almost) equally flawed: ‘I’ve seen the worst of you, and you’re murderous, miserable, men. You’ve seen the worst of me, I’ve been a proud, overdressed, self-centred woman. But the best in you pulls me above that, and the best in you, with my help, can sustain this parliament and this nation’ (p. 286). This scene affords the dramatist and the stage producers an opportunity for national self-reflection through the eyes of a sympathetic outsider. The representative function that parliament assumes in this drama is greater than that of a mere political body: it has the potential to be a space where flawed people can meet eye to eye and in good faith to further the good of the nation. The James Plays’ constitutional medievalism, then, makes parliament at least as important a reference point for national identity as the monarchy. While the highly symbolic conclusion of the stage version of James III showed the future James IV walking into the light, the last sound the audience heard before the lights went down was the thunderous stomping of the parliamentarians’ feet in welcome, which immediately merged into the applause of the real-world audience whom the staged parliament had previously co-opted. To be sure, in light of the break in Scottish parliamentary history in 1707, it is a complicated continuity that Munro envisions between medieval and modern Scotland, but continuity nonetheless: the plays implicitly assimilate the breaks in Scottish constitutional history into a history of beginnings, with parliament being resumed in 1999 after an adjournment of nearly three hundred years. As these examples indicate, interest in the medieval past has reached a high point in contemporary Scotland. This manifests in stories with an increasing thematic range being told in a remarkably wide range of media and practices. Crucially, Scottishness is no mere counter-project to Englishness in these stories. The wish for distinctiveness from England continues to play a role, but contemporary Scottish nationalism, as it appears in Scottish medievalism, increasingly has an eye on the bigger prize of international recognition as a nation among a wider world of nations. Wales Though interest in its medieval past is high also in contemporary Wales, in some important respects Welsh national medievalism trails that of the other three nations. Consider the figure of King Arthur, whose myth is perhaps the most famous of all origin myths to come from the British Isles but whose Welshness is now ambiguous at best. The theme of national identity, long foregrounded in the Arthurian tradition, has been latched onto not just by the original ‘owners’, the Welsh, but also (among others) by the British, the English and US-Americans. The complexity of Arthur’s allegiance is reflected in contemporary Arthurian reception, which for the

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most part substitutes Welsh claims for a vague Celticism or denies links of continuity to the present-day Welsh altogether. The complex property situation surrounding Arthur, as well as his ambivalent role in stories of Welsh national continuity, goes far back. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s foundational chronicle, Historia regum Britanniae (c.1136), clearly established Arthur as an ancestor of the Welsh and was read in Wales to prove the Welsh right to rule the island again in future.39 However, Geoffrey plainly tells a story of decline. Arthur’s reign is a last gasp before the Saxon takeover and the British degeneration into the Welsh; the British imperial line is taken up instead by the Norman kings. The ethnic antagonism between the British and the Saxons was subsequently muted, starting with Laʒamon’s Brut (c.1200), and Thomas Malory’s formative Morte Darthur (1485) located Arthur in the English past.40 In the second half of the nineteenth century, uncompromising English claims to ‘ownership’ of Arthur reflected the Anglocentrism of British nationalism and imperialism.41 A strengthened Welsh nationalist movement again produced a parallel, Welsh Arthur in the twentieth century, but Arthur’s appearances in the more widely known twentieth-century fantasy fiction and films, especially in US-American adaptations, displayed, if anything, a vague Celticism.42 The dominant trend in cinematic Arthuriana even now is towards noncommittal Celtic settings which serve as a backdrop for ostensibly universal but often American-tinted stories of nation-building. This is notably the case in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur from 2004, which makes strong but spurious claims about the authenticity of its Celtic Arthur.43 The film is uninterested in identifiable Celtic identities, but rather it participated, as Haydock puts it, in that decade’s trend of film medievalism towards morally ‘Manichean nostalgia’.44 Such nostalgia may play out in a framework that makes Arthur a Celt, but this Britain is mostly interchangeable with (other) fantasy settings. The renaming of the Picts into ‘Woads’ on the director’s whim – Fuqua later explained that ‘Picts’ sounded ‘a little weird’

39 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007). For a concise overview of the formative texts of Arthurian tradition, see Helen Fulton, ‘Introduction: Theories and Debates’, in Fulton, Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 1–11, at pp. 3–7. 40 Layamon, Brut or Hystoria Brutonum, ed. and trans. with textual notes and commentary by W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Harlow, 1995); Thomas Malory, Le morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field (Cambridge, 2013). See Jonathan Davis-Secord, ‘Revising Race in Laʒamon’s Brut’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 116:2 (2017), 156–81, at p. 181; Andrew Lynch, ‘Malory’s Morte Darthur and History’, in Fulton, Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 297–311, at p. 297. 41 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000), p. 123. 42 Geraint Evans, ‘Modernist Arthur: The Welsh Revival’, in Fulton, Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 434–48, at p. 443. 43 King Arthur, film, dir. Antoine Fuqua. USA: Touchstone, 2004. 44 Nickolas Haydock, ‘Digital Divagations in a Hyperreal Camelot: Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur’, in Fulton, Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 525–42, at p. 532.

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to him  – is telling in this regard. The one-season television series Camelot (2011) also presents an Arthur whose Britishness is incidental rather than establishing links to specific later national identities.46 The Welsh, having lost exclusive rights to Arthur centuries ago, remain strangers to recent mainstream Arthurian film and television even when their ancestors are ostensibly its object. The nationalism of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) is much more specific, but it is English nationalism that it projects, not Welsh.47 Arthur’s second major cinematic outing so far this century makes no pretensions to authenticity whatsoever but is shaped by the cinematic maximalism of the new age of superheroes. The film draws only loosely on Arthurian tradition,48 owing more to Ritchie’s own earlier ‘geezer’ comedies and a video-game aesthetic characterised by the extreme manipulation of time and camera movement. As Mary Behrman has also noted, the film’s English positioning ‘writes the Welsh out of their own history’.49 Not only does Ritchie claim Arthur unequivocally for the English (Arthur ultimately proclaims himself ‘England’), but the film even enacts a translatio from a Celtic to an English nation.50 Initially, Camelot exhibits visual and musical markers of Celticism such as ‘druidical’ mages in flowing robes, craggy landscapes and pagan funeral pyres. When Uther defends Camelot against the evil Mordred, plaintive Welsh lyrics speak of the afterlife in the mythical Welsh otherworld of Annwn.51 However, Celtic magic proves to be Camelot’s undoing, as Mordred’s apprentice Vortigern uses it to kill Uther and usurp the throne. The boy Arthur escapes in a boat that takes him from Camelot to Londinium. That boat ride represents in miniature a translatio imperii from the Celtic to the English: in brief successive shots, it shows a transition from a rural space of snow-capped mountains, highlands and lochs to placid lowlands and eventually the urban space of Londinium. Fittingly, the Celtic mage, previously Arthur’s mentor, takes her leave once Arthur has established his explicitly English court at Camelot at the end of the film. The Celtic world is in the past: the future belongs to the street-smart English. A prominent outlier in the generally de-Welshed Arthuriana of recent years comes from literature: Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015).52 However, the novel is not so much an origin myth as an anti-myth of interrupted continuity: the Arthur 45

45 Antoine Fuqua, Keira Knightley and Clive Owen, ‘Antoine Fuqua, Keira Knightley and Clive Owen Revisit the Round Table with King Arthur’ (2004) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 46 Camelot, television series, dir. Mikael Salomon et al. USA: Universum, 2011. 47 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, film, dir. Guy Ritchie. USA: Warner Brothers, 2017. 48 Usha Vishnuvajjala, ‘Ritchie (dir.), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2)’, in Leah Haught and Richard Utz (eds), Medievally Speaking (2017) [accessed 25 Octo­ ber 2019]. 49 Mary Behrman, ‘Angle-ing for Arthur: Erasing the Welsh in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXIX, pp. 49–65, at p. 59. 50 On translatio imperii, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ, 2013), p. 28f. 51 Rather fittingly for this resolutely presentist film, the song originates in a tie-in video to the first-person sci-fi shooter videogame series Halo: see also Behrman, ‘Angle-ing’, p. 51. 52 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (London, 2015).

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figure is revealed to be a manipulative chimera, and the narrative foreshadows radical rupture rather than continuity between the medieval and the modern Britons. The Buried Giant’s main theme is the hold which the past has on the present, which makes it one of several medievalisms I discuss here that are explicitly concerned with collective memory and myth-making. At one level, The Buried Giant is a bittersweet portrayal of an elderly married couple’s enduring love in the face of past betrayals and unreliable memory. At another level, it is a dark interpretation of a core British origin myth, an ominous account of the end of Celtic Britain and the imminent adventus saxonum. The Britain in which the action is set suffers from a mysterious forgetfulness, which also afflicts the two protagonists, the Britons Axl and Beatrice, who set out to find the son they had forgotten they had. In the course of their personal journey (which I will pass over here), this forgetfulness is revealed to be due to an act of mnemonic engineering by the late King Arthur. It is a spell put on a subdued dragon that forces her to fill the land with a mist of forgetfulness, whose main purpose is to prevent memories of war crimes committed by one ethnic group against another from tearing apart an inchoate mixed British–Saxon society. Arthur had ordered that all inhabitants of Saxon villages be massacred during the Battle of Badon, in breach of a treaty between the Britons and the Saxons that safeguarded the innocents and that Axl, then one of Arthur’s knights, had brokered. The memory of this betrayal obscured, Arthur subsequently set up his own myth as the familiar unifying figure and epitome of justice instead. Wistan, a Saxon warrior from the eastern fenlands who is immune to the mist, is on a mission to slay the dragon and restore his people’s memories of the crime. In the end, Wistan kills both the dragon and its aged protector, Sir Gawain, before announcing to Axl and Beatrice that, with the mist now lifted, the Saxons will take terrible revenge on the Britons. The Buried Giant resists interpretation as an endorsement of either remembering or forgetting past wrongs, but emphasises the cost of both. The principal narrator takes on a key role in the novel’s negotiation of this ethical quandary by implicating his audience in a similar process of forgetting an ethnic group’s dark fate for the sake of collective ease of mind.53 The narrator addresses an audience with whom he claims to share a nationality. In a lightly ironic, quasi-ethnological tone, he sketches a narrative of progress following the Middle Ages, suggesting that any primitiveness and barbarity he is about to relate is safely in the past. The later England or Britain from which he is narrating stands at the pinnacle of that progress and is reminiscent of the ‘green and pleasant land’ of cliché. In the very first sentence, the narrator informs the reader that ‘you would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated’ (p. 3). His tone is inclusive – he speaks of ‘we’ (p. 31), ‘our country’ (p. 3) and ‘the Britain of those days’ (p. 4) – but displays a distinctly English bias. He deplores the absence of a stereotypically English landscape – ‘we did not have the hedgerows that so pleasantly Jess Engebretson makes a similar argument in ‘Talking to the Dead: Narrator and Audience in Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’ (2017) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 53

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divide the countryside today into field, lane and meadow’ (p. 31) – but speculates that the view which his characters have as they stand on the ramparts of a Saxon village ‘may not have differed so greatly from one to be had from the high windows of an English country house today’ (p. 91). Contrasting the respective habitations of the Britons and the Saxons, he suggests that the Saxon village ‘would have been something more familiar to you as a “village” than Axl and Beatrice’s warren’ (p. 53). The ultimate nostalgia-laden signifier of British togetherness, the pub, is here aligned entirely with Saxon culture: ‘you would not have thought this longhouse so different from the sort of rustic canteen many of you will have experienced in one institution or another’ (p. 83). The narrator’s casual conflation of England and Britain barely masks the fact that he is prepared to represent only Saxon culture as familiar to the implied ‘modern’ (p. 83) audience. This denial of cultural kinship with the Britons takes an unsettling turn when Wistan ultimately announces to Axl and Beatrice that the Saxons will all but exterminate the Britons now that the dragon is gone. He foretells that the tentative intermingling of Britons and Saxons that has taken place under the mist of forgetfulness will soon give way to genocide: ‘For you Britons, it’ll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you. You’ll flee or perish. And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace of your people’s time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended’ (p. 340). The Buried Giant does not describe the process by which the Britons and their culture are displaced – whether by extirpation at the hands of the Saxons or cultural absorption – but the narrator’s way of addressing an ostensibly British but really English fictional audience suggests that the Britons have indeed comprehensively lost control of their homeland. This vision is particularly unsettling because of the previously introduced motif of people unknowingly walking on a graveyard. At one point, the rambling Gawain obliquely refers to the atrocities committed during the war, which have left barely any trace on the peaceful medieval British landscape. As he escorts Axl and Beatrice through a former mausoleum, Gawain, too, invokes the topos of the ‘green and pleasant land’ to describe Britain but motions towards the violence that lies hidden underneath: Here are the skulls of men, I won’t deny it. There an arm, there a leg, but just bones now. [. . .] I dare say, sir [i.e., Axl], our whole country is this way. A fine green valley. A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead. And I don’t talk, sir, only of those who received a Christian burial. Beneath our soil lie the remains of old slaughter. (p. 195)

By extension, the scene calls into question the bucolic later England-Britain sketched by the narrator, who so pointedly avoids the question of how that land has come into being after the events he narrates. The book works hard to suggest that the real-world audience bears at least some resemblance to the narrator’s fictitious ‘modern’ land. Having revealed that Arthur has cynically set up his own myth as a benevolent ruler who has unified the British–Saxon nation, the novel invites the modern audience to consider the way that the national integrating figure they are familiar with is likewise the contradictory product of a process of forgetting, and of remembering otherwise. The Buried Giant

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encourages the culturally literate audience to reflect that, both in the story and in real life, Arthur’s myth caters for a need for national cohesion but has also been imposed by dominant social groups in the interest of such cohesion. As I read it, the book encourages the audience to reflect that the national hero Arthur, rather than being associated with the obvious ‘descendants’ of the post-Roman Britons, the Welsh, now represents the newer breed of English-dominated Britons and even, as in Ritchie’s version, the English themselves. In the gulf between the events of The Buried Giant’s plot and its narrator’s ‘modern’ nation lies the disappearance of the Britons; in the span from Arthur’s first appearances in fiction to his appropriation as an idealised English-‘British’ national hero in the real world lurk painful histories of British nation-building and the English imperialism at home and overseas that this involved. Like Arthur’s myth, language history and literary tradition offer no guarantees of incontestable Welsh continuity to the present day. Adaptations from this century of the most celebrated cycle of medieval Welsh literature, the Mabinogion, are a subtle but illuminating example of this. One of the foremost objects of Welsh national medievalism, the Mabinogion has been revitalised in English-language adaptations. Although there is a clear sense that they treat Welsh heritage, they also reveal that the literary tradition that springs from the Mabinogion is now to no small degree perceived as universal, and that this universality to some extent inhibits national associations. A collection of eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, the Mabinogion is considered a founding text of Welsh literature and the Welsh ‘national epic’.54 Wider recognition of that status needed an English act of midwifing, however: Charlotte Guest’s English translation (1838–45).55 Guest’s Mabinogion was, as Annmarie Drury puts it, ‘an assertion of the nobility of Wales and the Welsh amongst whom she had chosen to live’.56 However, the broadly nationalist thrust of her achievement was undermined by the fact that she was no native to the region. English critics mixed praise for the Mabinogion with belittlement of Wales, contrasting the ‘internal colony’s’ former greatness with its modern degradation.57 This was the opposite of Guest’s intent, but there was an undeniable ambivalence to her act of translation. As Michael Cronin points out, translation is ‘rarely divorced from issues of power and identity’ when taking place between a minority and a majority language.58 This is not to deny the service Guest did to the tales by bringing them to European awareness. However, their canonisation via English also had the effect of de-emphasising Welsh ‘ownership’. 54 The title ‘Mabinogion’ is merely a convenient label for texts which were not intended as a collection and are not the work of a single author: Sioned Davies, ‘Introduction’, in The Mabinogion, trans. with an introduction by Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2007), pp.  ix–xxx, at pp. ix f. The tales have their origins in oral tradition far older than the two main extant textual witnesses, the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c.1400). 55 The Mabinogion, trans. Charlotte Guest, introduction by R. Williams (London, 1937). 56 Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, 2015), p. 65. 57 Drury, Translation, p. 68. 58 Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork, 1996), p. 4.

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The same tension between Welsh specificity and universality can be discerned in the burst of adaptations produced after the turn of this century.59 The two most high-profile adaptations were written in English: Matthew Francis’s The Mabinogi (2017), a verse retelling of the Four Branches (the four most famous of the tales), and New Stories from the Mabinogion (2009–13), a series of novella-length prose adaptations commissioned by the publisher Seren, which specialises in English-­ language texts by Welsh writers. The Seren novellas are a highly diverse collection of loose adaptations set in both the present and the future, and in various places besides Wales. An instructive meta-discourse of national-literary continuity and literary ownership surrounds both adaptations.60 Lloyd Jones, who adapts the Third Branch for the Seren series, registers his surprise that no Welsh-language publisher had commissioned a similar series ‘a long time ago’.61 On a basic level, of course, the English predominance in recent Mabinogion adaptation simply reflects the linguistic realities of contemporary Wales. After a collapse in Welsh-speaker numbers in the first half of the twentieth century, numbers have levelled out at around 20 per cent of the population in the early twenty-­ first century.62 Furthermore, the English predominance should be considered in the context of a fully bilingual Welsh nationalism:63 today, ‘Welsh literature’ quite naturally encompasses literature in both Welsh and English. It is not so surprising, then, that literary Welsh national medievalisms today should not particularly foreground the continuity of Welsh. And yet, there remains a tension between the suggestion that the Mabinogion is quintessentially Welsh and the claim, in these English adaptations, that it is a universal text. Various comments by Francis, the Seren authors and reviewers of the series illustrate this ambiguous relationship. It is at its least problematic for Seren commissionee Fflur Dafydd, who recalls her initial attraction to the Mabinogion: ‘here was something that was uniquely ours, yet had all the flavour of a European epic’.64 59 Audrey L. Becker, ‘Temporality, Teleology and the Mabinogi in the Twenty-First Century’, in Audrey L. Becker and Kristin Noone (eds), Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture Essays on Adaptations in Literature, Film, Television and Digital Media (Jefferson, 2011), pp. 195–218, at p. 195. 60 I offer a reading of one of the novellas in Chapter 6. For further case studies, see Aleksander Bednarski, ‘Windows into the Myth: A Pictorial Reading of Lloyd Jones’s See How They Run’, Image & Narrative, 19:2 (2018), 91–104; Matthieu Boyd, ‘The Four Branches Flowering: New Tales from the Mabinogion’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 35 (2015), pp. 57–87; Carlos A. Sanz Mingo, ‘Medieval World, Modern World: The Making of a Nation. The Welsh Mabinogion in Modern Adaptations’, in Claudia Marquis, Roger Nicholson and Gertrud Szamosi (eds), Contested Identities. Literary Negotations in Time and Place (Newcastle, 2015), pp. 121–36; Kati Voigt, ‘The Inheritance of the Mabinogion: Welsh Mythology in Tolkien’s Works and in Recent British Fiction’, in Dieter Petzold (ed.), The Inheritance of the Inklings (Frankfurt a. M., 2012), pp. 42–55. 61 Lloyd Jones, See How They Run (Bridgend, 2012), p. 232. 62 ‘Language in England and Wales: 2011’ (2013) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 63 Charlotte Aull Davies, Welsh Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: The Ethnic Option and the Modern State (New York, 1989), p. 37. 64 Fflur Dafydd, The White Trail (Bridgend, 2011), p. 203.

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Unsurprisingly, there is greater tension for the English writer Francis, who recounts being wary when first approached by Faber & Faber to write his adaptation. As an outsider who does not speak Welsh, ‘I cannot claim The Mabinogi as part of my personal heritage’. But Francis immediately tempers this description of the specifically Welsh text by suggesting that its canonical status makes it common property: ‘the greatest products of the human imagination are the heritage of us all’.65 Likewise on account of her tenuous Welsh connection, Tishani Doshi, author of the Seren novella Fountainville, reports strong hesitation about arrogating another culture’s property: ‘I believe it’s something dangerous to meddle with other people’s myths.’66 For her, too, the possibility of access lay in the tales’ universality, which she attributes to their obviously mythical rather than historical character: myths ‘are forever open, ready to be transformed and reinterpreted. For this reason, [. . .] I agreed to [. . .] take on all those, for me, unpronounceable Welsh names and fantastical Celtic happenings.’67 Other authors suggest that the English adaptations render lucid the Mabinogion’s opaque medieval aspects for the benefit of modern readers. Horatio Clare recalls thinking that the Mabinogion was ‘an appropriately dense and twisting root’ of Welsh literature, and Russell Celyn Jones believes that the ‘medieval, oral, storytelling tradition [. . .] no longer engages the contemporary reader’.68 That the adaptations’ mediating function necessarily involves a turn to the majority language English is implied by the series editor Penny Thomas. She describes the Mabinogion as a literary classic little known beyond the borders of Britain, or even beyond Wales, and hopes to further its fame abroad with the modern reworkings, ‘through’ which the original tales are ‘to be enjoyed wherever they are read’.69 Tellingly, one critic, convinced of Seren’s success in this popularising mission, writes that the series ‘may be the greatest service to the Welsh national epic since Lady Charlotte Guest’.70 ‘English’ support again makes the Mabinogion more widely known, but it also makes it less exclusively Welsh. These are, then, highly ambiguous cases of Welsh continuity medievalism. Furthermore, it seems to me the point Doshi makes needs to be stressed: dealing in the supernatural and fantastical rather than the recognisably historical sets contemporary appropriations of the Mabinogion – and indeed of King Arthur – apart from those of the equally canonical English histories by Shakespeare, for example, and even from universalising approaches to a William Wallace. The low-key celebration of Welshness in contemporary appropriations of the Mabinogion again highlights the way Welsh national medievalism is less assertive in the early twenty-first century than its equivalents in England, Scotland and Switzerland. Matthew Francis, The Mabinogi (London, 2017), p. xii. Tishani Doshi, Fountainville (Bridgend, 2013), p. 184. 67 Doshi, Fountainville, pp. 185f. 68 Horatio Clare, The Prince’s Pen (Bridgend, 2011), p. 201; Russell Celyn Jones, The Ninth Wave (Bridgend, 2009), p. 171. 69 Penny Thomas, ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion: Introduction’, in R. C. Jones, Ninth Wave, pp. 5–7, at p. 7. 70 Alfred Hickling, ‘The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis’ (2010) [accessed 10 January 2022]. 65

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Though less assertive, the Welsh national Middle Ages are still fairly varied. Besides the strong line-up of place-based practices of heritage tourism that Wales shares with the other British nations (Wales is the ‘castle capital’ of Europe, after all), its national Middle Ages are currently at their strongest in variations, in many different media, of an origin myth which, unlike Arthur’s, is grounded in historical fact. It revolves around neither a single hero nor a single event, but around Welsh resistance to English rule in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and its figureheads, especially Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Owain Glyndŵr. The resistance myth is the continuation and intensification of what Geraint Evans has identified as a trend of the twentieth century.71 The increase in interest in late-medieval Wales and its struggles with England is obviously fired by, and in turn feeds back into, the slowly increasing demand for greater political autonomy for Wales, an obvious milestone for which was the sanctioning of a National Assembly in 1998. A growing body of literature on the heroes of resistance includes several recent novels dedicated to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd,72 and Llywelyn’s counterfactual survival of the ambush in 1282 forms the premise of Sarah Woodbury’s fantasy series After Cilmeri (nineteen novels to date).73 The bulk of this growing body of literature, however, is devoted to Owain Glyndŵr. One of the most famous figures in the history of Wales, Glyndŵr led an anti-English revolt that lasted from 1400 to 1415, when he most likely died, in obscurity but uncaptured by the English. Glyndŵr was posthumously transformed into a national redeemer figure.74 Today, he enjoys great fame in Wales, his legacy added to continuously and with increasing frequency since the late 2000s with statues, biographies and (popular) histories,75 poetry76 and even picture books.77 He is the object of several novelisations, most notably in Moelwyn Jones’s Son of Prophecy trilogy.78 That title is an English translation of ‘Mab Darogan’, the mythical Welsh figure who will, according to prophecy, reclaim Britain for the Britons, that is to say, for the Welsh. Through the centuries, Mab Darogan has been associated with a number of leaders besides Glyndŵr, including King Arthur, Llywelyn the Great and Henry VII. Yet, of these Meibion, Glyndŵr’s symbolic status is particularly high in early twenty-first-century Wales. This place of pre-eminence is further attested by institutional initiatives such as the recent (failed) attempts to repatriate the so-called Pennal Letter of 1406 to Wales. The letter, in which Glyndŵr asks the King of France for support and describes his vision of an independent Wales, was composed during a synod of the G. Evans, ‘Modernist Arthur’, p. 446. E.g., John Hughes, The Lost Welsh Kingdom: What Was to Become of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn’s Queen? (Talybont, 2015); Peter Gordon Williams, Llywelyn Ap Gruffudd: The Life and Death of a Warrior Prince (Talybont, 2015). 73 Sarah Woodbury, The After Cilmeri Series, 19 vols (n.p., 2011–). 74 E. R. Henken, National Redeemer: Owain Glyndŵr in Welsh Tradition (Cardiff, 1996). 75 E.g., Gruffydd Aled Williams, The Last Days of Owain Glyndŵr (Talybont, 2017); Terry Breverton, Owain Glyndŵr: The Story of the Last Prince of Wales (Stroud, 2013); R. R. Davies, Owain Glyndŵr: Prince of Wales (Talybont, 2009). 76 Rhys Parry (ed.), A Song for Owain: Poems in Praise of Owain Glyndŵr (Talybont, 2004). 77 Rhiannon Ifans, Owain Glyndŵr: Prince of Wales (Talybont, 2003). 78 Moelwyn Jones, Son of Prophecy Trilogy, 3 vols (Talybont, 2016–18). 71

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Welsh Church at Pennal in 1406. The letter was exhibited at the National Library of Wales in 2000 but remains the property of the Archives Nationales in Paris. Facsimiles were authorised in 2009 to be permanently displayed in six Welsh institutions, including the National Library. In another example of institutional recognition, the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, upon achieving full university status in 2008, was renamed Wrexham Glyndŵr University – in recognition of Glyndŵr’s aim, stated in the Pennal Letter, to found universities in Wales.79 It should be noted, though, that a rather different picture emerges if we look beyond Wales, where engagement with Welsh resistance to English rule is scarce and superficial. This is noteworthy, given the unabated global interest in medievalism set in Great Britain. Especially striking is the virtual nonexistence of international portrayals of Glyndŵr outside adaptations of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, where ‘Glendower’ is a marginal and ambiguous figure.80 Kurt Sutter’s American-produced mini-series The Bastard Executioner (2015) is worth mentioning for representing, unusually, a Welsh rebellion; less unusually, however, Sutter relegates it to a secondary role.81 The rebellion serves primarily to set the scene: it is the early fourteenth century, the Welsh have been ‘crushed’ by Edward I, and English barons ‘rule their Welsh fiefdoms with uncompromising brutality’ (according to the title card). The main story is that of the Welshman Wilkin Brattle and his vendetta against an English Baron who has murdered Brattle’s wife and unborn child. Only in a subplot does The Bastard Executioner represent what is left of the failed Madog ap Llywelyn rebellion of 1294–95. Gruffudd y Blaidd (‘the Wolf ’) and his small remnant of poorly armed rebels wage a guerrilla war against the English occupiers. The series never delivers on the national pathos which this storyline promises. Instead, it veers into esoteric territory involving a persecuted Templar and a living descendant of Jesus, whom Brattle and the Baron’s Welsh widow must protect from the corrupt Church. The rebels come to their aid: in defiance of the convention that all other struggles be subordinated to the national cause in medievalism, that cause remains a secondary concern here. Due to the show’s early cancellation, it is impossible to know if the Welsh resistance was to take a more central position in later seasons. As it stands, Sutter’s prioritising of standard fare straight from The Da Vinci Code playbook over Welsh national medievalism is representative of the way this origin myth remains a discreet presence outside the safe space of intra-Welsh historical discourse. The newly heightened profile of medievalism within Wales itself is reflected in some tentative links being made between medieval Welsh royalty and political institutions. Monarchical history itself obviously is a cause for melancholy for Welsh 79 David Williamson, ‘Owain Glyndwr and the French Connection’ (2013) [accessed 27 June 2018]. 80 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV: Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London, 2002). In contrast, Scotland’s warrior king Robert the Bruce has received two cinematic treatments in the late 2010s alone: Outlaw King, film, dir. David Mackenzie. UK: Sigma Films, 2018; Robert the Bruce, film, dir. Richard Gray. USA: Yellow Brick Films, 2019. 81 The Bastard Executioner, television series, dir. Kurt Sutter. USA: FX Network, 2015.

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nationalists, given the symbolic appropriation of the title ‘Prince of Wales’ by the English under Edward I for the heir apparent of the English, and later British, monarch (though some take comfort in the Welsh origins of the Tudors). In the face of such forced discontinuity, the veneration increasingly shown towards Owain Glyndŵr in his country tends to stress the fact that he was the real Prince of Wales of his time, or simply ‘the last Prince of Wales’. The most resonant recent political Glyndŵr invocations concern the devolved Welsh Parliament, the Senedd. The Senedd has assumed a comparable if less pronounced role of symbolising national identity to the one increasingly being played by the Scottish Parliament. As the Great Tapestry did for Scotland, a representative Welsh panoramic medievalism from 2012, the BBC’s documentary series The Story of Wales, makes the Senedd the end-point of a whistle-stop tour through national history.82 As is typical of the format, the series argues that national identity emerged in the Middle Ages: the programme’s presenter, Huw Edwards, claims that the Welsh nation came into being through the ‘hunger for power and [. . .] lust for land’ of the medieval royals of Wales and England. From there, Edwards goes on to trace the nation’s trials and achievements over subsequent centuries, to end on an optimistic summary: the outward-looking modern Welsh are ‘an ancient people more certain of our identity than at any point in the past thousand years’, a people whose story ‘has only just begun’. Crucially, The Story of Wales connects this new-found confidence with the new political institutions. The introduction itself represents a historical trajectory in a panning shot that briefly captures miniature scenes from the different episodes before coming to a halt on the Senedd building. There has been no Welsh equivalent to Munro’s ambitious fictional parliamentary medievalism in the James Plays, however. The fact that the actual historical precedents for today’s parliament are far weaker than those in Scotland certainly plays a role in this. In the realm of political symbolism, though, a number of small gestures suggest a comparable interest in presenting the modern parliament as a continuation of sorts of medieval origins. The very name ‘Senedd’, which translates simply as ‘Parliament’, has an evocative medievalist side to it: historically, the term refers to Owain Glyndŵr’s famed assembly at Machynlleth in 1404, where he was crowned Prince of Wales.83 This may partly account for the complaints from the public when the Assembly Members voted to adopt a bilingual name, ‘Senedd Cymru’ and ‘Welsh Parliament’, in late 2019; Huw Edwards at least named the connection to Glyndŵr as a reason to reverse the decision.84 A more direct act of homage to Glyndŵr as the progenitor of the Senedd was reported in 2017, when it was announced that Glyndŵr’s flag would be flown next to the building at the

The Story of Wales, television series, dir. John Geraint, Sophie Elwin-Harris and Jeff Morgan. UK: BBC, 2012. 83 John Davies, A History of Wales, rev. edn (London, 2007), p. 194. 84 Michael Savage, ‘Huw Edwards Joins Backlash over Bilingual Name for Welsh Senedd’ (2019) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 82

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request of Plaid Cymru Member of the Senedd (now party leader) Adam Price to mark the twentieth anniversary since Welsh devolution was approved.85 Another royal figure from medieval Welsh history receives a mention at the Senedd: Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), the tenth-century King of Deheubarth who eventually ruled over much of Wales. Hywel is mostly remembered today as the codifier of sophisticated laws that were noticeably progressive for their time and would remain in force in Wales until the Acts of Union with England were passed in 1536 and 1543.86 He is memorialised in Tŷ Hywel (‘Hywel’s House’), which was the original home of the Senedd and remains part of its estate, and in Siambr Hywel (‘Hywel’s Chamber’), which was reopened in 2009 as a youth debating chamber and ‘interactive learning centre’.87 In a particularly symbolic turn, Tŷ Hywel hosted the first-ever UK Supreme Court sitting in Wales in 2019. This event occupies the intersection of parliamentary and judiciary medievalism, another major focus of constitutional medievalism more generally. With Welsh law, however, narratives of continuity are just as difficult to sustain as for the Senedd. On the occasion of the Supreme Court hearing, a lecture on Hywel’s laws and the viewing of an extant manuscript were organised for the benefit of the Supreme Court members.88 The antiquarian aspect to this was hard to miss: the relationship between past and present Welsh law is necessarily one of discontinuity. In post-union, common-law Wales, Hywel can be memorialised only as the giver of laws long since disestablished. Despite his new associations with the Welsh Parliament, Hywel Dda’s unobtrusiveness confirms the general impression of constitutional medievalism in Wales as something that rarely amounts to more than political folklore. Indeed, unlike the situation in Scotland, there have been no Welsh autonomism or independence efforts likely to be successful in the early decades of the twenty-first century, let alone ones undergirded by medievalism. (This is why Wales is not represented with a chapter on separatist or isolationist medievalism in this book, the way the other three nations are.) In fact, despite the recent references, official Wales turns to the Middle Ages to foster a national spirit decidedly less frequently than the other nations discussed in this study do, and even activist cultural actors hardly ever do so in any sustained fashion. One needs to remember, of course, that the inroads which the political Welsh nationalist movement made in the twentieth century have been tentative, and even now Welsh political nationalism is a much lesser force than

‘Owain Glyndŵr’s Banner to Be Flown outside Senedd’ (2017) [accessed 12 January 2022]. 86 J. Davies, History of Wales, pp. 84–92. 87 Senedd Cymru, ‘Europe’s First Dedicated Youth Debating Chamber to Open at National Assembly for Wales’ (2014) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 88 Senedd Cymru, ‘UK Supreme Court’s First Sitting in Wales in Tŷ Hywel at the National Assembly’ (2019) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 85

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its confident Scottish counterpart.89 Medievalism is not widely paired with separatist agitation beyond the Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) at this time.90 A decisive contributing factor to this state of affairs is that Welsh nationhood has been less closely associated with medievalism than Scottish nationhood to begin with. Among other things, this is because Welsh cultural memory subscribes to a somewhat different periodisation scheme of premodernity than do its Great British neighbours: in the Welsh model, the idea of an identifiable Welsh people emerging in the medieval period is rivalled by the idea of a far longer continuity from, and in some variants a slow decline after, British antiquity. This is compounded by an even more fundamental problem of Welsh national medievalism: the fact that Wales was disunited for almost all of its medieval history before the English conquest. Under these difficult conditions, which are both old and structural and more recent and contingent, the revival of national medievalism in early twenty-first-century Wales is therefore less pronounced than in the other three nations. England English national medievalism is very prominently represented in this book, for the simple reason that medievalist expressions of English identity are currently the most numerous as well as the most broadly based of the four. From fiction to politics, across media and social practices, medievalism of a national bent is increasingly common in England. It is important to note from the outset, however, that English identity does not always dare to speak its name. Rather, much of the time, medievalisms that represent English figures, events and institutions ostensibly negotiate Britishness. In my previous research on battle commemoration at Hastings, I have described an English memory site that bore a strong touristic stamp on the highly symbolic 950th anniversary in 2016.91 This most famous of medieval English battles is memorialised at the English Heritage Trust-managed Battle abbey in the small town of Battle in East Sussex. Symptomatically, the commemorative events that took place in 2016 took care to avoid any links that might have been made to that year’s Brexit vote, and to overt nationalism more generally. To be sure, the narrative which framed the event was the familiar one of the Conquest as ‘the last successful invasion of Britain’, the implication of which is, of course, the familiar unique post-medieval continuity. The massive re-enactments of the battle that English Heritage put on managed to square the circle by presenting the performers as re-enacting precursors of the national self, irrespective of whether they were re-enacting Normans or ‘Saxons’: on the evidence of ‘same time, same place’, this

On the history of Welsh nationalism, see Aull Davies, Welsh Nationalism. Long gone seem the days when the militant nationalist Meibion Glyndŵr (‘Sons of Glyndŵr’) movement invoked the Welsh hero to violently protest an English-made housing crisis in Wales from 1979 to the mid-1990s: Henken, National Redeemer, pp. 176f. 91 Matthias D. Berger, ‘“This Most Historic of Locations”: Performing Authentic Nationhood at Hastings and Morgarten’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 85–102. 89

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was a traditional affirmation of strong and stable national identity since 1066. Yet Englishness was never sharply distinct from Britishness but, rather, was wrapped up in and merged into it. The event’s studious political inoffensiveness relied on the way the organisers cushioned it in entertainment and knowledge transfer rather than leaning into its patriotic connotations. This was no less obvious than at Bannockburn two years previously. The attempt at depoliticising a memory site strongly connected to Englishness while still maintaining its continuing relevance to the nation is typical of contemporary heritage tourism and public commemorative culture in England. The Battle of Agincourt, the surprise defeat of the French in 1415 that has long been the object of English jingoism and whose turn it was to be publicly commemorated in 2015, was similarly marked in a way that simultaneously affirmed and underplayed national identity. The organising Agincourt 600 Trust stated that it was determined ‘to bring French and British heritage together for all activities connected with 2015’.93 The commemorative service at Westminster abbey was held with the respectful involvement of the French. A monument for the dead of both armies was erected on site and a joint re-enactment, military parade and educational workshops took place. Again it was the educational angle which was dominant (with interest in the technology of the longbow being particularly pronounced). Even at Agincourt, national identity narratives, though not eliminated, were defanged by the educational protocols of today’s heritage industries. A much more assertive nationalism is to be found in English medievalism that treats constitutional themes. English medievalism excels at this, though it is in fact in the ambit of constitutional medievalism that Englishness most readily disappears behind, or merges with, larger imagined communities: Britain, usually, but at times anything from the Commonwealth upwards. Firstly, the monarchy remains an important focal point of national identity in England, more so than in either Scotland or Wales. Though this is not a new development, medieval English monarchs are frequently made to represent Britishness. One such monarchical medievalism was an internationally noted media event: the finding of the remains of Richard III in Leicester in 2013 and his reinterment in 2015. The ‘car park king’ (for such was the place of his discovery) was reburied with such pomp in Leicester cathedral that the organisers had to remind the congregation that the ceremony was not in fact a royal funeral but a reburial. Indeed, the scale of the event and the public response to it – an estimated 35,000 queued for hours in bad weather to catch a glimpse of the coffin – suggested an act of state, an effusion of royalism, heritage pageantry and post-religious pilgrimage all rolled into one.94 92

92 Compare also Brownlie’s account of the reenactment from an earlier year: Memory and Myths, p. 129. 93 ‘Main Events of 2015’ (2015) [accessed 19 November 2019]. 94 When Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, thousands more lined the streets and queued to see her lying in state, many having travelled in from overseas. Though Richard’s reburial and Elizabeth’s state funeral are hardly equatable, they are comparable in the medievalism that underpinned them, and in the sense of awe that that medievalism inspired in witnesses on both occasions.

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There was agreement amongst the participants that national history had somehow come full circle. This was the approved message also of such august commenters as the queen, who sent an open letter (‘an event of great national and international significance’), and the presiding bishop (‘a moment when, as a nation, we can touch a critical moment in our story’).95 Anne Bailey offers an insightful appraisal of this monarchy-centred discourse of ostensibly British, but actually English, identity. I would add to her account that the public’s interest in Richard as an ‘ordinary man’, which Bailey suggests overshadowed the reburial’s dimension as a British heritage event,96 actually operated perfectly in tandem with it. It was in keeping with wider contemporary attitudes towards the British monarchy as both a historic national institution and an object of personal identification.97 These attitudes find expression in countless examples of contemporary cultural production, such as the films The Queen (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and The King’s Speech (2010), as well as television series The Crown (2016–).98 All of these are empathetic monarch’s portraits that represent the royal prerogative as self-sacrifice. These unashamedly ‘humanising’ representations of the monarchy focus on rich inner lives subordinated to the nation’s welfare, allowing for easy, positive national identification through the monarch. Similar arguments can be made regarding the BBC’s The Hollow Crown (2012 and 2016), a series of feature-length adaptations of Shakespeare’s two English-­history play tetralogies whose first instalments came out during the so-called ‘2012 Cultural Olympiad’ (a series of events that took place in the run-up to the Summer Olympics held in London later that year).99 Billed and received as a distinctly ‘British’ interpretation, this series too invites national identification through the English monarchy, especially through Hal/Henry V in the first tetralogy. His character arc is one of redemption, growth and apotheosis as a national hero. (This requires the films to iron out many of the plays’ ambiguities, such as Henry’s war of aggression in France, which is no Machiavellian ploy to ‘busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels’ here but a just and honourable national cause).100 The reinterred real-world Richard III 95 Qtd respectively in Maev Kennedy, ‘King Richard III’s Reinterment Carries Pomp and Grandeur of State Funeral’ (2015) [accessed 11 January 2019] and Maev Kennedy, ‘Richard III Reburial: Thousands Expected to Witness King’s Final Journey’ (2015) [accessed 11 January 2019]. 96 Anne E. Bailey, ‘Anthropology, the Medievalist . . . and Richard III’, Reading Medieval Studies, 41 (2015), 27–51, at p. 40. 97 Indeed, public reactions to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022 suggested the same combination of personal empathy with a sense of witnessing ‘history’. 98 The Queen, film, dir. Stephen Frears. France: Pathé, 2007; Elizabeth: The Golden Age, film, dir. Shekhar Kapur. USA: Universal Pictures, 2007; The King’s Speech, film, dir. Tom Hooper. UK: UK Film Council, 2011; The Crown, television series, dir. Benjamin Caron et al. UK: Left Bank Pictures, 2016–. 99 The Hollow Crown, television series, dir. Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock. UK: BBC, 2012; The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, television series, dir. Dominic Cooke. UK: BBC, 2016. 100 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV: Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London, 2016), 4.3.342–3.

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may be less easily assimilated to this kind of identificatory discourse, as he is still best known as the hunch-backed ogre of Shakespeare’s play. Nevertheless, he offers a human focal point for identities to which continuous English monarchical history as such, irrespective of whether it is ‘positive’ or not, is a valuable resource.101 Arguably, in no nation in the world is judiciary medievalism stronger than in England. It shone particularly brightly during yet another centenary, in 2015, the 800th anniversary of one of the most important symbols of continuity in constitutional medievalism anywhere: Magna Carta. There was commemorative activity on a massive scale, with a myriad of occasions held in its honour in both the UK and other countries with a common law tradition. Magna Carta reception in the UK ranged from national self-interrogation to national self-congratulation, from the British Library’s standard-setting exhibition ‘Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy’102 to state ceremonies attended by the queen and the prime minister. A smaller but particularly instructive event took place at the Palace of Westminster on 31 July 2015. An assortment of peers and Supreme Court judges, barristers, court officials and academics from the UK, the US and several Commonwealth countries staged a mock trial entitled ‘Treason? The Trial of the Magna Carta Barons’.103 Its counterfactual premise saw the rebellious barons who made King John seal the charter put in the dock. A simplified form of present-day common law procedure was used to try the barons for treason. Along with the barons’ actions, the very legitimacy of Magna Carta was debated and ultimately affirmed. If the list of high-powered participants betrays an institutional slant, the event’s narrative framing by the BBC’s award-winning journalist Gavin Esler confirmed this. By asserting Magna Carta’s continuing importance, the British ‘fourth estate’ joined the legislature and judiciary in celebrating a broadly supported consensus narrative. The Magna Carta appealed to in the mock trial was the familiar ‘myth and totem’ described by Nicholas Vincent.104 ‘Treason’ used a conventional narrative of the charter’s constitutional role to celebrate cultural heritage. In the mock trial, the two dominant positions of Magna Carta reception were made to square off for dramatic effect. For much of its reception history, Magna Carta has divided its commentators into the camps which Martin Krygier wryly calls the ‘votaries’ and the ‘sceptics’. The former hold Magna Carta to be ‘a major constitutional document, the foundation of the rule of law and the liberty of the subject in England’. The latter emphasise ‘the self-interested motives of the barons’

That was surely what journalist Jon Snow meant when he interpreted the impressive turnout in Leicester as showing ‘how keen we are on our history’: qtd in Bailey, ‘Anthropology’, p. 29. 102 See the companion volume edited by Claire Breay and Julian Harrison: Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy (London, 2015). 103 UKSupremeCourt, ‘Treason? The Trial of the Magna Carta Barons: Westminster Hall, 31 July 2015’ (2015) [accessed 10 January 2022]. 104 Nicholas Vincent, ‘Introduction’, in Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta, pp. 13–19, at p. 14. 101

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and question ‘the charter’s constitutional significance’.105 The sceptics take an instrumentalist view, arguing that Magna Carta’s present eminence is due not to its original contents but to centuries of myth-making.106 In acquitting the barons, the judges followed the defence’s votary line of reasoning that John’s tyrannical behaviour had flouted the rule of law. As in much of its post-medieval reception, the vindicated Magna Carta stood synecdochically for the common law tradition as a whole, which meant that there was a striking circularity to the proceedings: present-day legal procedure was employed to legitimise its own purported origins. With the thirteenth-century legality of Magna Carta established, the mock trial eliminated any taint of original sin from common law’s established way of doing things: that is, deference to the ‘law of the land’, meaning custom and established precedent; protection of the liberty of the subject; and, most importantly, checking executive abuse of power with the rule of law. History has shown that defences of the common law tradition easily transition into more sweeping claims to national pedigree. As Krishan Kumar suggests, common law’s ‘slow cumulation of changes that came by trial and error’ has been claimed, in a long-standing bit of myth-making, to perfectly embody the unique continuity of English identity.107 The argument runs that, unlike the rupture-­ridden ‘Continent’, England at all times kept in touch with its medieval roots. The mock trial’s magnificent setting of Westminster Hall, which is the venerable former home of England’s highest courts and the oldest surviving part of the Palace of Westminster, made sure that Magna Carta was firmly embedded in that context of English identity. However, the association of Magna Carta and the common law with Englishness has never been entirely exclusive. Instead, the event also revealed what Kumar describes as the ‘imperial’ tendency of English identity to reach outwards and encompass larger – British, Commonwealth and Anglosphere – identities.108 Thanks to the involvement of legal practitioners from countries other than England, this Magna Carta medievalism celebrated not just homely Englishness but the entire common law world. Englishness thus also latched on to, and amalgamated with, the results of former imperial and colonial projects. It is worth mentioning briefly that this twin allegiance had been on display five years previously in Ridley Scott’s blockbuster film Robin Hood (2010), which makes Robin a key figure in the genesis of Magna Carta.109 It is far and away the most overtly nationalist version of Robin Hood’s myth in decades, not just because of its emphasis on the ‘English liberties’ that Robin Longstride (tellingly, this is referred to as a Both Jonathan Sumption, ‘Magna Carta Then and Now: Address to the Friends of the British Library’ (2015) [accessed 1 September 2019], p. 1. 106 Martin Krygier, ‘Magna Carta and the Rule of Law Tradition’, in Paula Waring (ed.), Papers on Parliament, 65: Proceedings of a Symposium Held by the Department of the Senate and the Rule of Law Institute of Australia to Commemorate the 800th Anniversary of the Sealing of Magna Carta (Canberra, 2016), 11–29, at p. 15. 107 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), p. 216. 108 Kumar, The Making, p. x. 109 Robin Hood, film, dir. Ridley Scott. USA and UK: Universal, 2010. 105

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‘noble Saxon name’) champions but also because of its central plot line of a French invasion at the white cliffs of Dungeness, which is a fantasy of a second Norman Conquest averted. At the same time as it deploys these English memory sites, however, the Magna Carta plot line is clearly geared towards a global English-speaking audience. The production side supports this interpretation. Not only was the film produced by the Hollywood studio Universal Pictures, but Scott also cast almost exclusively non-English actors from the former colonies to play the outlaw protagonists: Robin is played by Russell Crowe (a New Zealander) and Marion [sic] by Cate Blanchett (Australian), while additional outlaw roles went to Scott Grimes (US-American), Kevin Durand and Alan Doyle (both Canadian). Mark Addy, who plays Friar Tuck, is the only Englishman in the band.110 Robin Hood thus negotiates English and imperial identity simultaneously. ‘Treason’ went further still. One of the judges justified her ‘not guilty’ verdict by observing that there were precedents for the stipulations made by Magna Carta in several medieval European charters, which she took to indicate that ‘the themes expressed in the charter are universal’. In the Westminster performance, then, Magna Carta assumed the august role of a document that articulates natural, because universally valid, principles. At the same time, the symbolic homecoming counterbalanced this universalism with a proud particularism. A nesting doll presented itself of increasingly expansive collectivities that are supposedly graced by the principles stated in, or retrospectively read into, Magna Carta: the English, the common law world, all of humanity. Importantly, this was an additive universalism, quite unlike the dynamics at play in the Mabinogion adaptations, where universality was claimed in service of a necessary broadening of its audience. Finally, the congregation of the great and good drawn from England and the common law world in Westminster Hall is a clear example of the significance that constitutional medievalism can hold for organs of state. The lasting impression of the proceedings was one of dignified formality (and some prime hamminess), coupled with the splendour of the setting and the picture of harmonious cooperation presented by authority figures from law, parliament and national communication media. The unashamedly elite nature of the event indicates that it was conceived as an opportunity for the custodians of the status quo to tell their flattering history of Magna Carta, and of the prevailing legal and constitutional order along with it. Having discussed the dominant, ‘British’ strand of contemporary English national medievalism in some of its guises, I must now add an example of those medievalisms that do insist on a specifically English identity. In fact, these medievalisms are particularly relevant at a moment when English nationalism is increasingly recognised as a significant cultural and political force but for the most part has yet to discard its British stalking horse. An especially telling example is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2013), which has much to say about a powerful contemporary strain of proto-political Englishness. It does so speaking a faux-Old English. On the relevance of antipodean ‘mateship’ to Robin’s band of merry men, see Anne McKendry, ‘Mateship in the Middle Ages: The Australianness of William Wallace, William Thatcher, and Robin Longstride’, in D’Arcens and Lynch, International Medievalism, pp. 185– 205, at pp. 196–8. 110

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Notions of Englishness have long relied on language history and literary tradition.111 There is an appreciable sub-strand of English medievalism in the early twenty-first century that reclaims the world language in support of English identity while playing on Anglo-Saxonist themes.112 Problematically, such reclamations of linguistic Englishness may come with a racial dimension. As early as the eighteenth century, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was used to designate a supposed racial group in both Britain and the US.113 This racist usage has recently re-entered the general public discourse in the English-speaking world as Anglo-Saxonism is being yoked to nativist and white nationalist political ideologies. The crowdfunded and Booker-longlisted novel The Wake by the lapsed environmental activist and Eurosceptic Kingsnorth shows a striking confluence of literary Anglo-Saxonism and nationalist nostalgia.114 Its protagonist, Buccmaster, lives through the Norman Conquest of England and mourns the loss of a traditional linguistic–cultural Englishness rooted in place. The story is narrated retrospectively by Buccmaster himself, who addresses an unknown future ‘thu’. Buccmaster, a self-­ important free landowner who loses his family and his home in the Lincolnshire fenlands to the Normans, becomes the leader of a small war band and leads them in guerrilla-style attacks on ‘the frenc’, but also against his fellow English, whom he despises for refusing to bow to his authority. Increasingly unhinged, Buccmaster hears the voice of the mythical Weland the Smith, which eventually merges with his own narrative voice. The novel closes with the destruction of the war band and Buccmaster raving in apocalyptic terms about the ruin of everything. The novel is written in a synthetic Old English of Kingsnorth’s devising, which he calls a ‘shadow tongue’ (p. 353). It is an explicit attempt at providing authentic access to the mindset of the pre-Conquest English for a non-specialist readership. The shadow tongue drastically simplifies Old English in terms of morphology, while the syntax and tense system are largely modern and punctuation is mostly done away with. The lexis is almost completely purged of French and Latin influences, but, crucially, neither does it use many Old English words that failed to pass into modern English. Thus a form of poetic primitivism, the shadow tongue simultaneously suggests lines of cultural continuity and stresses medieval otherness. Simply

111 Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2018), p. 19. 112 Frantzen and Niles define Anglo-Saxonism as ‘the process through which a selfconscious national and racial identity first came into being among the early peoples of the region that we now call England and how, over time, through both scholarly and popular promptings, that identity was transformed into an originary myth available to a wide variety of political and social interests’: Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, ‘Introduction: AngloSaxonism and Medievalism’, in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainsville, 1997), pp. 1–14, at p. 1. See also Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, 2020). 113 C. Jones, Fossil Poetry, p.  10; Adam Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’ (2017) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 114 Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (London, 2015).

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put, Kingsnorth imagines alterity as underdevelopment: his simplified language expresses the idea that the Middle Ages were the ‘infancy’ of modernity. The theme of a massive rupture in English history caused by the Normans is reflected not just in the novel’s language but also in the meta-linguistic musings of its protagonist. For Buccmaster, the rupture is between the land and English culture, and particularly the English language. In an actualisation of the common metaphor of language as a living organism, Buccmaster considers language to be embedded in, and inscribed on, the land.115 This manifests in his belief in the ‘natural’ names of things. The invasion of the Normans gives notice of a process of linguistic uprooting. Buccmaster fears that when names change due to foreign influence, the essence of the things they denominate will, too, and he will find himself a stranger in his own country: i was locan at an ac treow [. . .] it had seemed to me that this treow was anglisc as the ground it is grown from anglisc as we who is grown also from that ground. but if the frenc cums and tacs this land and gifs these treows sum frenc name they will not be the same treows no mor. it colde be that to erce [i.e., a primordial earth deity] this treow will be the same that it will haf the same leafs and same rind but to me it will be sum thing that is not mine sum thing ingenga [i.e., foreign] of what i can no longer spec. (p. 124)

This anticipated estrangement is based on a cruel reversal of the belief in what Chris Jones calls ‘a non-arbitrary language of motivated signs’.116 The renaming violates the notion of a non-arbitrary language not so much by suggesting the fundamental arbitrariness of all language as by suggesting that the foreign language will render the particular, formerly natural, relationship between English and its referents arbitrary. Jonathan Hsy rightly observes that this estrangement is part of Kingsnorth’s wider representation of ‘vanishing ecologies’. I am not fully convinced, however, by Hsy’s argument that Kingsnorth ‘do[es] not convert the natural environment into metaphors for political change’.117 Buccmaster sees the profound connection with the land interrupted by the politically engineered influx of foreigners.118 In fact, Bucc­master’s dismay at the forced transformation of England by a foreign language is virtually interchangeable with his dismay at the forced transformation of the English themselves by the arrival of neophyte personal names: the names of the folcs of angland was part of anglisc ground lic the treow and rocc the fenn and hyll and i seen that when these names was tacan from the place where they had growan [. . .] and when their place was tacan by names what has

115 On the organicist metaphors that came to dominate methodologies of language analysis in the nineteenth century, see C. Jones, Fossil Poetry, p. 4. 116 C. Jones, Fossil Poetry, p. 17. 117 Jonathan Hsy, ‘Language Ecologies: Ethics, Community, and Digital Affect’, PMLA, 131 (2016), 373–80, at p. 378. 118 ‘Political’ in the sense of the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

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not growan from that ground is not of it and can not spece its tunge then [. . .] sum thing deop and eald had been made wrong. (p. 164)

Language is inextricably bound up with England, and both are inextricably bound up with the English. I would therefore argue that the novel’s sense of an ecological crisis is a vehicle for a highly political kind of nostalgia – specifically, for a version of the Norman Yoke myth. The Norman Yoke is a central medievalist myth of Englishness. At its core is the idea that the Normans stole from the English their traditional freedoms, and that this form of continental tyranny – often linked to the unjust feudal system and the oppressive Roman Church – either took centuries to shake off (with English liberties being gradually regained through such constitutional landmarks as Magna Carta) or continues to express itself in ruling-class privilege.119 The powerful Noman Yoke myth has inspired leading thinkers of such movements as the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and the Levellers and the Diggers in the seventeenth. The main focus of The Wake, however, is the cultural, not the political, Norman Yoke: Buccmaster’s private feelings of a loss of traditional Englishness rather than material dispossession. And that is exactly where Buccmaster is at his most unreliable. He claims the Normans have taken away ‘the eald ways’ of the English (p. 195), but his idea of what ‘the eald ways’ are – a complex imbrication of the English people, especially the early settlers, the pagan gods, the land and the English language – is exposed as wholly unrepresentative of his time and place. His backwardness is noted by several characters. When he tries to ignore Christian custom to give his grandfather a pagan funeral, even his supportive sister, Aelfgifu, tells him that ‘these is not the eald times’ (p. 174). Furthermore, the ‘native’ system of beliefs and customs which Buccmaster desires to return to England is shown to be an inauthentic bricolage. When the war band abduct the Norman Bishop Turold, Buccmaster wants to execute him in the grisly fashion of a ‘blud earn’ (‘blood-­ eagle’). The men are appalled by the suggestion, and one of them points out that not only is the blood-eagle ‘not a thing of these times’ (p. 338), but it is also a Danish rather than an English custom. Clearly, the great English cultural continuity which Buccmaster envisages has been broken well before the Normans came, and perhaps never existed in the first place. The irony is, then, that Buccmaster has always been a stranger to England. Consequently, his wider point – that a new way of life is being imposed on England by the Normans, to the loss of the connection of the English with the land and hence of their very identity – is much weakened by the fact that he is not representative of English identity at all. There are reported statements by Kingsnorth that suggest he shares some of Bucc­master’s concerns about a supposed English loss of a deeper connection to their land under a foreign, in this case globalist, ‘yoke’. For instance, Kingsnorth reports having had from a young age ‘an inchoate sense that much of the world’s colour, beauty and distinctiveness was being bulldozed away in the name of money and

Siobhan Brownlie offers a valuable overview of the various strands of the myth and their use over the centuries: Memory and Myths, pp. 112–17. 119

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progress. Some old magic, some connection, was being snuffed out in the process.’120 This ‘old magic’ resembles Buccmaster’s notion of an original conformity of the signifier with the signified, of the culture and the land, in natural union. The loss of this union threatens to undo English identity for Kingsnorth as much as for Buccmaster. As Jones has demonstrated, some rather troubling implications arise from Kingsnorth’s nostalgia in connection with his literary Anglo-Saxonism. An avowed Brexiteer from the left, Kingsnorth has repeatedly stressed his disillusionment with the left’s neglect of national belonging. For him, such belonging is the only thing worth exploring in art: quoting Norman Lewis, he has stated that ‘“I am looking for the people who have always been there [. . .] and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.”’121 Elsewhere, Kingsnorth has characterised liberal immigration policy as compromising English identity.122 Jones observes that Kingsnorth’s choice of a ‘neo-Anglo-Saxon’ language to recount the bereavement of those whose country has been invaded chimes uncomfortably with increasingly loud nationalist and often racist online polemics written in cod-Anglo-Saxon.123 Jones notes that the sense of English victimhood at the hands of the continentals that is Buccmaster’s primary theme makes his narrative an obvious political allegory proleptic of the English nationalism that drove the Brexit vote.124 Indeed, as I show in Chapter 3, several leading Brexiteers were also strongly invested in Anglo-­ Saxonist discourse, though they claimed to defend Britishness, not Englishness. In its proper context, Kingsnorth’s evocation of an earlier form of English is more than just an authenticity effect. His comments on the loss of a magical connection between the English and their land due to globalisation and immigration echo (if perhaps do not fully endorse) Buccmaster’s belief in the possibility of a culture so intertwined with a place that to change the culture is to estrange it from itself to the point of placelessness. In a sense, Kingsnorth’s un-Frenched shadow tongue is itself an attempt to revisit a more rooted culture and to undo, if only for a moment, those continental influences that have served to estrange the English from their land, and hence from themselves.125 There is, however, some obvious irony in Kingsnorth’s apparent like-mindedness with Buccmaster: thanks to Buccmaster’s overt Paul Kingsnorth, ‘The Lie of the Land’ (2017) [accessed 11 May 2019]. 121 Kingsnorth, ‘Lie of the Land’. Chris Jones first pointed out the troubling implications of this statement in a keynote given at the Middle Ages in the Modern World conference in Manchester on 28 June 2017. 122 Erica Wagner, ‘The Constant Gardener’ (2016) [accessed 12 November 2019]. 123 C. Jones, Fossil Poetry, pp. 10f. 124 See also Christian Schmitt-Kilb, ‘A Case for a Green Brexit? Paul Kingsnorth, John Berger and the Pros and Cons of a Sense of Place’, in Ina Habermann (ed.), The Road to Brexit: A Cultural Perspective on British Atitudes to Europe (Manchester, 2020), pp. 162–78. 125 In a telling paratextual detail, Kingsnorth consistently refers to William the Conqueror as “Guillaume le Bâtard” – in modern French. In analogy to Buccmaster’s insistence that to change the name is to change the thing, this amounts to a refusal to accept the Conqueror as fully part of English history, and French as part of English language history. To use William’s English name and epithet in this context would be to taint post-Anglo-Saxon England, to make it less than English. See also Schmitt-Kilb, ‘A Case for a Green Brexit’, pp. 163. 120

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unreliability as a witness of cultural change, The Wake reaches a far more nuanced and interrogative position on the question of a foreign yoke imposed on the English than does its author. Switzerland Swiss national medievalism is particularly strong on origin myths, which continue to form a significant part of the national symbolic arsenal and are deployed frequently in ways ranging from the incidental to the quasi-ritualistic. It is also the most thoroughly politicised medievalist repertoire of those explored here. Swiss national medievalism may not exhibit as broad a thematic range as its English counterpart, but it is just as deeply entrenched at the national, regional and local levels. It finds expression in a host of social and political practices and across various media, although the smallness of the Swiss market means that lavish audiovisual medievalism is in short supply. Wilhelm Tell is easily the most recognisable of Swiss mythical figures and an enduring symbol of original Swissness who continues to supply material for folkloristic, satirical and political treatment. Even in his first, medieval, appearance, Tell was part of an origin myth. The first mention of him, in Das Weisse Buch von Sarnen (‘The White Book of Sarnen’, 1470s), embeds his story in an account of the origins of the first three confederated Orte (cantons), Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.126 The account was meant to prove the Confederates’ ancient privileges of imperial immediacy in order to have an imperial ban on them revoked.127 Over the course of the centuries, Tell has shared a close relationship with Switzerland’s other pivotal medievalist origin myth, the Rütli conspiracy (also fully realised for the first time in the Weisse Buch von Sarnen). This myth tells of patriotic conspirators from the three Orte, who took an oath of solidarity on the Rütli (a meadow by Lake Lucerne), razed the tyrannical Habsburg nobility’s castles (in the so-called Burgenbruch) and drove the Habsburgs out of the country. The Confederates then went on to fend off foreign forces in a series of battle victories. Together, these myths form the backbone of the so-called ‘liberation tradition’ (Befreiungstradition).128 It is hard to overstate the liberation tradition’s importance. Virtually all Swiss medievalisms discussed in this book are connected to it in some way. After its medieval beginnings, the liberation tradition evolved over the centuries and commingled with broader notions of the ‘free Old Confederates’ to become what Marchal calls an ‘imagological bricolage’ that provided Switzerland with a desired origin of 126 Das Weisse Buch von Sarnen: Wortlaut und Übersetzung des Chroniktextes mit kurzer Einführung, ed. Regierungsrat des Kantons Obwalden, trans. Bruno Meyer (Sarnen, 1984). 127 Michael Blatter and Valentin Groebner, Wilhelm Tell: Import  – Export. Ein Held unterwegs (Baden, 2016), pp. 25–35. 128 Marchal has written extensively about the transformation of the Swiss historical imaginary  – as he calls the myth of the ‘Old Confederates’ and the liberation tradition  – and the social and political roles it played through the centuries: see especially Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte: Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2007), pp.  26–170 and (for an overview) pp.  414–17; in English: ‘Medievalism, the Politics of Memory and Swiss National Identity’, in Evans and Marchal, Uses of the Middle Ages, pp. 197– 220, at pp. 200–11.

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nationhood in the absence of dynastic history. This is therefore not simply a case of nineteenth-century ‘invention of tradition’: rather, as Andreas Suter suggests, it is a far longer ‘tradition of invention of tradition’.130 Marchal argues that the Swiss sense of tradition that developed over the centuries ‘is probably unique in its vitality and often even relevance in day-to-day politics’.131 Its various stages of development are also singularly well documented. Tell’s status as a lone wolf and tyrannicide occasionally complicated his integration into the Rütli story. This showed, for instance, in Aegidius Tschudi’s Chronicon Helveticum (left unfinished in 1572 and first published 1734–36), and Friedrich Schiller carefully distinguishes Tell’s assassination of the hated Habsburg bailiff from the political Rütli covenant as contrasting approaches to ending tyranny in his classic version (Wilhelm Tell, 1804).132 And yet, unlike the popular figure he became internationally in the Age of Revolution,133 Tell continued to play a stabilising, unifying role in Switzerland both before and after the civil war and the creation of the nation-state in 1847/48.134 He retained that function through the first half of the twentieth century. An opposing tendency towards ironic treatment also developed during the twentieth century.135 Max Frisch satirised the patriotic myth in his Wilhelm Tell für die Schule (‘Schoolbook Wilhelm Tell’) in 1971, at a time when the deconstruction of Swiss national myths by historians was taking off in earnest.136 However, such irreverent treatment cemented rather than eroded Tell’s status as an icon of modern Swissness. There has been increased Wilhelm Tell activity in the twenty-first century. Tell and his crossbow continue to be the subject of myriad banal uses in advertising and branding to signify Swissness with an economy surpassed only by the white-onred Swiss cross. Frisch’s satirical Tell has found some, but very few notable, heirs in the twenty-first century.137 The most widely publicised comedic treatment has been Mike Eschmann’s 2007 film Tell, a slight farce that features a Tell who is really Austrian but hankers after Swiss naturalisation.138 A Habsburg governor vows future 129

Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 443 and 225. Andreas Suter, ‘Nationalstaat und die “Tradition von Erfindung”: Vergleichende Überlegungen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 25 (1999), 480–503; see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 1–14. 131 Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 24f. 132 Aegidius Tschudi, Chronicon Helveticum. Ungekürzte Neuausgabe aufgrund der Originalhandschriften, ed. Peter Stadler and Bernhard Stettler (Bern, 1998); Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, with a commentary by Wilhelm Grosse (Frankfurt a. M., 2013). 133 Blatter and Groebner, Wilhelm Tell, pp. 88–97. 134 A national identity shared by the winners and the losers of the civil war only began to emerge in the mid-1880s: Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli, ‘Nationale Identität – allzu Bekanntes in neuem Licht’, in Marchal and Mattioli, Erfundene Schweiz, pp. 11–20, at p. 14. This was thanks in no small part to the unifying imagery of the Old Confederates. 135 Christoph Egger, ‘Tell: Ein Trauerspiel’ (2007) [accessed 4 June 2015]. 136 Max Frisch, Wilhelm Tell für die Schule (Frankfurt a. M., 2015). 137 Peter von Matt, Das Kalb vor der Gotthardpost: Zur Literatur und Politik der Schweiz (Munich, 2012), p. 106. 138 Tell, film, dir. Mike Eschmann. Switzerland and Germany: Zodiac Pictures, 2008. 129

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revenge against the Swiss, with a map showing Switzerland encircled by the goldon-blue of the EU suggesting that this revenge will eventually come to pass. Tell and the wider liberation tradition have lately been treated in the mode of historical revisionism. Recent examples are, respectively, Thomas Vaucher’s Tell: Mann. Held. Legende (‘Man. Hero. Legend’) from 2017 and Charles Lewinsky’s Der Halbbart (‘The Half-Beard’) from 2020.139 Both historical novels trace supposed real events that would go on to become the stuff of legend (in the case of Halbbart, the Battle of Morgarten), highlighting the deliberate mythicisation which later tellings involved. Both novels are in touch with a wider trend in Swiss cultural memory: the idea that myths are powerful tokens of national identity even though – or precisely because  – they are made up. I discuss such ‘metamythical’ tendencies in greater detail in the context of political discourse in Chapter 4. A significant continuation of the Tell tradition is to be found in an earnest and culturally conservative strand of medievalism that celebrates him  – untroubled by his frequent ironisation – as a figure foundational to Swiss identity. An example of this is the annual open-air theatre ‘Tellspiele’ in Interlaken, which are not a creation of the twenty-first century but, rather, have staged Schiller’s play since 1912.140 They make the townspeople and people from the region major stakeholders in Tellian heritage. The performances are at least as much for the benefit of these communities – who are intimately involved in its performance and staging and for whom it represents an integrative quasi-ritual event – as it is for the benefit of the (mostly Swiss) audience. The staging of the Tellspiele on a detailed, naturalistic set that changes little from year to year adds to the sense of continuity-by-repetition. In an interesting development, the plays were performed not in Schiller’s standard German, but in Swiss-German dialect, for several seasons after 2016.141 This further removed it, at least temporarily, from any ‘high art’ context in favour of participatory enactment of regional and national belonging. Finally, Tell is a political figure, particularly often to be encountered in a rightwing national-conservative environment. This preponderance goes back to the 1990s. That said, Tell remains a more neutral political myth than most other components of the liberation tradition, which are now almost exclusively in the hands of the national-conservatives at the national level. Similarly, while the Tell matter is predominantly treated as a conservative origin myth today, he can be more than just a reassuring symbol of Swissness: as I show in my final two chapters, Tell retains the capacity for unruliness and critique of the status quo. Panoramic medievalism is among the more prominent forms medievalism takes in Switzerland today. I have mentioned the BBC’s The Story of Wales; that documentary series was actually part of a wider burst of European documentary and docufiction productions that offered panoramic condensations of national history in the early 2010s. Relevant examples include A History of Scotland (2008–9), Die Deutschen (2008–10), The Story of Ireland (2011), The British (2012)  – and 139 Thomas Vaucher, Tell: Mann. Held. Legende (Bern, 2017); Charles Lewinsky, Der Halbbart (Zurich, 2020). 140 Peter Wenger and Herbert Steiner, Tell lebt: Tellspiele Interlaken (Interlaken, 2012). 141 ‘Tellspiele: emotional – spannend – dramatisch – mitreissend – packend – traditionell’ (n.d.) [accessed 14 January 2022].

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Die Schweizer/Gli Svizzeri/Les Suisses/Ils Svizzers (2013). Sharing a central concern with transhistorical national identity, these productions converted historical episodes – mostly chosen in ways that recall the familiar great men and great events – into a semblance of the continuity and totality which their very titles, full of demonyms and definite articles as they are, suggest. The docufiction Die Schweizer is a particularly clear example of the way these panoramas locate the origins of national identity in the Middle Ages, from where a narrative trajectory runs towards (temporary) culmination in the twenty-first century. Die Schweizer inherits its most conservative tendencies from the early to mid-twentieth-century politico-cultural Spiritual Defence of the Homeland movement.143 Structurally, it inherits from it the diptych-like emphasis on medieval origins (including the Rütli Oath) on the one hand and the foundation of the nation-state in 1848 and subsequent industrialisation on the other. It thus tacitly flattens into continuity the intervening religious strife of the Reformation, the Ancien Régime, the French invasion of 1798 and the Helvetic, Mediation and Restoration periods. The narrator of Die Schweizer closes with the claim that behind the appearance of a history of isolationism lies a solidary Willensnation that has thrived on international exchange. Other widespread panoramic formats include combinations of text and still images in purposely accessible and entertaining educational works. One of these formats is the ‘quick guide to . . .’, a type of self-observation that Swiss book buyers appear to have developed a particular taste for. In 2015, Diccon Bewes published the large-format Around Switzerland in 80 Maps, which represents the history of Switzerland cartographically, starting with a minimal mappa mundi-style illumination from Albrecht von Bonstetten’s Superioris Germaniae Confoederationis descriptio (1480), which consists solely of the Old Confederacy and is framed by a blue circle containing gold stars (Fig. 3).144 ‘How ironic’, writes Bewes, ‘that over 500 years after Bonstetten’s map, Switzerland is once again an island surrounded by a sea of star-studded blue.’145 Bewes does not labour the analogy any further, but his joking observation of early Swiss insularity sets the scene for an endeavour typical of its genre, which is, in Bewes’s own words, to ‘us[e] the past to explain the present’ (p. 8). 142

A History of Scotland, television series, dir. Tim Neil et al. UK: BBC, 2008–09; Die Deutschen, television series, dir. Robert Wiezorek et al. Germany: ZDF: 2008–10; The Story of Ireland, television series, dir. Mike Connolly, Niamh Sammon, Simon Chu and Luke McMahon. UK and Ireland: BBC Northern Ireland and Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 2011; The British, television series, dir. Marion Milne, Nick Green, Louise Hooper and Jenny Ash. UK and USA: Sky Atlantic, 2012; Die Schweizer/Gli Svizzeri/Les Suisses/Ils Svizzers, television series, dir. Dominique Othenin-Girard. Switzerland: SRF, 2013. 143 David Christen, Schweizergeschichte fürs Volk: Die Darstellung der Schweizergeschichte in den vier Dokufiction-Filmen im Rahmen des Themenmonats ‘Die Schweizer’ des Schweizer Fernsehens (SRF) im November 2013 und deren Verwendung im Unterricht (Munich, 2014), p. 59. 144 Diccon Bewes, Around Switzerland in 80 Maps: A Magical Journey, 2nd edn (Côtes de Montbenon, 2017). 145 Bewes, Around Switzerland, p. 14. See also Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, ‘Albrecht von Bonstettens geographische Darstellung der Schweiz von 1479’, Cartographica Helvetica: Fachzeitschrift für Kartengeschichte, 15–16 (1997), 39–46. 142

Figure 3. Albrecht von Bonstetten, Superioris Germaniae confoederationis descriptio. In Historia Eremi sanctae Mariae in Helvetiis, 1481. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. MS Lat. 5656, fol. 8r. BNF Gallica.

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More wide-ranging self-explanation occurs in Histoire Suisse (2007), which is part of the series of educational booklets Comprendre la Suisse (‘Understanding Switzerland’) by Éditions Loisirs et Pédagogie.146 Described on the dust jacket as an ‘easily accessible panorama’, Histoire Suisse, too, looks for understanding of the country Switzerland is today and even promises insight into what might be its ‘future challenges’ by looking at its ‘roots’ (p. 5). Again, these roots properly extend only to ‘the foundation’ of the Old Confederacy (p. 19), even if an earlier section covers Swiss prehistory. In just under one hundred pages, the author, Grégoire Nappey, condenses historical information into bullet points while cartoonist Mix et Remix illustrates that information in distinctive drawings of gnome-like characters, including mythical ones such as Guillaume Tell and Arnold Winkelried,147 in scenes filled with puns and absurdist humour. As if to highlight the tension between fact and fiction, it is Tell who guides the reader through history and signals the most salient pieces of knowledge. Histoire Suisse thus maintains an ironical half-distance towards this symbol of Swissness. It is a characteristically Romand (i.e., French-speaking Swiss) work, the playful product of a region that is home to many of Switzerland’s most prolific creators of bandes déssinées. As Georg Kreis points out, the Histoire’s mischievous approach to national history does not detract from its underlying patriotism, which historically has been at least as pronounced in French-speaking Switzerland as in the German-speaking part.148 Swiss medievalism is often powerfully rooted in place, and place-based commemorative activity has been pronounced in the early twenty-first century. Compared to similar place-based medievalism in Britain, what is striking about Swiss medievalism is that it is both comprehensively integrated into sub-political rituals of local and regional belonging and prone to conservative political co-optation. Again, I draw on my previous research on battlefields as an example of contemporary commemorative practices in Switzerland.149 Unlike either Hastings or Bannockburn, Morgarten is a battle whose fame grew disproportionately to its contemporary significance. It was the result of long-­standing tensions between the rural community of Schwyz (in today’s Central Switzerland) and the House of Habsburg over pastureland belonging to Einsiedeln abbey, which was under the Habsburgs’ legal protection. When smallholders from Schwyz sacked the abbey in 1314, Duke Leopold I of Habsburg responded by deploying an army. On 15 November 1315, fighters from Schwyz achieved a surprise victory against him. The ‘Pact of Brunnen’ documents an alliance formed in the battle’s aftermath by Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. From the late fifteenth century onwards, the ‘Pact’ was read as the founding charter of the Old Confederacy, until the ‘Federal Charter’ Grégoire Nappey and Mix et Remix, Histoire Suisse (Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, 2007). Winkelried, a central figure in Swiss medievalism, is a mythical warrior introduced into accounts of the Battle of Sempach (1386) first as a nameless martyr almost a century after the event and mentioned by name only in 1533. His noble self-sacrifice was used to explain the turning of the tide of battle against Duke Leopold III of Austria’s superior forces: Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 323–34. 148 Georg Kreis, ‘Schweizerische Nationalgeschichten im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 59 (2009), 135–48, at p. 143f. 149 M. Berger, ‘Most Historic of Locations’. 146 147

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of 1291 stole its crown in the late nineteenth century.150 Morgarten went on to be reinterpreted as the ‘blood baptism’ of Switzerland, the first battle of the so-called ‘wars of liberation’ against encroaching neighbours.151 Increasingly mythicising accounts amplified on the few near-contemporary sources, now telling of a doughty Alpine people raining rocks and logs on haughty invaders. The seventh centenary of the battle in 2015 was celebrated on a grand scale. A three-day festival (Volksfest) in June that took place in the environs of the Morgarten memorial in Oberägeri in the canton of Zug took pride of place. The festival featured a medieval market, folk-music concerts, fireworks, ceremonial addresses and a ritual procession. It also included a strong military presence in an army and air show, which was entirely in keeping with over a century of strong military associations with Morgarten.152 Sixty thousand visitors responded to the organisers’ call. Ownership structures (both actual and metaphorical) at Morgarten and at the British sites are very different from each other. In the cases of both Bannockburn and Hastings, centralised ownership contributes to the sites’ being operated primarily, not least for reasons of profitability, as national tourist sites that provide for an international audience and focus less on regional and local embeddedness. Ownership of Morgarten, a composite memory site spread across two cantons, is a patchwork: the Morgarten Trust, the district of Schwyz, the canton of Zug, the municipality of Oberägeri, the Morgarten Shooting Association and several private individuals all own pieces of ‘Morgarten’ land.153 Morgarten certainly is a tourist destination, and a new information centre and educational trail created for the anniversary mean it now resembles the British sites more closely in this regard. However, in ways that reflect its diffuse ownership structure, Morgarten has far stronger local and regional meanings to go with the national ones than either of the British sites have. It is a peg onto which all kinds of regional heritage have been hung: the Morgarten festival, for instance, prominently featured associations of local farmers and a pointedly provincial line-up of musicians. Almost entirely monolingual, the festival had no special provision for international visitors: primarily, this was a place and a region celebrating themselves. In this way, the situation at Morgarten fully reflects the ease with which things slip from the regional into the national in Swiss memory culture, and in the so-called Waldstätte in particular.154 The Waldstätte’s sense of independence and its self-conception as the ‘original Switzerland’ sat side by side at the memory site of Morgarten. Stark differences in explicit political appropriation between the British and Swiss sites are also apparent. Whereas Hastings and, somewhat more surprisingly, Bannockburn were pointedly not used as a stage for national politics even in grand anniversary years, Morgarten was, and unapologetically so. As I explore in detail in Chapter 4, 2015 witnessed a concerted national-conservative attempt to capitalise 150 Roger Sablonier, Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen: Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300 (Baden, 2008), pp. 154–60. 151 Silvia Hess, Morgarten: Die Inszenierung eines Ortes (Baden, 2018), p. 152. 152 Hess, Morgarten, p. 252. 153 ‘Morgarten – Der Streit geht weiter’, brochure (Unterägeri, 2015), p. 9. 154 The term collectively refers to the early confederated Orte of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.

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on this and other historical anniversaries to reanimate a discredited complex of Swiss national myths for Eurosceptic, party-political ends. The official ceremonial act at Morgarten included a speech by Federal Councillor Maurer of the SVP. In it, he accused the historical profession of dismissing the medieval origins of Switzerland as mere invention. The historians’ unpatriotic cavilling, Maurer claimed, was not academic but wholly political in motivation.155 There are historical reasons why the strong conservative political showing at Morgarten would be widely perceived as an expected and authentic aspect of the memory site rather than inadmissible instrumentalisation. Facile parallels between Swiss military resilience then and now remain a stock feature of Morgarten medievalism. Furthermore, the Swiss militia army’s presence at the festival played right into Maurer’s hands: it is both a pet subject of the SVP and an enduring controversial issue of national politics. This political dimension of Morgarten is thoroughly internalised by the local community and embraced as an opportunity to present to the nation a local and regional take on Swissness. Turning away now from medievalisms that rely on sameness of place, one of the most obvious contrasts to national medievalisms from the British nations is the almost complete absence of Swiss narratives of linguistic and literary continuity. This has to do with the nature of Swiss nationalism itself. Switzerland was the example Ernest Renan used when he famously rebutted ethnic determinism in his Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882). Rejecting as inadequate dimensions such as race, religion, geography and language, he argued that the nation was an act of will on the part of its members: ‘a daily plebiscite’ (‘un plebiscite de tous les jours’).156 This was demonstrated, he felt, by Switzerland’s several national languages.157 The idea of being a Willensnation was indeed a vital part of Swiss self-justification and self-fashioning during the period of nation-building in Europe, and an ideology of nationhood that transcends linguistic boundaries maintains great purchase on the national psyche to this day. One should note that this linguistic inclusivity tends to stop at the country’s four official languages, excluding immigrant languages from the multilingual symbolism. Yet, as regards the official languages at least, language forms part less of the ethnic than of the civic dimension of Swiss nationalism. Boasting age-old unity and continuity of language – and by extension ethnicity – is quite simply not an option here: French and Italian were for the most part the languages of unfree Untertanen (‘subjects’) in the Old Swiss Confederacy. In place of claims to shared language and culture, the readily translatable stories of medieval Swiss liberation demonstrated significant integrating power when the language regions became politically equal partners in the nineteenth century, suggesting as they did a shared Swiss frame of mind.158 Any separate continuities of language and ethnicity since the Middle Ages were subsequently de-emphasised. 155 Ueli Maurer, ‘Was uns Morgarten heute noch bedeutet: Die Rede von Bundesrat Ueli Maurer anlässlich des Jubiläumfestes “700 Jahre Schlacht am Morgarten” vom 21. Juni 2015 beim Morgarten-Denkmal’, Zürcher Bote, 26 June 2015, 1–2, at p. 1. 156 Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882 (Paris, 1882), p. 27. 157 Renan, Nation, p. 20. 158 Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 143f.

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Where Swiss medievalism also differs substantially from its British counterparts is in the near absence of specific rather than generalised constitutional medievalisms. This needs to be highlighted, because there is a clear disconnect between this near absence and the – in international comparison – very active use of medievalism in Swiss referendum and party politics. The absence of British-style monarchical medievalism is of course hardly surprising: as a federal republic, Switzerland has no monarchy whose origins could be traced to the Middle Ages. More than that, however, its cultural memory is actively inimical to hereditary nobility, let alone royalty. The ‘peasant’ character of the community and the expulsion of the oppressive nobility were (inaccurately) celebrated already in the Middle Ages.159 The lack of judiciary medievalism in turn is partly the effect of undeniable historical rupture following the French invasion of 1798, but it also reflects a Swiss understanding of the state that privileges political, and especially direct-democratic, resolution over judicial deliberation.160 It has been remarked that weakly developed legal thought is a peculiarity of the Swiss polity.161 This is reflected not only in the absence of positive identification with legal tradition but also in a latent hostility towards the judiciary among a considerable segment of the public. That hostility routinely clothes itself in medievalism. Thus, the figure of the ‘foreign judge’, a late twentieth-century addition to the liberation tradition who resurfaces in times of debate over European integration, serves in anti-judiciary polemics that on some level are aimed at domestic judges as much as they are at foreign ones. The lack of any parliamentary medievalisms of note reflects the privileging of the direct-democratic aspects of Switzerland’s political system, with whose mystique the post-1848 parliament is unable to compete.162 More surprisingly, direct democracy, while certainly traced to the medieval past, is rarely given any concrete medievalist treatment. The idea usually is that the Old Confederacy was democratic generally: ‘the world’s oldest democracy’.163 The Landsgemeinde, a direct-­ democratic public ballot that operates on the principle of majority rule and has medieval roots in the so-called Länderorte (‘rural cantons’), used to be an important Swiss memory site.164 However, its disestablishment over the past 150 years in Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p. 35. Thomas Maissen, ‘Weshalb den Schweizern das Recht nicht so wichtig ist’ (2018) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 161 Georg Kreis, Fremde Richter: Karriere eines politischen Begriffs (Baden, 2018), p. 104. 162 This is not at all to say that the Swiss Parliament is a medievalism-free zone. The Parliament Building, though built in Renaissance Revival rather than neo-Gothic style, prominently features statuary representations of the most iconic Old Confederates, images of the Landsgemeinde (see below), and a series of dates considered by the designers to be pivotal in Swiss constitutional development, beginning with the traditionary date of 1291: André Holenstein, Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte (Baden, 2014), pp. 17f. 163 Marchal and Mattioli, ‘Nationale Identität’, p. 11. 164 Georg Kreis, Schweizer Erinnerungsorte: Aus dem Speicher der Swissness (Zurich, 2010), pp. 25–35. For a critical discussion of the idea of a direct line of development from the medieval (regional) Landsgemeinde to today’s national semi-direct democratic system, see Thomas Maissen, Schweizer Heldengeschichten – und was dahintersteckt (Baden, 2015), pp. 150–60. 159

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all but two cantons – three went in the period 1996–98 alone – has been largely uncontroversial, which suggests that even this constitutional medievalism is no longer the force that it once was. Swiss medievalism does, however, consistently highlight the country’s federative structure, which many trace to the Old Confederacy’s extremely loose ‘statehood’ or, more accurately, the former near-autonomy of the cantons. In a case of extremely broad but very powerful constitutional medievalism, many consider the entire modern state and its strongly developed principle of subsidiarity to have grown organically out of the Old Confederacy; the more unreal variants of this idea all but ignore the historic breaks and centralist interlude of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Versions of this constitutional medievalism are also enlisted in the cause of isolationism in Europe in contemporary national-conservative political discourse. This enlisting is fully representative of Swiss medievalism, which, it bears stressing once again, is politicised easily and strongly. From this overview, a picture begins to emerge of the respective range and pervasiveness of national medievalism in England, Scotland, Wales and Switzerland. The findings of subsequent chapters should be considered against the general tendencies outlined here. For all the manifest differences between them, cultural actors, educators, politicians and their audiences and collaborators in all four nations can be said to see an increasingly valued commodity in a feeling of connectedness to the Middle Ages.

Part I

The Politics of Autochthony What constitutional medievalisms I have discussed so far trace political institutions back to their first stirrings in the Middle Ages. They underpin the state whose institutional antiquity they proclaim. This section, by contrast, is dedicated to the ways in which medievalism – including constitutional medievalisms closely related to those just outlined – has been put to work in the context of major political developments, even upheavals, over the three decades since the 1990s. The same memory sites and traditions can be enlisted to support the status quo and agitate for radical constitutional change. The reason why the medievalism employed in contemporary politics demands its own section is not just that it is by tendency disruptive and party-­ driven, rather than stabilising and (ostensibly) consensus oriented. Rather, I discuss it in detail – with separate chapters for the different national contexts – because it has reached remarkable prominence in a volatile and distinctive political moment. Unlike anything seen in more than half a century, medievalism in Britain and Switzerland, as in Western Europe more generally, has not only attended but informed many of the major political developments of the day: the flowering of Eurosceptic and other nationalisms, the desire for downscaling, the occasional stunning upsets of political ‘exitism’. Nor are these political medievalisms the exclusive province of professional politicians or political organisations. In many instances, they are produced by citizens engaging in politics from without its formal settings. My broader premise is that since the turn of the century political medievalism has benefitted from a turn to what I have called a politics of autochthony. In its purest and most problematic form, this brand of identity politics seeks to transform a series of highly contingent events, from the distant past to the present, into the ‘natural growth’ of the nation and insists on the primacy of ‘organic’ or ‘homegrown’ national identity, political institutions and law over outside influence and international exchange. Broadly geneticist in thrust, its explanatory power is thus derived from a vertical analysis that predominantly looks to tradition, sources and precedent. It does so at the expense of horizontal, contemporaneous influencing factors that transcend the borders of the (national) body it describes. Such

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political reification of autochthony tends to find in the Middle Ages its earliest usable past: roughly what Geary calls a mythical ‘moment of primary acquisition’ of nationhood.1 The increasing acceptability and success of the politics of autochthony and, hence, the attractiveness of national medievalism in the political sphere are due in large part to the culturalisation of politics in Europe and beyond. Sylvia Sasse describes this culturalisation succinctly in terms of a tendency of placing a state’s constitution on a level with allegedly stable national cultural norms and customs.2 In her account of this process, Sasse mentions the examples of two unofficial (and much ridiculed) ‘contracts’ with foreign nationals published in 2018 by Swiss and German media outlets, respectively, which sought to impress on immigrants the pre-eminence of the respective national Leitkultur (‘guiding’ or ‘mainstream culture’). As Sasse puts it, such gestures ‘interpret the democratic foundations of the Federal Constitution or the Basic Law as Swiss or German culture and thus ethnicise the political system’. The upshot of this trend is a potential threat to the liberal democratic order through a shift from civic–political–voluntarist values to ethnolinguistic–cultural ones. To be clear, the official anti-racist consensus in most Western societies, though embattled, largely prevents mainstream political actors and commentators such as those presented here from successfully deploying overt blood-and-soil medievalism. However, while the uses of the Middle Ages by figures close to the political mainstream are distinct from the more extremist uses, they are not unrelated to them. As Daniel Wollenberg states, ‘some of the extreme right’s formative ideas about heritage and tradition emanate from more mainstream right-wing discourse’.3 Accordingly, some of my primary sources are of interest precisely because they constitute the thin end of the wedge for those extremist uses of the Middle Ages that insist on historically validated ethnic ‘purity’.4 By downplaying or negating the importance of outside influence in the form of migration and cultural and political exchange, some of the examples discussed here contribute to making socially acceptable the idea of a self-contained polity legitimated solely by its cultural lineage. They thus restrict – only conceptually for now – the possibility of newcomers legitimately participating in that polity. The implications for multicultural and multi-ethnic societies such as Switzerland and the UK stand to be formidable. This section spotlights political landmarks and developments which likely decided, at least in the medium term, entire national constitutional futures. The Scottish Independence Referendum, the Brexit vote and the rise of the national-­ conservative movement in Switzerland are both symptomatic of and contribute to ongoing changes to a far wider political climate, which is increasingly renationalised as the twenty-first century enters its third decade. I do not share Carpegna Falconieri’s impression that the political use of medievalism by separatist nationalists 1 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), pp. 12f. and 156. 2 Sylvia Sasse, ‘Die falschen Unterschiede: Über die Kulturalisierung des Politischen’ (2017) [accessed 24 August 2020]. 3 Daniel C. Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (Leeds, 2018), p. 41. 4 See Amy Kaufman, ‘Purity’, in Emery and Utz, Medievalism, pp. 199–206.

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waned after a peak in the late 2000s. The three chapters that follow are an attempt at showing why. They are concerned with some of the most salient of many parallel developments and events whose movers are united in revisiting the nation’s history in order to redirect the nation’s destiny. We encounter here questions of separatism, independence and isolationism played out in medievalist rhetoric and imagery. Constitutional distinctiveness is traced back to some point in the Middle Ages to make the case for a modern-day arrangement that entails less close involvement with larger political bodies. The level of aesthetic sophistication and propagandistic force of these medievalisms varies considerably, as does the prominence they are accorded by the political actors involved. In all cases, however, efforts at constitutional downscaling find congenial models in the Middle Ages of traditionalist imagination. Accordingly, their supporters stress  – often to breaking point  – the relevance of medieval versions of self-determination and statehood for present-day polities. While the medieval symbolism is often tenuous, it is strongly emotive. In fact, it often betrays a distinct loss of a sense of proportion: political nationalists use medievalism hyperbolically, and not infrequently imply establishment neglect or even a cover-up of history while couching their claims in a rhetoric of war. The propagandistic nature of some of these medievalisms inevitably raises ethical questions. What constitutes use, what abuse, of history? To what extent does the moral imperative of truth-telling apply to political actors that resort to history, and specifically deep history, to make their case? When asked a variant of this question in 2015, a year marked by free-wheeling memory politics in Switzerland, Swiss philologist Peter von Matt noted drily that political propaganda was not exactly famous for being bound to the Commandment of not bearing false witness.6 With von Matt, I believe that to lament the bad history of political discourse is mostly to miss the point. Above anything else, medievalism allows political actors to convey their positions with significant symbolic economy. That said, the high stakes involved in the medievalisms I turn to now do require me to probe them for inconsistencies and blind spots. But where I critique bad-faith medievalisms, I do so not so much for their flawed history as for their manipulative intent and potentially dire real-world consequences.7 5

5 Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders, trans. Andrew M. Hiltzik (Leiden, 2020), p. 71. 6 Peter von Matt, ‘“Morgarten könnte auch unter Höhlenbewohnern spielen”’, Sonntagszeitung, 22 March 2015, p. 12. 7 See also Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte: Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2007), p. 428.

2 For Freedom Alone: The Scottish Independence Referendum

F

But what were they for? A Scottish parliament, of course. But now they have it, what is it for? [. . .] Maybe it’s for saying, Look, listen, this is who we are. And maybe that is no insignificant thing, and the purpose of a parliament is to say it again, over and over.1

or obvious reasons, the key reference point for twenty-first-century Scottish constitutional medievalism of a separatist bent has been the debate on independence from the UK, and particularly the Scottish Independence Referendum that took place on 18 September 2014 and ended in defeat for the separatists. After the reasonably close result (55.3 against 44.7 per cent) on a very high turnout (84.6 per cent), the constitutional future of Scotland, inside or outside the Union, remains uncertain. This uncertainty has been compounded by the narrow British vote in 2016 to leave the EU, which saw a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland vote to remain. Soon after the European referendum, the clear Scottish ‘Remain’ vote caused the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon, to think aloud about a second ‘indyref ’ and the EU membership of an independent Scotland. At the time of writing, Sturgeon appears to have settled into a long game of trying to get Westminster to approve a second Scottish independence referendum. For many, the country’s constitutional future is tightly bound up with the matter of Scottish national identity. The search for national identity has intensified in Scottish cultural discourse since the 1980s.2 Notably in the Scottish literary sphere, the question of Scottishness in the twenty-first century has been addressed with urgency, vigour and, often enough, playfulness. This engagement has not shied away from taking a political stance, with a clear majority of commenters supporting independence.3 The political interventions of cultural actors on the topic of Scottish James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still (London, 2010), p. 36. Trish Reid, ‘Post-Devolutionary Drama’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 188–99, p. 191. 3 Among the many Scottish literati who endorsed the pro-independence campaign were David Greig, James Robertson, Irvine Welsh and Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s then-Makar, or national poet: Robert Crawford, Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary 1

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independence have also been significantly more likely to turn to medievalism than have been those of their politician counterparts. Because even though the SNP leadership did refer to the Wars of Scottish Independence and particularly the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath during the referendum campaign, theirs was relatively lowkey engagement with the medieval past. This is especially true if we compare it to the phase prior to the passing of the Scotland Act in 1998, which established the devolved Scottish Parliament and Government. The Pre-Devolution Braveheart Moment To gain a clearer sense of the present state of Scottish political medievalism, I need to turn briefly to the distinctive pre-devolution moment in the second half of the 1990s. The key ingredient of what was a heady medievalist brew was Mel Gibson’s highly successful and highly controversial film Braveheart (1995).4 Without wishing to replicate the relevant literature on the film, I need to stress that, besides Braveheart having been a significant factor in worldwide perceptions of Scotland and its history since, it also had a considerable if ambivalent influence on cultural memory in the ‘homeland’. The award-winning Hollywood blockbuster joined the ranks of a long line of influential appropriations of the memory sites of the Wars of Scottish Independence and William Wallace, imagining a Scotland brutally oppressed by the colonial-type English. Braveheart’s questionable history (regularly punctured in criticism) reactivates a literary tradition of depicting Wallace in terms of anti-­ English martyrdom, a tradition that goes back at least to Blind Hary’s Wallace.5 In a withering critique of the film, Colin McArthur accuses it of promulgating a xenophobic Celticism and masculinist ‘warriorism’ that lends itself to extreme right-wing and neo-fascist appropriation.6 Arguably, some of Braveheart’s roughest edges – its crude Anglophobia and homophobia – are attributable in equal parts to the wholesale importation of a tradition dating back to the late Middle Ages and to the filmmakers’ own, very much present-day, conservative sexual and gender politics.7 Wallace’s post-Braveheart incarnations in fiction tend to distance themselves from the film. Below, I argue that Scottish nationalists resorting to medievalism in politics or culture more generally have likewise been careful, since devolution, to eschew narratives of colonial victimisation, consciously or unconsciously articulating Scottish nationhood as counter-projects to the atavistic chauvinism of Braveheart. Imagination, 1314–2014 (Edinburgh, 2014), p.  230. Edwin Morgan, whom Lochhead succeeded as Makar, was likewise an outspoken supporter of Scottish political independence both before and during his incumbency and until his death in 2010. 4 Braveheart, film, dir. Mel Gibson. USA: Icon Productions, 1995. 5 Blind Hary, Hary’s Wallace (Vita Nobilissimi Defensoris Scotie Wilelmi Wallace Militis), ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1968). 6 McArthur provides evidence of the film being embraced by the far Right the world over, notably in the US and Scotland itself: Colin McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (London, 2003), pp. 207 and 128. 7 Sid Ray, ‘Hunks, History, and Homophobia: Masculinity Politics in Braveheart and Edward II’, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 29:3–4 (1999), 22–31, at p. 30.

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At the time of its release, however, SNP politicians thought fit to capitalise on the film’s success in a bid to increase party membership. As recounted by David Rieff, party volunteers ‘handed out leaflets to filmgoers as they left cinemas all over Scotland that read, in part: “You’ve seen the movie  – Now face the reality [. . .] Today, it’s not just bravehearts who choose independence, it’s also wise heads.”’8 In the same year, SNP vice-president Paul Scott described the party’s mission in the following terms: Wallace saw independence as a prerequisite for common good. He realised that without it, the freedom of his country to trade, to develop resources and freely to decide on alliances and its own priorities would be destroyed. [. . .] In modern terms, the desires of civic nationalism are exactly the same.9

The party leader, Alexander Salmond, was full of praise for Braveheart. He took his cue from the film in his final speech at the 1995 party conference and had the SNP adopt images from it in the campaign literature. A month after the film opened, the party achieved its highest poll ratings in seven years.10 Not just politicians basked in the film’s popularity. More lastingly, journalists (especially south of the border) associated Braveheart not only with Scottish nationalism but also with Scottish national politics more generally. Depending on the context, this association takes on neutral to pejorative connotations. When the new Scottish Parliament was inaugurated on 1 July 1999, the BBC’s coverage of the ceremony was bookended by music from the film’s soundtrack;11 presumably, this was neither intended nor understood as a disparagement of the Scottish nation. Still, the more negative variant has proved durable in newsrooms: Anne McKendry cites a 2007 international newspaper report on the SNP’s becoming the largest party in the Scottish Parliament elections, headlined ‘Welcome to the Republic of Mel Gibson’ and crediting Gibson and Braveheart ‘for contributing “in no small part” to this development’.12 And yet, it is difficult not to see the actual Braveheart effect on election results as modest at best, and party-political association with the film as a double-edged sword in the long run. At the 1997 general election, the SNP share of the vote was a mere 0.6 per cent higher than in 1992 (with 8,000 fewer votes for the SNP). Despite these modest gains, McArthur writes, senior party figures ‘will confess off the record that the party’s relentless exploitation of the film was a tactical error, quite apart from being morally and aesthetically blind’.13 Robert Crawford similarly notes that the 8 David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven, 2016), p. 114. 9 Qtd in John Arlidge, ‘SNP Shares Mel’s Vision of Scotland the Brave’ (1995) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 10 McArthur, Brigadoon, p. 126–7. 11 Lin Anderson, Braveheart: From Hollywood to Holyrood (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 11f. 12 Anne McKendry, ‘Mateship in the Middle Ages: The Australianness of William Wallace, William Thatcher, and Robin Longstride’, in D’Arcens and Lynch, International Medievalism, pp. 185–205, at p. 199 n. 17. 13 McArthur, Brigadoon, p. 200.

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SNP’s use of the film has since given way to wary dissociation from the cliché of the Scottish nationalists as ‘Bravehearts’.14 The SNP’s retreat from Gibson-inspired Wallace myth can partly be accounted for by the fact that the SNP has formed the Scottish Government since 2007, and by the fact that they were courting the decisive moderate vote in the 2014 referendum. However, it was really the 1997 campaign that marked a turning point for the SNP’s approach to Wallace and historical material more generally. Thereafter, according to Michael Penman, the party made ‘a conscious effort to shift away from historical romanticism and patriotic icons’.15 No longer would it stake out strong claims, for example, on the annual 24 June Bannockburn anniversary rally. It is against the backdrop of this shift in the medievalist practice of Scottish nationalists that we must consider the medievalisms deployed during the Independence Referendum campaign in 2014. Indyref, the Battle of Bannockburn and the Declaration of Arbroath While the ‘Aye’ side of the referendum debate and specifically the SNP evoked medieval history in their campaign, they largely sidestepped the more war-like memories of the Anglo-Scottish conflicts. Alexander Salmond did try to make political capital from the Battle of Bannockburn and to represent the Declaration of Arbroath as a quasi-constitutional document of early nationhood. These SNP medievalisms notwithstanding, engagement with medieval history proved to be both more in depth and more relaxed among the Scottish literary scene. A number of cultural nationalists found relevance in national medievalism yet also tackled head on the problematic martial aspects of memory sites from the Wars of Scottish Independence, and particularly the Battle of Bannockburn. For them, too, the Declaration of Arbroath was a favoured object of more celebratory treatments. First, though, I turn to the political professionals. Salmond’s aide Joan McAlpine made something of a statement of intent in 2012 when she said, ‘we will not normalise independence with Braveheart rhetoric’.16 A further clue that the SNP was not going to resort to Claymore tactics during the referendum campaign was the fact that more was not made of the fact that the referendum was set to take place in 2014, the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.17 The SNP’s new approach was put to the test when the Bannockburn Visitor Centre opened in May 2014. In his function as first minister, Salmond duly abstained from overt political messaging during his address at the reopening. Yet, in an on-site interview recorded for a promotion video by the Scottish Government, he could be seen veering from innocuous-sounding praise for the immersiveness of the ‘all singing, all dancing’ virtual reality presentation into a more partisan direction. Crawford, Bannockburns, pp. 131f. Michael Penman, ‘Introduction: The Battle of Bannockburn. 1314 to 2014’, in Penman, Bannockburn, 1314–2014, pp. 1–14, at p. 7. 16 Qtd in Michael Blackley, ‘Declaration of Arbroath, 2014’ (2014) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 17 See Penman, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 14 15

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His pronouncement is worth rendering at length, not because it constitutes vigorous political agitation – it does not – but because it boils down a traditional medievalist master narrative of Scottish nationhood: Bannockburn was the foundation stone of the modern Scottish nation. It was a bloody conflict, obviously, and any commemoration of any battle must reflect that [. . .]. But what [. . .] came out of it was a concept of elective kingship, of popular sovereignty. Something really important in terms of what will develop in the first European statement of that intent in the Declaration of Arbroath [. . .]. And secondly, of course, without Bannockburn there would have been no Scotland. So, the freedom and liberty which people strive for the world over still was actually encapsulated on [sic] over these two days, here in Bannockburn, 700 years ago. And therefore, to be immersed in that and understand its importance and understand the drama, the blood and the suffering of battle, but also to understand the point and purpose and the conclusion and the lesson of it is of huge importance to every generation of Scots – as it has been in the past, and as it will be in the future.18

In this statement, Salmond’s role as leader of the separatist cause remains largely subliminal. Yet there is a sense that the humanism in his comment on the imperative to remember ‘the blood and the suffering of battle’ is perfunctory. His main point emerges, rather, in the (at least debatable) gloss on the Declaration of Arbroath as the first statement of ‘popular sovereignty’. This is emblematic of Salmond’s systematic linking of the free democratic political order with the historical Scottish nation. The importance and desirability of that nation’s independence in the twenty-first century is heavily implied by the discursive alignment of ‘freedom and liberty’ after the victory over the English at Bannockburn with ‘every generation of Scots’. In his insistence on ‘the purpose and the conclusion and the lesson’ of Bannockburn, Salmond engages in a light form of the politics of autochthony. His is the kind of normative ancestral history brought to bear to determine the present through its ‘lessons’, ‘truths’ and ‘precedents’. As will become clear in some of the English and Swiss examples below, this tendency to read medieval history teleologically, with the sovereign modern nation as its terminus, links the centre-left Scottish nationalist with nationalists of altogether different stripes elsewhere. The SNP leader allowed himself a more high-visibility evocation of the Declaration of Arbroath three months later, though in a fashion that, tellingly, operated with a series of absences and unstated premises. Salmond chose the symbolic location of Arbroath abbey in Angus to deliver a ‘Declaration of Opportunity’ while canvassing for secession from the Union.19 Yet, apart from the conjuring work performed by the place itself and by the reference to a heightened rhetorical form Scottish Government, ‘Public Opening of the Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre’ (2014) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 19 Tom Gordon, ‘Salmond Evokes Declaration of Arbroath as Referendum Campaign Enters Final Month’ (2014) [accessed 12 January 2022]. 18

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(a ‘declaration’), the connection between Salmond’s speech and the Declaration of Arbroath remained hazy. Topping his list of opportunities was protecting ‘forever’ from ‘Westminster privatisation and cuts’ that lowest common denominator of leftof-centre conceptions of national identity in Britain, ‘our publicly-owned, publicly-run NHS’. The other opportunities in Salmond’s mind were ‘the opportunity to create a fairer Scotland, ending the assault on the most vulnerable members of our society’, and ‘the opportunity for young people to stay in Scotland, to choose to build their future here’.20 This was clearly an effort to portray independence as a more left-wing, social-democratic alternative to the status quo. And that status quo could only be read, by anyone noddingly familiar with the contents of the Declaration of Arbroath, as a new form of the ‘English rule’ proclaimed anathema by the signatory barons.21 Salmond’s evocation of the Declaration as a medieval constitutional settlement and founding document of egalitarian democracy illustrates the iconic if historically floating place which the medieval Scottish struggles for independence hold for many in twenty-first-century national discourse. The so-called Declaration is in fact a baronial letter of appeal to Pope John from 1320. It seeks the lifting of the excommunication of Bruce and concocts an uninterrupted line of Scottish kings to ancient times, thus claiming sovereignty for the Scottish monarchy in the face of English encroachment. In a very famous passage, the signatories proclaim that they would depose Bruce if he should try to sell them out to the English: if he should give up what he has begun [. . .], we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.22

The latter half of this passage in particular has fired the post-medieval imagination. Dauvit Broun points out that it is almost impossible for us to read the Declaration now ‘without hearing in [it] the echo of our own modern notions of national self-determination’, even though that reading is erroneous.23 Mark Bruce highlights the extremely discontinuous history of concepts central to the Declaration, and especially those of natio and libertas.24 He shows that, since the seventeenth century, the Declaration has undergone a radical transformation ‘from a letter expressing baronial privilege within an esoteric and localized political situation to a universal,

Qtd in Gordon, ‘Salmond’. The Declaration of Arbroath, ed. and trans. James Ferguson (Edinburgh, 1970), p. 9. 22 Declaration of Arbroath, p. 9. 23 Dauvit Broun, ‘The Declaration of Arbroath: Pedigree of a Nation?’, in Geoffrey Barrow (ed.), The Declaration of Arbroath: History, Significance, Setting (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 1–12, at p. 1. 24 Mark P. Bruce, ‘Creating Scottish Nationalism: English Translations of the FourteenthCentury Declaration of Arbroath’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XV: Memory and Medievalism (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 126–56, at pp. 132f. 20 21

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populist declaration of independence’.25 In performing this transformation, modern readers have in effect fallen for the signatories’ pose of speaking for the whole of Scotland rather than merely one of several conflicting factions.26 This reading, as Bruce shows, was predicated on radical decontextualisation and recontextualisation through translation from the original Latin into English as well as through the transfer into print editions, which eliminated any markers that this was an occasional diplomatic letter to the pope rather than a declaration of universal principles.27 To be clear, Bruce does not claim, and neither do I, that the Declaration should be denied its place within ‘the early development of ideas that would, much later, lead to theories of representative government’.28 Some scholars have indeed described the Declaration’s context of the Wars of Scottish Independence as a time of early Scottish constitutional uniqueness. However, post-medieval Scots – and, as Bruce shows, Americans – demonstrably went on to strongly reshape the Declaration in their own image. Precisely such reshaping was still going on when Salmond addressed the press on a bowling green beside Arbroath abbey to lay out his vision for an independent twenty-first-century Scotland. On balance, however, this tame sample (by Salmond’s standards) is indicative of the much toned-down medievalism in recent mainstream political debates on Scotland’s future. The contrast of the 2014 referendum campaign with the devolution campaigns of 1997 is stark. Then, as Penman states, all parties made use of the Declaration of Arbroath ‘as a measure of patriotism and political idealism’.29 The political nationalists have not given up entirely on constitutional medievalism as part of their repertoire, but they have lately showed a good deal of restraint. The Bannockburn Rotunda Poems Scotland’s writers showed less inhibition during the independence campaign. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the NTS-organised poetry competition for the inscription on the restored Bannockburn Visitor Centre rotunda, from which Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Here Lies Our Land’ emerged victorious. At this point, I want to consider the constitutional narratives embedded in some of the other poems submitted to this public memorialisation of medieval Scottishness. With the celebratory 700th anniversary year of the battle coinciding with the independence referendum, the occasion invited pithy political statements for reasons of context alone. Many of the poems submitted are not shy of showing their political colours. In this, they differ from Jamie’s winning poem, which abstains from voicing a nationalist and separatist politics altogether. Few of these poems are uncomplicated statements of nationalist sentiment, let alone of separatist agitation. Yet the memory, and the renewed prospect, of Scottish political independence haunt many of them, with the Declaration of Arbroath being invoked in no fewer than half of the poems.

25 26 27 28 29

Bruce, ‘Creating Scottish Nationalism’, p. 127. Bruce, ‘Creating Scottish Nationalism’, p. 134. M. Bruce, ‘Creating Scottish Nationalism’, p. 142. M. Bruce, ‘Creating Scottish Nationalism’, p. 150. Penman, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.

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The most overtly political of the submissions is that by John Burnside. He frankly states his belief in the need for Scottish independence in his author’s note and emphasises the bonds of solidarity and ‘the democratic element’ of Bannockburn. In the untitled poem, an unspecified ‘we’ look back to the battle and see solidarity between ‘schiltron [i.e., pike formation] and king’, neither of which are ‘heroes’ but just ‘men / Standing together’. This vertical bond between high and low is then contrasted with a more perfect, future union, in which nobody is free till each is free According to his gifts, and to his needs, And when the time allows, we prove it so: No tyrant and no-one common. All one breath.30

In his note, Burnside explains that he was channelling ‘the socialist views of John Maclean’, and there are clear echoes here of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s dictum that ‘I am truly free only when all human beings [. . .] are equally free’.31 This makes Burnside’s line ‘nobody is free till each is free’ only a faint echo of the Declaration of Arbroath’s most famous passage. Given the unclear nature of the collective spoken for in Burnside’s poem, and despite Burnside’s support for independence, it is as much a plea for a universally conceived democratic future as an exalting back story for twenty-first-century Scottish nationalism.32 In this, Burnside’s poem partakes of the same tentative universalism as some of the other Scottish poetry I have touched on previously. Aonghas MacNeacail’s contribution takes up the high discourse of national unity and liberty, and pointedly moves it away from royal hero worship. In his note, MacNeacail suggests that the languages of English, Gaelic, Scots and Latin  – in which his poem is composed – would all have been familiar to Robert the Bruce. A meaningful linguistic omission in the poem itself is that of Norman French, which is acknowledged in MacNeacail’s note as one of the languages Bruce would have spoken. The omission of the high-medieval language of court can be read as a reclamation of the perspective of those described, in the note, as ‘without voice, vote or influence’. In the speaker’s account, it is Bruce whose ‘vision of the day’ allows him to ‘[seal] / the nation’s name’ and who makes the claim to fight ‘for freedom alone’ that is enshrined in the Declaration of Arbroath: ‘set propter libertatem solummodo’. This direct quote is the only line in Latin in the poem. However, this key line, too, is reclaimed from a language of temporal and clerical authority for ‘the common people’ (as per MacNeacail’s description) in the closing image of the ghosts without names, who marched, fought, limped, died, [. . .] arms linked around this tree of liberty. 30 All quotations from the poems and accompanying notes are taken from Bannockburn: 10 Poems for a Landscape (Edinburgh, 2013). 31 Qtd in Jon Stewart, Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge, 2021), p. 243. 32 See also Crawford, Bannockburns, p. 234.

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MacNeacail chooses to frame the poem as an endorsement of Scottish independence, which he equates with political freedom in his note: ‘If sovereignty was lost again, the dream remains. There have been ebbings: there have been flows, but the dream remains alive.’ A sideways glance at a poem from the previously discussed Wallace Muse may help to make the point that many recent literary treatments of memory sites from the Wars of Independence have been acutely conscious of the adjustments necessary to make them fit for a modern, democratic Scotland. The poem in question, Donald Smith’s ‘Election Day’, links both William Wallace and Robert the Bruce to an act of democratic choice in contemporary Scotland. Yet, while the speaker acknowledges the achievements of both men, he also states that ‘you are not my hero[es]’.33 ‘Election Day’ thus rejects the more naive type of history that draws a direct line from the medieval nation to the modern and from medieval independence achieved on the battlefield to present-day general enfranchisement. Smith’s speaker does have a sense of the historical background or genealogy of the political institution he is part of on that day. In terms evocative of birth and ancestry, he faces his question: ‘This is the navel and the omphalos’ where ‘history’s diverse footprints coalesce’. Yet, although this can be read as partly restituting contemporary relevance to the medieval heroes of Scottish independence, the poem’s conclusion looks forward, not back: ‘people of the present, / immigrant and emigrant all / become joint owners of the future’. Rejecting ethnic nationalism in his description of the electorate, the speaker evokes a Scotland aware of its history but not determined by it. ‘What says the oracle?’, he asks, and is answered: ‘“I am your elective freedom, / and the burden of your choice.”’ Confounding neat continuity, the poem veers from an ancient interrogative to a present affirmation of popular empowerment. Freedom is claimed democratically, not inherited passively from the war heroes of yore. Returning to the rotunda competition, two more poems are of interest for the way they combine particularist evocations of the Declaration of Arbroath with a universalist turn to the wider world. Robin Robertson’s self-stated goal was to look beyond Bannockburn as a ‘loose symbol of freedom, nationhood, and victory against the odds’ and to reposition it ‘in the continuum of Scots history’. Proceeding deictically, much as Kathleen Jamie does in her poem, from the image of the rotunda as a compass, Robertson’s poem locates significant events from Scottish history, medieval to modern, on their respective compass points. South, ‘England, glinting at arms’; west, ‘the cleared villages of Barra, Ardnamurchan’, and far beyond, ‘Canada’; north-north-west, ‘Stirling Castle, saved this day’, and ‘beyond it far Glenfinnan’, where ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ raised his banner in the Jacobite rising of 1745; and ‘dead north, Culloden Moor’, where that rising was crushed the following year. This fanned-out arrangement of benchmarks of Scottish history is then interpreted as ‘this land of the scattered, this Scotland’, as Robertson folds time and human activity onto the land. The allusion to the Scottish diaspora in the 33 All quotations from this poem are from Donald Smith, ‘Election Day’, in Lesley Duncan and Elspeth King (eds), The Wallace Muse: Poems and Artworks Inspired by the Life and Legend of William Wallace (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 132f.

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‘land of the scattered’ and the Canada reference is reinforced in the follow-up sentence, which nods to the Declaration of Arbroath: ‘We are nowhere, everywhere, fighting / for freedom alone. The same cause and course for everyone – and this, our compass.’ Robertson comments that he wanted to ‘resist any simplistic nationalism’ and reposition Bannockburn as a ‘memorial to the past that looks to the future’. I do not think he is altogether successful in this, not least because the Scottish diaspora’s imperial and colonial entanglements are omitted entirely in the rather solipsistic-seeming entity here grandly called ‘this Scotland’  – emulating, perhaps, Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt and his elegy for England. The global Scotland sketched here is romanticised as having the unifying ‘cause and course’ of ‘freedom alone’. That seems a bold conclusion to draw even from his own historical line-up, in which Bannockburn rubs shoulders with the decidedly ambivalent royalism of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Proclaiming freedom to be the underlying principle of it all, risks yet again reducing Bannockburn to that ‘loose symbol’ against which Robertson professes to work. As the title ‘The Bannockburn Compass’ suggests, Robert Crawford’s poem shares the conceit of Bannockburn as an orienting device located at the spiritual centre of Scotland. Yet, unlike Robertson’s poem, this one wears its historicism lightly. This more personal, even intimate, poem speaks in sensuous imagery: at daybreak, ‘sharpened light reveals / Who it is you kiss’, and at sunset, ‘Friskily under eyelids / New dreams begin now’. The speaker’s gazing into the four cardinal directions – the ‘strong mountains’ in the north, ‘daybreak’ and ‘Larks’ in the east, ‘lush vineyards’ and ‘Geese’ in the south and ‘sunset’ in the west – contains a centrally placed adaptation of the famous passage from the Declaration of Arbroath: For as long as one Hundred of us can still stand We fight for freedom.

Gyration completed, the poem culminates in a romantic union (including yet more circular imagery) as the speaker seals a marriage covenant with both the land and the political nation: With this ring I wed Dog heather, Scots thistles, hope, The Bannockburn wink.

More than any of the other poems submitted, this one interweaves the personal with the political – a union encapsulated, as I read it, in the curious metaphor of the ‘Bannockburn wink’. Crawford already primes us for a political reading of the poem in his note, where he announces that, ‘like the Battle of Bannockburn, [the poem] is about Scottish independence’. However, he also points out that ‘in its [haiku] verse form, its compass points, and its dreams, it resonates more widely, signalling internationalism as well as Scottish loyalties’. Crawford is at pains (here as elsewhere) to characterise Scottish independence efforts as modern, liberal minded and cosmopolitan. In this,

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he is in line with current mainstream Scottish nationalism and shares more than a little ideological ground with the SNP and its twenty-first-century leaders. Crawford and the SNP seem to share one more concern. Judging by Crawford’s poem and the anti-unionism of the nationalists, both can be argued to be a little too quick to disown as ‘un-Scottish’ Scotland’s own imperial history within the British Union. In the author’s note to the poem, Crawford describes his line referring to ‘hot empires wrestl[ing]’ to the south as a reference to ‘the Roman and other empires’. That these ‘other empires’ must include the British empire is not much of an interpretive leap. But the fact is, of course, that modern Scotland was significantly shaped by its own imperial past – indeed, was a driving force within empire – along with its southern neighbours. Clearly, this is no reason to question the sincerity of Crawford’s internationalist ideals. It may, however, serve as an illustration of the kind of blind spots a politically engaged, and ostensibly internationalist, nationalist Scottish poetics might be prone to. In sum, the poems commissioned for the competition are representative of the way the stock of imagery and themes derived from the Wars of Independence can still fire Scottish constitutional thinking. They are eagerly, if often critically, taken up by a cultural scene which strongly skews towards independence. It is in the poems that refer to the Declaration of Arbroath that we get closest to uncomplicated celebrations, in a nationalist vein, of the Wars of Independence. In this, the cultural scene mirrors the political scene’s vectoring away from battlefield glories. The egalitarian ideals of freedom and self-determination derived from the Declaration, through conscious or unconscious acts of reinterpretation, have survived relatively untarnished the controversial debate surrounding the divisive Braveheart and its hyper-masculinist interpretation of what ‘freedom’ means in Anglo-Scottish relations. Whereas the din of battle has mostly died down since devolution, then, the Declaration – in its post-seventeenth-century form divested of royalist ballast – has kept its purchase with Scottish poets. A gendered disparity is worth mentioning at least in passing. Although coincidence may well account for the fact, it is striking that all the politically involved poems discussed here were authored by men, whereas the poems by Kathleen Jamie and Valerie Gillies focus on themes of continuity of place and cultural memory. I explore some of the background and implications of this suggestion of a gender split in contemporary medievalist approaches to national themes in Chapter 5. Robert Crawford and ‘Bardic Voice’ I want to conclude the chapter by considering in a little more detail the instructive case of Robert Crawford and the multiple hats he wore during the Scottish independence debate. Professor of modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews as well as a seasoned poet, Crawford represents a politically outspoken part of the Scottish cultural scene with strong ties to academia.34 He is particu34 Another example of such a personal union is, again, Kathleen Jamie, who is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling, an essayist, poet and has been Scotland’s Makar since 2021 – as well as being an outspoken supporter of independence.

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larly self-reflexive of the liminal status he and other Scottish literati hold in between poetry, politics and scholarship. Crawford has made no pretence of his political beliefs in any of the public roles he inhabits but, rather, has been an outspoken supporter of Scottish independence both before the referendum and since. In a keynote address at the National Library of Scotland’s 2015 conference on ‘Poetic Politics: Culture and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, One Year On’, he addressed exactly the poet’s balancing act: ‘No poet should feel obliged to engage, in his or her work, explicitly with politics. All poets should be free to do so, however.’35 He then advanced the concept of ‘bardic voice’, which he sees as the basis for a committed, socially effectual poetics and scholarship. According to him, the poet who wants to write politically hears that bardic voice: it is the impulse that ‘urges him or her to speak on behalf of a community, a tribe, a gender, a nation’. Bardic voice is constantly at odds with a second voice, which ‘insists only on truth to the individual self – an unstable self which may elude communal, tribal, gender or national definition’. The notion of bardic voice is of course a resonant Celticism as well as a medievalism – a fact that Crawford is awake to when he acknowledges the ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘antique’ ring to it, fearing that it might be ‘too [. . .] Ossianic’.36 Nevertheless, in his address he advocated the concept of bardic voice for the way it suggests ‘access to the power of public address’ and because of the historic importance of such access in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere. He stated his firm belief ‘in the possibilities for Scottish poets still of a bardic stance’. On the momentous occasion of the independence referendum, according to Crawford, ‘bardic voice was often the appropriate thing to risk’. He himself risked it repeatedly, and on diverse channels, in 2014. He published a poetry collection in Testament as well as a cultural and literary history of the memory site of Bannockburn, Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314–2014 (which I have cited repeatedly above).37 As he admitted in the 2015 keynote, it becomes readily apparent, when reading either, that he supports independence. The charge of propagandism, however, he repudiated vigorously. Instead, these publications are, in his opinion, suffused with bardic voice that speaks on behalf of all Scots. What interests me most is how Crawford uses his ‘power of public address’ in them to consistently stress the relevance of the medieval for the modern nation. This abiding concern should not be confused with monothematicism. By any measure, Testament is a diverse collection of poetry, by turns introspective, erotic, intertextual (one section is devoted to poetry by Constantine Cavafy) and religious (another section consists of demotic paraphrases from the New Testament). The collection is at its most political in ‘A Little History’, the longest of the sections, which reflects on Scotland’s history with a view to future independence. ‘The Robert Crawford, ‘Professor Robert Crawford, Opening Keynote at Poetic Politics’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 36 Crawford has written on the epithet ‘the Bard’ as used for prominent literary figures: ‘The Bard: Ossian, Burns, and the Shaping of Shakespeare’, in Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester, 2004), pp. 124–40. 37 Robert Crawford, Testament (London, 2014). 35

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Bannockburn Compass’ is also included in Testament. A brief look at two more poems will give a greater sense of Crawford’s notion of bardic voice, and the medieval themes to which he resorts to raise it. Most of the ‘History’ poems are written from a first-person perspective, singular or plural. Thus, they make at least an implicit claim to speak for the broader Scottish community. This is most evident in ‘Declaration’, in which Crawford adopts the first-person voice of Scotland itself. The poem paints an unflattering picture of Scotland as a ‘blotchy’ alcoholic and given to sexism. Yet, despite its flaws, the recovering Scotland declares itself ‘determined  / To be less prim about my gene-pool, more airily cosmopolitan’, and states that ‘All I want now is my dignity back, / To stand on my own unsteady feet’ (p. 13). The medieval resonance of the title – yet again via the Declaration of Arbroath – is then added to as the country asserts its readiness [. . .] to renew My auld alliance with this tipsy planet, My dependence And my independence. (p. 13)

Alluding to the Franco-Scottish alliance that held from the late thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, the ‘auld alliance’ renewed here is not with one specific country but with the whole world. Hardly soberer than Scotland, that world is to be met on equal terms. The implication seems to be that the old alliance with the world has been broken by the Anglo-Scottish accord and, by extension, Scotland’s later integration into the British polity. Although the poem was published two years before Brexit, it is difficult not to read in this an anticipation of some of the Brexiteers’ – and later Prime Minister Theresa May’s – counterintuitive claims that secession from the larger union would result in a more ‘global Britain’.38 The idea seems to be that, with one less intermediary entity, contact with the wider world will be more direct, and hence ‘truer’. Although Crawford is obviously much readier to acknowledge that secession from the UK would entail international ‘dependence’ as much as ‘independence’, at this present moment, it is noteworthy that exponents of nationalist separatism still felt the urge to clothe themselves in globalist garb to achieve political respectability. Crawford strikes a bitter tone in ‘Flodden’, named after the Scottish military disaster in 1513. In onomatopoetic language he describes the inglorious result of what has been described as the last great medieval battle to take place on the British Isles: ‘Flooded with blood, sodden, splodged  / Second Agincourt for England’ (p. 19). ‘Agincourt’ functions, here as elsewhere, as a shorthand for a crushing and bloody English victory over a numerically superior force. A reference to the folk tune ‘Flowers of the Forest’, which commemorates the defeat, stresses the fact that ‘The Scots king [was] just one of those flowers of the forest’ blighted by the battle. The speaker is unconcerned with romanticising the chivalrous James IV’s death. Rather, he regrets Theresa May, ‘Britain after Brexit. A Vision of a Global Britain. May’s Conference Speech: Full Text’ (2016) [accessed 29 November 2022]. 38

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the more long-term consequences for a weakened Scotland’s independence. The defeat at Flodden is here interpreted, starkly, as ‘yon blood-red midwives’ / Breechbirth of the British Empire’ (p. 19). As in ‘The Bannockburn Compass’, empire is an alien, English, imposition on the Scottish nation. Both ‘Declaration’ and ‘Flodden’, then, continue that poem’s veiled accusation of persistent English imperialism. More directly political pugnacity proved controversial for Crawford’s other publication from 2014, Bannockburns. In this scholarly monograph, he interprets the memory site of Bannockburn as a central mytheme of Scottish independence. His premise is that, ‘from the start, Bannockburn was the most literary of battles’ (p. 23). He then proceeds to trace it through the centuries in literature, theatre and film, sometimes straying from the narrow focus on Bannockburn to consider the wider context of Scottish independence in literary imagination in works by Robert Baston, John Barbour, Robert Burns, Jane Porter, Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead, but also in Braveheart and Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch. Crawford’s principal argument is that, despite its diverse history of reimaginings, Bannockburn has consistently been used to bolster the case for Scottish independence. Pro-British interpretations of it are accordingly given short shrift and, in one case, even accused of being ‘Unionist spin’ (pp. 52f.) – a one-sidedness noticed by several reviewers.39 Another frequent criticism levelled at Crawford was that he treated the notion of ‘freedom’ carelessly.40 Indeed, Crawford fails properly to historicise the concept in such statements as ‘in all Scottish accounts of Bannockburn it is freedom that is the writers’ predominant theme’,41 and in fact he frequently conflates ‘freedom’ with ‘independence’. As other examples discussed above have shown, Crawford is certainly not alone in this. It was Crawford’s mixing of roles – that of the academic and that of the man on a political mission – that proved most contentious. While he is at pains to dissociate himself from party politics, he stresses the importance of a political commitment in culture: ‘Bannockburns makes claims for the lasting importance of literary voices as contributors to political debate’. In consistence with this, he shows awareness of the fact that ‘yoking the medieval Battle of Bannockburn to Scotland’s 2014 political arguments is asking for trouble’.42 He was not mistaken. James Campbell, while acknowledging Crawford’s ‘authoritative’ chapter on Robert Burns, accuses the book of having for the most part ‘more in common with pamphleteering than literary criticism’.43 Kathryn Sutherland considers Crawford’s ‘lin[ing] up’ of contemporary writers in support of independence ‘reductively propagandist’. James Coleman, Review of Bannockburns, by Robert Crawford, The Innes Review, 66:2 (2015), 213–16, at pp. 214f.; James Campbell, ‘Bannockburns by Robert Crawford – review’ (2014) [accessed 14 January 2022]; Kathryn Sutherland, ‘A Scotland Built on Stories’ (2014) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 40 Campbell, ‘Bannockburns’. 41 Crawford, Bannockburns, p. 26 42 Crawford, Bannockburns, p. 1. 43 Campbell, ‘Bannockburns’. 39

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It is certainly true that, as in his poetry, Crawford-the-professor has no qualms about letting his own political opinions influence the narrative  – bardic voice is evidently no great respecter of discursive boundaries. I do not wish to pass judgement on whether this amounts (as Campbell claims) to ‘flag-waving’ on Crawford’s part. I merely wish to point out the intriguing blend of voices – academic, poetic, political – in his interventions. To me, this encapsulates the lively, hybrid wider discourse about Scotland’s constitutional future. Positions of both cultural and political nationalisms confront one another and, sometimes, mesh to a remarkable extent. The two spheres casually overlap in contemporary Scotland, to a degree greater than in either England or Switzerland, let alone Wales. This overlap is reminiscent of the phenomenon which Leerssen has called the ‘cultivation of culture’.44 The term refers to the way poetic ideals are ‘actively propelled by critics and intellectuals into the realm of public opinion and politics’ at an early stage in nationalist movements.45 That certainly seems to be the ambition of Crawford and his no less bardic fellow travellers. Although the Scottish independence movement is not at all new, actual chances of it achieving its goal certainly are, and the country’s literary scene has been galvanised by them. Even though medievalism of the sort discussed in this chapter failed to make that crucial difference in 2014, most of it chimed with the times by focusing more on historic Scottish achievements off the battlefield than on. The former First Minister Alexander Salmond did not get the memo, it seems. His increasingly likely fate as a holdout of an older independence discourse sums up recent developments in separatist medievalism. Amid personal squabbles with his former party colleague and protégée Sturgeon, Salmond founded his own separatist party, Alba, in the run-up to the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. Shortly after its launch, Alba made the headlines, thanks to a promotional video produced and voiced by Angus Macfadyen, the actor who played the Bruce first in Braveheart and again in Robert the Bruce in 2019.46 Taking advantage of these intertexts to beat the drum for Alba, the video shows the statue of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, intercutting it with shots of saltire-waving stand-ins for medieval ‘sma folk’ who swarm about Arthur’s Seat. ‘I was there,’ intones Macfadyen, ‘I am the Bruce. And here and now, people power will prevail again. Alba will unite the clans.’ The media and political opponents heaped on the scorn, calling the ad ‘embarrassing’, ‘cringeworthy’ and ‘a “dog whistle” anti-English stunt’.47 Salmond dug in his heels: ‘These attacks from our opponents on our campaign video show scant regard for the history of Scotland. People who decry a nation’s history will never address a nation’s 44 Joep Leerssen, ‘Linguistic Geopolitics and the Problem of Cultural Nationalism’, in Broomans et al., Beloved Mothertongue, pp. 15–36, esp. at pp. 31–6. 45 Leerssen, ‘Linguistic Geopolitics’, p. 18. 46 Alba Party, ‘The Bruce Backs the ALBA Party to “Unite the Clans”’ (2021) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 47 Adam Forrest, ‘Alex Salmond: SNP Attacks “Embarrassing” Robert the Bruce Campaign Ad by Alba’ (2021) [accessed 15 January 2022]; Christine Lavelle, ‘“OUT OF DATE” Alex Salmond’s Alba Party Accused of Stirring Up “Anti-English Sentiment” with “Robert the Bruce” Campaign Video’ (2021) [accessed 15 January 2022].

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future.’ Alba won no seats in the Scottish Parliament in 2021. It is possible that negative public perception of Salmond himself played a part in this poor showing: besides his very public feud with Sturgeon, he had stood trial on charges of sexual assault until his acquittal in 2020. If one thing is clear from the foregoing discussion of contemporary Scottish national medievalism, however, it is that Alba’s defeat could not have been due to a general lack of ‘regard for the history of Scotland’. The election simply confirmed that the braveheart constituency is now very small. 48

48

Qtd in Forrest, ‘Alex Salmond’.

3 2016 and All That: Brexit I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked on their faces and I am troubled with the thought that people are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances.1

O

f the political events discussed in this section, the Brexit vote in the UK’s EU membership referendum of 23 June 2016 was the most seismic. It set in motion a daunting process of constitutional disengagement that is likely to alter fundamentally the lived political, social and cultural reality of British citizens for decades to come. The implications for the cohesion of the UK are considerable. National medievalism played an important supporting role in preparing the ground for Brexit and has punctuated the Brexit process since.2 Simply put, the Middle Ages have been made to conjure both visions of former national greatness and the spectre of humiliation by foreign invasion. More specifically, the referendum and the Eurosceptic currents from which the Brexit vote flowed have insisted

Boris Johnson, ‘My Vision for a Bold, Thriving Britain Enabled by Brexit’ (2017)

[accessed 13 January 2022]. 2 A shorter version of this chapter has been published as M. D. Berger, ‘2016 and All That: Medievalism and Exceptionalism in Brexit Britain’, in Ina Habermann and Daniela Keller (eds), Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity (Tübingen, 2021), pp. 23–39. In-depth analyses of medievalism in Brexit rhetoric are still few. See Andrew B. R. Elliott, ‘Medievalism, Brexit, and the Myth of Nations’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXIX, pp. 31–8; John C. Ford, ‘“Once More into the Breach!”: Allusions to Agincourt and the Medieval Past in Cross-Channel Political Reporting of Brexit’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXX, pp. 53–73. Carpegna Falconieri mentions the example of Brexit only to suggest that the use of medievalism in favour was scarce and lacklustre: Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders, trans. Andrew M. Hiltzik (Leiden, 2020), p. 222. On the leveraging of the past more generally in Brexit discourse, see Chiara Bonacchi, Mark Altaweel and Marta Krzyzanska, ‘The Heritage of Brexit: Roles of the Past in the Construction of Political Identities through Social Media’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 18:2 (2018), 174–92. See also Laurie Finke and Susan Aronstein ‘Cry George: Grounding English National Identity in the Age of Brexit’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXX, pp. 29–52, and Mary Rambaran-Olm’s forthcoming ‘On or about 1066’, in Matthew Stratton (ed.), The Routledge Guide to Politics (New York, forthcoming), which discusses the public perception of that date and its implication in Anglo-American white nationalisms and imperialism. 1

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on obligating constitutional heritage and the need to stave off political ‘takeover’ that threatens that heritage. As with the Scottish Independence Referendum, it would be an exaggeration to say that medieval imagery was dominant prior to the European referendum. With some notable exceptions, politicians rarely referred to medieval history in any substantial way. Besides, there was no British or English cultural scene that drew analogies to the medieval past to an extent comparable to the involvement of cultural nationalists before the Scottish Independence Referendum. Cumulatively, however, the European debate was inflected in important ways by medievalist imagery and rhetoric, which (public) historians, journalists and politicians deployed in books, newspaper coverage and op-eds, on blogs, online fora and social media. Englishness as Britishness A first observation to make about Brexit medievalism is that, in a political revival of Anglo-Saxonism and the closely related myth of the Norman Yoke, it overwhelmingly refers to the English Middle Ages. This is highly revealing, because leading Brexiteers have been keen to portray Brexit as a pan-British liberation movement, whereas I am not alone in seeing among the main drivers of Brexit an unspoken English nationalism working in tandem with predominantly English ideological traditions of Euroscepticism.3 Brexit medievalism thus expresses what many proponents of Brexit cannot, or will not, articulate directly: their desire to liberate England, which is supposedly being oppressed.4 While Brexit medievalisms derived from Anglo-Saxonism and myths surrounding the Norman Conquest are the most pervasive variant, one particularly widely publicised pre-referendum medievalism referred to neither of these directly. It did, however, play to similar English fears of invasion from mainland Europe. Andrew Elliott notes how, in an early example of Brexit medievalism, the Daily Express crusader figure, previously confined to the paper’s masthead, became yoked to its campaign for the UK to leave the EU in November 2010.5 That was almost three years before Prime Minister David Cameron would commit to calling an in/out referendum on the ‘fundamental reform’ he hoped to procure from the EU. The Express article in question, ‘Get Britain out of Europe’, explicitly makes the crusader the symbol of an anti-EU campaign intended to put pressure on Cameron: ‘The famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the E.g., Robert Winder, ‘After Brexit, England Will Have to Rethink Its Identity’ (2018) [accessed 14 January 2022]; Patrick Cockburn, ‘Brexit Unleashed an English Nationalism That Has Damaged the Union with Scotland for Good’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 4 See also Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (Croydon, 2018), p. xvii. O’Toole, who also notes the English focus, cites Eurosceptic references to the Hundred Years’ War, a conflict he calls ‘the one episode [in English history] that is more thoroughly unhinged than Brexit’ (p. 160). In an evocative medievalism of his own, O’Toole likens the two events to highlight the elite origins of both (p. 161). 5 Elliott, ‘Medievalism’, p. 36. 3

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figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed.’6 Two months later, a special edition of the newspaper featured a blown-up version of the crusader standing watchful on the white cliffs of Dover, saying ‘We demand our country back’, beneath the headline ‘GET BRITAIN OUT OF THE EU’.7 The Express reprinted its front page in the weeks before the vote in 2016. Elliott offers an illuminating reading of the bricolage of temporalities at play in the image – the present day, the Second World War and the Middle Ages – which join to make a diffuse yet clearly anti-EU point.8 I agree with Elliott’s analysis but would emphasise the unique quandary in which an explicitly British Euroscepticism finds itself – and found itself in this case – when turning to the Middle Ages for political support. While the time frames of the present day and the Second World War in the Express splash may credibly gesture towards a pan-British frame of reference, things get murkier with regard to the Middle Ages. The headline refers to ‘Britain’ and the figure is called an unspecific ‘crusader’, but, thanks to a quirk of history, his coat of arms depicting a red cross on white can be read – and indeed is more likely to be read – as belonging to the patron saint of the English, St George. I read this as a visual variant of the still-common conflation of ‘British’ and ‘English’. The tension between the two need not be resolved: they collapse into the ‘happy clarity’ of myth once described by Roland Barthes that would suggest, in this case, an Englishness that self-evidently merges into the larger collective of Britain.9 For political medievalism in particular, the conflation is more than a matter of simple terminology. Medievalist notions of a unique continuity were once the lifeblood of highly influential Whiggish historical accounts of a unique insular continuity. Whig historians hymned Britishness, but they, too, looked mostly to English constitutional developments for their arguments. Years before the European referendum, then, the Express gave the game away by reproducing that combination of symbolic notoriety and strange invisibility that characterises the English constituency that would later tip the scales in favour of Brexit. Neo-Whiggism and Euroscepticism: Daniel Hannan and the Historians for Britain One of the more substantial constitutional medievalisms produced in the run-up to the referendum fully reproduces that English preponderance. In his historical polemic How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters, the vanguardist Brexiteer, then Conservative Member of the European Parliament and sitting member of 6 ‘Get Britain Out of Europe’ (2010) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 7 The front page of the special edition is reproduced in Kate Chapman, ‘Daily Express, on the People’s Side to Get Britain Out of the European Union’ (2016) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 8 Elliott, ‘Medievalism’, p. 36. 9 Roland Barthes, ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’, in Mythologies (Paris, 1957), pp. 213–68, at p. 252.

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the House of Lords Daniel Hannan developed a master narrative about a unique Anglo-American tradition of constitutionally guaranteed freedom.10 His essentialist interpretation of European and world history consistently privileges the achievements of the English-speaking countries over those of the (other) European countries, let alone countries further afield. A right-wing libertarian, Hannan has been described by some fellow Conservatives as being part of a set of ‘“grammar-school imperialists”’ whose quest is ‘to reassert what they regard as Britain’s lost place in the world’.11 Hannan contributes to the Daily Telegraph and Conservative Home, Britain’s biggest Conservative activist blog. He has regularly appeared on television and radio stations affiliated with the US right. He has benefitted from a reputation as the ‘thinking man’s Brexiteer’ while contributing to the infusion of reactionary ideas about historiography, language, culture and international relations into the political mainstream. I give Hannan a place of prominence here because he is arguably Brexit’s ideologue-in-chief (Sam Knight refers to him as ‘The Man Who Brought You Brexit’) and because, in reactivating outdated narratives of unique continuity, he both integrated into a cohesive narrative the more fragmentary medievalisms mostly used by other proto-Leavers and provided something of a blueprint for much of Brexiteer medievalism since. How We Invented Freedom is a cross between a wide-ranging overview of political, legal and intellectual history and a broadly Thatcherite polemic. For Hannan, ‘the story of freedom’ is ‘the story of the Anglosphere’ (p. 12), whereas ‘we’re being polite’ when we speak of ‘Western values’ in other European states: ‘What we really mean is that these countries have adopted the characteristic features of the Anglo-American political system’ (p. 10). To Hannan, ‘freedom’ means the rule of law, personal and economic liberty and representative government (p. 4). He conceives the ‘Anglosphere’ as countries with an English-speaking history committed to these freedoms (in Hannan’s generous reading, this includes Singapore as much as it does India). The premise of the book is, however, that the Anglosphere has lately disastrously neglected its heritage. Hannan calls on his Anglosphere readers to remember its singular history and to take political action against its Europeanisation (p. 371). His remedies include embracing patriotism, especially on the national curriculum (p. 17), strengthening democracy (p. 359), further guaranteeing security of contract (p. 368), fostering tax-cutting capitalism (p. 322) and curbing the interventionist and welfare state (p. 365). In the case of Britain, he recommends quitting the EU and instigating an Anglosphere-wide free trade zone instead (p. 372). To make the case for his Anglosphere exceptionalism, Hannan consistently looks to the Middle Ages for precedents. Firstly, he asserts the great seniority of the English nation-state, which he dates to the early medieval period (p. 68). In his view, this was the basis for all the other unique achievements of the Anglosphere (p. 65). 10 Daniel Hannan, How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters (London, 2013). For a fuller discussion of Hannan’s polemic, see my ‘Roots and Beginnings: Medievalism and National Identity in Daniel Hannan’s How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters’, in Ute Berns (ed.), Anglistentag 2016: Proceedings (Trier, 2017), pp. 119–35. 11 Sam Knight, ‘The Man Who Brought You Brexit’ (2016) [accessed 14 Janu ary 2022].

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Secondly, Hannan thinks the English institution of precedent-based law is just as venerable: it survived the ‘calamity of the Norman invasion’ (p. 80) at the county level and below and was codified at the national level by the Norman kings in the mid-twelfth century (p. 77). Thirdly, he takes on board a controversial thesis by Alan Macfarlane that claims that, uniquely, in the absence of a peasantry, medieval England developed an individualist society that proved singularly predisposed to a capitalist economy (pp. 79, 132–5). Finally, Hannan praises the early ‘representative institutio[n]’ of the witenagemot (p. 84) and even more so the restitution and strengthening of such institutions with the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215 (here presented as producing a proto-upper house) and Simon de Montfort’s Parliament in 1265 (as a proto-lower house, pp. 121–2).12 All this is strongly based on so-called Whig history, a strand of historiography that was very successful mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century. In broad strokes, the traditional Whig master narrative envisions a linear historical trajectory for England  – and its ideological successor, Britain  – towards a liberal parliamentary and capitalist democracy. What Mary Spongberg and Clara Tuite call the ‘“forging” of Britain’ in Whig historiography involved ‘moulding into a national destiny such cornerstones of English cultural memory as the “ancient constitution” of the Saxons, the unbroken continuity of limited monarchy, the providential role of the Church of England, parliament and the rule of Common Law (and the extension of these institutions into Empire)’.13 As Andrew James Johnston points out, the social side of this has often been identified in ‘the rise of the gentry in the later Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period and that of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.14 A distinguishing feature of the Whig narrative is the premium it puts on genealogy, continuity, patriotism and, above all, the notion of progress. The Whig historian, as Herbert Butterfield conceived him in his influential critique, studies ‘the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present’. The past amounts, in teleological fashion, to ‘the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.15 The main charge later levelled against Whig history was that it indulged in immoderate, complacent presentism.

In 2016, Hannan stated that Magna Carta is ‘the Torah of the English-speaking peoples. It’s the text that sets us apart while at the same time offering universal truths to the rest of mankind’: Daniel Hannan and A. E. Dick Howard, ‘The Enduring Legacy of Magna Carta’ (2020) [accessed 14 January 2022]. With this claim, Hannan subscribes to the same particularism-as-universalism that was espoused in official Magna Carta commemoration one year earlier. This is just one example of how porous the boundary can be between officially sanctioned constitutional medievalism looking to stabilise the political status quo and its use by (formerly) fringe politicians who promote radical change. 13 Mary Spongberg and Clara Tuite, ‘Introduction: The Gender of Whig Historiography. Women Writers and Britain’s Pasts and Presents’, Women’s History Review, 20:5 (2011), 673– 87, at p. 673. 14 Andrew James Johnston, ‘“Rum, Ram, Ruf ”: Chaucer and Linguistic Whig History’, in Lange, Schaefer and Wolf, Linguistics, pp. 37–5, at p. 37. 15 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965), pp. 31f. and v. 12

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Several characteristics of How We Invented Freedom highlight Hannan’s indebtedness to Whig history. Firstly, he engages in bald historical revisionism. He reactivates an outdated grand narrative of the nation to interpret earlier events in light of later ones – that is, teleologically. This is a conscious reactivation: according to Hannan, the current historical profession is either cowed or taken in by a strident anti-colonialism and multiculturalism. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, Hannan asserts, historians ‘flinched’ from the ‘truths’ of an English exceptionalism with ‘roots in pre-Modern England’ (p. 15). Hannan expressly emulates the Whig historians because they had no difficulty in seeing this exceptionalism (pp. 84, 117). In its sweeping generalisations, Hannan’s grand narrative very deliberately runs counter to the vast majority of contemporary specialist accounts. Like many other writers from the right – including the Swiss national-conservatives – Hannan invokes the topos of ‘unfashionableness’ (pp. 14, 96, 117) to justify his championing of long-refuted historiographical positions.16 How We Invented Freedom is a return to exceptionalist British histories that, Hannan argues, have been betrayed and traduced by marxisant (and therefore vaguely foreign) intellectuals. He combines this historiographical atavism with an attack on the national curriculum, which he faults for failing to instil proper patriotic virtue (p. 17).17 Hannan’s take on the politics of the day is couched in terms of a dauntless part-time historian’s struggle against a faddish, unpatriotic and deceiving or deceived historiographical and educational mainstream. Hannan’s studiously Whiggish history presents the reader with the old interpretive framework of ‘two enduring factions within the English-speaking peoples: one committed to the values that underpinned [Anglosphere] exceptionalism, and one hankering after the more statist models favoured in the rest of the world. To label these factions “Whig” and “Tory” is, without question, anachronistic; yet it is also an invaluable shorthand’ (pp. 15f.). And so, the English Civil War and the American Revolutionary War again share an ‘essential continuity’ (p. 229) not only with one another but with ancient English rights and liberties as well. In turn, the overthrow of James II, a mainstay of the Whig interpretation of history, is given the romanticising treatment as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, and William of Orange’s accession is construed as the assertion of a parliamentary self-government ultimately derived from ‘the folkright of Anglo-Saxon freedoms’ (p. 238). Hannan, ever reliant on vague analogies, sees this turn of events ‘foreshadow[ed]’ in 1014, when Æthelred was ‘invited conditionally to the throne’ (p. 87). The reader is thus offered the familiar claim to a unique continuity of laws and liberties which in Britain – quite unlike the Continent – reach back to the early Middle Ages and were consolidated in subsequent milestones such as Magna Carta and the English and US Bills of Rights. Such vague analogising converts contingency and historical specificity into ‘timeless’ principles. In a telling rhetorical move, Hannan argues in terms of historical ‘implications’ (p. 42) being worked out: for example, he claims what amounts See Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, p. 50 for a brief description of this topos. The idea that the modern educational system has buried the nation’s ‘true’ history of ancient national roots is also common among right-wing traditionalists: Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, p. 54. 16 17

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to unaltered continuity for the common law, which he suggests the ‘pragmatic [. . .] Anglosphere peoples’ more actually ‘discovered’ than ‘made’ (p. 78). Since this early English history holds ‘lessons’, ‘truths’ and ‘precedents’, it determines what is politically possible and desirable in the present. Assertions of transhistorical national identity are closely linked to this. Although he dissociates these assertions from racial definitions, Hannan claims cultural filiation from decidedly homogeneous medieval origins (the ‘Anglo-Saxons’), and even postulates consistent character traits. Hannan indulges in some striking linguistic essentialism and determinism when he claims that English has the ‘intrinsic propert[y]’ of ‘favour[ing] the expression of empirical, down-to-earth, practical ideas’ (p. 29). He contrasts this latter aspect with the pretentious continental language of a ‘Hegel or Marx, Derrida, or Sartre’ (p. 30). Without irony, Hannan quotes the ‘intellectually dazzling’ (p. 122) British MP Enoch Powell’s description of English as ‘“the tongue made for telling truth in”’ (qtd p. 124).18 As I have suggested in my Introduction, the mythical mode of memory is characterised by identificatory proximity, that is, by the way that the act of remembering fosters a sense of community: between real-world contemporaries that share certain cultural memories, but also between people that share neither time nor place, including between the ‘remembering’ subject and characters in a novel, film – or a history.19 With Hannan, it is identification all the way down: the national ‘we’ is ever present in a work that insists on taking history personally. There is a flip side to such a perspective. In the case of historical wrongs, it may instead be more comfortable to shift the blame onto a more abstract entity, such as ‘human nature’. Slavery is a case in point that, while taking us beyond the scope of medievalism, is highly illuminating concerning Hannanite mythical memory. Hannan feels that Britain and the US are hard done by in this matter: Of course, if your starting point is that Britain and the United States were evil and oppressive colonial powers, you will find something or other to complain about. The absurdity of the whole debate, though, is that we are all descended from slaves; from slave owners too, come to that. It could hardly be otherwise, human history being what it is. [. . .] We are, in other words, all in this together. Everyone on the planet is descended from the exploiters and the exploited. (p. 287)

Hannan’s facile comment thoroughly naturalises, and hence comes close to exculpating, very specific instances of slavery by explaining them away as part of a more general ‘human history’. In the historiographical equivalent of privatising profits and socialising losses, the Anglosphere can be credited with having invented freedom, but it cannot be held to account for having robbed others of theirs. Not for one moment should we mistake the ‘we’ of Hannan’s Anglosphere as internationalist in character. Rather, there is a strong sense that the countries it encompasses are really one cultural unity and have been so all along. In Hannan’s description, all Anglosphere countries share essential properties that simultaneously On Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, see below, pp. 176–77. Stephanie Wodianka, Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte: Ästhetik, Medialität und Kulturspezifik der Mittelalterkonjunktur (Berlin, 2009), pp. 36–43. 18

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set them apart from the rest of the world and predispose them to close (political, economic, military) cooperation with each other. This community of culture, and of cultural memory, is particularly obvious in the book’s concluding paragraph: ‘You, reading these words in [the English] language, are the heirs to a sublime tradition. [. . .] Act worthy of yourselves’ (p. 377). Put in terms of Emily Robinson’s description of the conservative right’s historical sensibilities, this is a shared past that has the ‘capacity to make demands upon the present’.20 In a sense, How We Invented Freedom is a quasi-irredentist tract – though it is of course lost territory of a cultural and economic, rather than geographical, nature that is meant to be reclaimed for the nation. Thus, Hannan clearly appeals to features of imperial identity – that is, the tethering of British identity to the products of empire – that Krishan Kumar observes throughout English history.21 Even though Britain (and England with it) has long lost its imperial status as the ruler of colonies and dominions, in a representation like Hannan’s it still wields influence by association with its many offshoot nations, with which it is still essentially one in a cultural sense.22 Hannan is at least partly aware of the mythical side of his ancient freedoms. He concedes, for example, that the American Founding Fathers’ belief in their ancient rights ‘as Englishmen’ may have mattered more than the actuality of such rights (p. 238). Elsewhere, he admits that, ‘up to a point’, it may not be unreasonable to ‘see the embrace of Anglo-Saxonism by later generations, and the positing of a national identity in opposition to Frenchness, as an invention’ (p. 97). The most self-reflexive passage in this context is the one in which Hannan cites Ernest Renan’s dictum that ‘getting its history wrong [. . .] is part of being a nation’ (p. 107) and proudly claims that ‘English exceptionalism was defined with reference, not to racial characteristics, military prowess, or island geography, but to law, liberty and representative institutions’ (p. 107).23 Yet Hannan, as if to prove Renan right, conveniently forgets that those less desirable characteristics, too, have very much been part of Anglosphere national narratives. For example, English Anglo-Saxonism was strongly racialised in the nineteenth century: Stephanie Barczewski reminds us that ‘an elaborate racial hierarchy was erected which placed the Anglo-Saxon peoples at the top, a crude biological determinism seemingly confirmed by Britain’s pre-eminent political, economic and military position’.24 Rudyard Kipling – author of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and provider of several quotes in Hannan’s book – springs to mind as 20 Emily Robinson, History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics: Past Politics and Present Histories (Manchester, 2012), p. 2. 21 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003). 22 Compare also Edoardo Campanella, ‘A Diminished Nation in Search of an Empire’ (2019) [accessed 11 January 2022]. 23 The translation Hannan uses, though unacknowledged, is Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1990), p. 12. The complete French original reads: ‘L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la formation d’une nation, et c’est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger’. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882 (Paris, 1882), pp. 7f. 24 Barczewski, Myth and National Identity, p. 124.

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a representative of the now thoroughly uncomfortable blend of racial thought with an imperial civilising impulse in his postulation of Anglo-American exceptionalism (even though Kipling may not be consistently confident in that exceptionalism).25 In any event, for the most part Hannan foregrounds neither the intellectual impact nor the calculated political use, but rather the supposed factual basis, of medievalist appropriation and historical narratives more generally. The claim to continuities of both constitution and character is reflected in Hannan’s organic and procreative diction. He refers to the ‘germs’ of liberties brought over the Channel by the Germanic settlers (p. 57), to parliamentary democracy ‘pulsing in the womb’ in the tenth century (p. 75) and to the common law growing ‘like a coral’ over the centuries (p. 30). The coronation oath sworn by King Edgar upon his consecration in 973, Hannan tells us, contained the idea of government by contract ‘in foetal form’ (p. 85). With some ingenuity, Hannan even detects the ‘roots of [continental European] statism claw[ing] their way deep into the cold soil of the Middle Ages’ (p. 141). It is in such rhetorical devices that the idea of ‘homegrown’ political culture is at its most apparent. This is the politics of autochthony, working to dignify one body politic and discrediting others. Hannan’s Euroscepticism is rooted in precisely this glorification of autochthony. In How We Invented Freedom, the EU poses a threat to home-grown liberties not just in its current incarnation: rather, political European integration as such is contrary to the nature of Britain in the light of normative ancient origins, unbroken continuity and timeless national identities. Hannan supplements the British/European dichotomy with a familiar populist one that pits a patriotic ‘people’ against EU-friendly domestic ‘elites’. His anti-elite rhetoric anticipates more recent examples witnessed in political insurgencies and ‘establishment’ defeats in the West since the mid-2010s, such as Brexit itself, the election of Donald Trump as president of the US in 2016 (and his failed bid in 2020), the electoral successes of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the formation of Italian governments including the Movimento Cinque Stelle, the medievalism-prone Lega and the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia. As I show in the next chapter, similar anti-elite rhetoric aimed at a nebulous entity called the ‘classe politique’ has long been the stock-in-trade of the Swiss national-conservatives, including the largest political party in the country. This kind of anti-elitism sees Hannan repeatedly criticising Britain’s ‘multiculturalist establishment’ and ‘intellectual elites’ (p. 17) and imputing to Europhilia ‘connotations [. . .] of snobbery, of contempt for majority opinion, of the smugness of a remote political caste’ (p. 93). Forgetful of their roots, these elites are, in a word, un-British. A Chaucerian medievalism from the book speaks particularly eloquently to Hannan’s concern with both cultural pedigrees and his defiance of uppity Continentals and their domestic spawn. Johnston points out that Chaucer served as ‘the seemingly secure linguistic base’ of literary Englishness in the Whig interpretation of history.26 In fact, as Ardis Butterfield suggests, this view is still part and parcel

25 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, in The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire, ed. Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (Exeter, 1996), pp. 307f. 26 Johnston, ‘“Rum, Ram, Ruf ”’, p. 38.

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of many of our own accounts of the ‘rise’ of English language and literature. In Whig history, the ‘national language’ was a key factor in the development of the legal, constitutional, political, social, economic and educational spheres’.28 Hannan for his part invokes the diminished literary status of English after the Conquest to revive the trope of oppressive alien rule and to insinuate a hereditary Anglo-French enmity since that date (p. 93). Enter Chaucer, whose works Hannan hails as ‘revolutionary not only in their dramatic qualities, but also in the fact of being written in English’ (p. 94). Chaucer, ‘like so many writers after him, was unabashedly patriotic about his national language’ – and Hannan professes to quote him: ‘Right is that English, English understand / That was born in England’ (p. 95). Hannan, eager to identify a literary rebellion in late fourteenth-century England, is putting words into Chaucer’s mouth. What Hannan actually quotes are lines from the opening of the Auchinleck MS version of the anonymous romance Of Arthour and of Merlin (c.1330): 27

Of Freynsch no Latin nil y tel more Ac on I[n]glisch ichil tel þerfore: Riȝt is þat I[n]glische vnderstond Þat was born in Inglond.29

In this proem, the anonymous author explains that the reason why he is writing in English is that every Englishman understands it, as opposed to French or Latin. At no point, however, does this amount to a hereditary ‘Saxon’ resentment of an Ivanhoe-style Norman Yoke, as Hannan suggests of Chaucer. The fact that Hannan uses that passage to claim the English language as a marker of a distinct national identity in the fourteenth century is not unusual.30 Ascribing the lines to Chaucer, however, is a telling slip. Hannan must have got the idea that they are Chaucer’s from William Hazlitt’s English translation of Augustin Thierry’s Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825).31 This is quite instructive in itself, since it exemplifies the way Hannan rejects much of recent scholarship in favour of a nineteenth-century precursor. In fact, however, Thierry does not attribute this particular quote to Chaucer. Hannan misreads a trail of

27 Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), pp. 8–10. 28 Johnston, ‘“Rum, Ram, Ruf ”’, p. 39. 29 Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, 2 vols (London, 1973), vol. 1, lines 19–22. 30 See S. Bly Calkin, ‘Violence, Saracens, and English Identity in Of Arthour and of Merlin’, Arthuriana, 14:2 (2004), 17–36, at p. 31; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996). But compare Ursula Schaefer, ‘Language and “National” Identity: The Case of French and the English in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Peter Moos (ed.), Zwischen Babel und Pfingsten: Sprachdifferenzen und Gesprächsverständigung in der Vormoderne (8.–16. Jahrhundert) (Zurich, 2006), pp. 431–45, at p. 435. 31 Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, de ses causes et de ses suites jusqu’à nos jours, en Angleterre, en Écosse, en Irlande et sur ce continent, 3 vols, 6th ed. (Paris, 1843).

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footnotes that leads back to a correct reference.32 A small enough mistake, and it may well be an honest one. And yet, there is more at stake here than simple oversight: the misattribution is the inevitable consequence of an extreme narrowing of historical perspective. It is not the study of historical origins as such that is the problem. The problem is that such study, because it is made to undergird a specific brand of identity politics, creates its own exigencies that ultimately make for a crude ancestral history full of silences, exclusions and contradictions. Hannan has clearly never even looked up his Chaucer. Instead, he relies on Chaucer’s reputation as a stalwart of the English language and the father of English poetry because Hannan, by the logic of his own argument, must have home-grown authority to prop up his claim to a medieval ancestry of exceptionalist English (British, Anglosphere) identity. Simply put, Chaucer could not have been anything other than a Whig. I am not accusing Hannan of consistently engaging in dishonest dealing or, alternatively, intellectual laziness. But the Chaucer imbroglio is the symptom of a larger failure, which is using sources extremely selectively and taking a good deal on faith. Late in the book, Hannan claims that ‘our generation has squandered its heritage’ (p. 370). And that, of course, is precisely what history is reduced to in Hannan’s account: heritage, ownable history. Perhaps ironically, but hardly coincidentally, Hannan anticipated the nationalist rhetoric that would be employed by Alexander Salmond in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum. In both cases, an identity collective is seen as the result of slow historical growth and its members are urged to remember the heritage that supposedly expresses that growth. This strongly normative kind of heritage comes with what Robinson calls a ‘filial duty’ to the past (p. 31), a duty which – judging by Hannan’s polemic – inhibits rather than fosters enquiry. In his underlying claim that Western values are really Anglo-­American values, Hannan stubbornly refuses to accept genuine historical change and the possibility of intellectual exchange. Not only does this make Hannan an extreme case of the narcissism of small differences. He also typifies the kind of ahistoricism critiqued by Geary: ‘Those who claim that their actions are justified or compelled by history have no understanding of change, the very essence of human history’.33 How We Invented Freedom was largely ignored by academia and received only scant attention by non-partisan and left-of-centre media outlets when it came out in 2013, but it proved a success with the English-speaking right-wing commentariat.34 Although its limited ideological reach necessarily limits its suasive impact, the book seems designed to occupy the middle ground between academia and the broader public. While offering no scholarly apparatus whatsoever, Hannan keeps up Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes, and Its Consequences, in England, Scotland, Ireland, & on the Continent, trans. William Hazlitt, 2 vols (London, 1847), vol. 2, p. 386 n. 2. 33 Geary, Myth of Nations, p. 173. 34 E.g., Adrian Hilton, ‘Daniel Hannan’s Hymn to Anglosphere Exceptionalism’ (2013) [accessed 14 January 2022]; James Hannam, ‘Dan Hannan’s How We Invented Freedom’ (2014) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 32

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a pretence of scholarly decorum for much of the book and in his acknowledgements emphasises his status as a trained historian-turned-politician: ‘It was only several years after being elected to political office that I finally admitted to myself that I would never be a full-time historian’ (n.p.). Adopting the popularising approach of a part-time historian, Hannan strikes the pose of an outsider to, and ostensibly impartial critic of, today’s unpatriotic academic discipline of history. It is this liminal status that allows him to lend intellectual respectability to atavistic ideologies without having to stand up to proper critical scrutiny. In the context of Brexit, the historian–politician Hannan seemed to enjoy a rather disconcerting amount of public credit, even as his history went hand in hand with the anti-elite rhetoric of a firm member of the elite, the pathologisation of political opponents and the brazen press-ganging of supposed ideological forebears. While Hannan’s elaborate medievalism is not, at present, representative of a sizeable political movement, he was certainly not the only leading Brexiteer to engage in historiographical necromancy.35 A particularly instructive pre-Brexit parallel to his essentialist heritage version of history was the right-wing pressure group Historians for Britain around Cambridge historian David Abulafia and including a handful of high-profile historians and journalists such as David Starkey and Andrew Roberts.36 They banded together to make their case for a Britain outside the EU based on their own exceptionalist reading of English and British history. The Historians for Britain made their first appearance in a letter to The Times in 2013 and then went on to set up a website sporting a blown-up image of the ‘original Brexiteer’, Henry VIII.37 In 2015, Abulafia issued a manifesto-like article in History Today.38 The Historians for Britain were linked to the Eurosceptic thinktank Business for Britain and readily admitted their ties to like-minded business people;39 incongruously, they also claimed to be ‘independent and nonpartisan’.40 Elliot cites Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians (published in 2019) and Boris Johnson’s (long-announced but now indefinitely shelved) The Riddle of the Genius, on William Shakespeare: ‘Medievalism’, pp.  33f. For further examples, see Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù, Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West (Oxford, 2019), esp. pp. 75–8. 36 Carpegna Falconieri also notes the Historians for Britain campaign but considers it an outlier: Militant Middle Ages, p. 222 n. 10. 37 The Historians for Britain website has been given a complete makeover since 2017; everything points to a domain abandoned and repurposed. The original website can be accessed at ‘Historians for Britain’ (n.d.) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 38 David Abulafia, ‘Britain: Apart from or a Part of Europe?’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 39 Neil Gregor, ‘Historians, Britain and Europe’ (2018) [accessed 12 January 2022]; Andrea Mammone, ‘For Britain and against the EU: Historians for Britain Strike Again’ (2016) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 40 See ‘Historians for Britain’. Andrew Knapp points out that the Historians for Britain shared their Westminster address with ‘the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies, the Taxpayers’ Alliance (opposed to taxes) and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (opposed to tackling climate change)’: ‘Historians for Britain in Europe – A Personal History’, Histoire@ Politique, 31:1 (2017), 27–35. 35

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Although they purported to be constituted of ‘dozens of Britain’s leading historians’, Gregor noted that their ranks thinned significantly if one sifted out ‘the journalists and the purveyors of coffee-table history-as-entertainment’.41 In other words, they bore a remarkable similarity to Hannan not just in terms of their politics but also in occupying the conveniently unaccountable twilight zone between academia and journalism. And the similarities do not end there. The Historians for Britain too were clearly inspired by the old Whig narrative of unique continuity and so told a very similar story of ancient English (and then British) exceptionalism as Hannan did. Like Hannan, the History Today piece skates over anything that could endanger that exceptionalism, including the history of British colonialism and imperialism. A number of public rebuttals showed that the Historians for Britain’s history of British exceptionalism met with robust opposition among fellow historians. An open letter to that effect was signed by almost three hundred academics.42 It would be adventurous to claim that there is a direct line leading from the endeavours of these historians and journalists – or indeed Hannan – to the democratic renunciation of EU membership. And yet, it is likely that the kind of mythical sense of English-British exceptionalism formulated in detail by these parties is shared, in a more fragmentary form, by a great many of their Brexit-voting compatriots. After the Referendum: The Brussels Yoke and English Nationalism Post-referendum medievalism for the most part echoes the themes which Hannan emphasises in his work: historical British superiority and continental invasion. Some incidental post-referendum examples by the irredeemably posh provocateur, former chairman of the pro-Brexit European Research Group and Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg represent the jingoist end of Brexiteer exceptionalism ideology. In 2018, he insisted that the ‘first Eurosceptic was the ninth-­ century Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great, who defeated the Norse “great heathen army” in 865’;43 as Rambaran-Olm, Leake and Goodrich point out, it takes little imagination to guess who today’s heathen army might be.44 In 2017, Rees-Mogg recited a crude best-of list of ‘British’ success stories to rapt listeners at the Tory Party conference. On closer inspection, many of his inspirational premodern moments turn out to be familiar English nationalist touchstones passed off as all-British: We need to be reiterating the benefits of Brexit, because this is [. . .] so important in the history of our country. I mean, this is Magna Carta, it’s the burgesses Gregor, ‘Historians’. ‘Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated’ (2015) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 43 Christopher Kissane, ‘Historical Nonsense Underpins UK’s Brexit Floundering’ (2018) [accessed 11 January 2022] 44 Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake and Micah James Goodrich, ‘Medieval Studies: The Stakes of the Field’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 11:4, Race, Revulsion, and Revolution (2020), pp. 356–70, at p. 363 n. 10. 41

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coming at parliament, it’s the great Reform Bill, it’s the Bill of Rights. [. . .] It’s Waterloo, it’s Agincourt, it’s Crécy – we win all these things. [As a member in the crowd prompts him:] And Trafalgar, absolutely. [. . .] This is such a positive thing for our country. It frees us from a failing economic model. This is a liberation, it is a freedom, it is an inspiration.45

English constitutional medievalism sits side by side with a post-medieval, British, constitutional landmark, just as English victories in the Hundred Years’ War seamlessly merge with the later, British or British-led, victories against Napoleonic France. Loosely connecting them all, as well as facilitating the link to Brexit, is yet again that sketchy notion of ‘freedom’. The fear of unfreedom finds a ready home in the idea of a ‘Brussels Yoke’.46 Predictably, the Bayeux Tapestry can be relied on as a shorthand for this idea. This ready-made link led the Sun to publish a gleeful ‘Bye-EU Tapestry’ artwork early in 2018. It showed Theresa May’s anticipated triumph in the Brexit negotiations – represented by a heap of decapitated European leaders – and a Britain freed from ‘continental shackles’.47 Nigel Farage, erstwhile UKIP leader and relentless Eurosceptic agitator since the 1990s, made a political fashion statement already in 2014 by sporting a tie depicting the Tapestry in order to recall ‘the last time we were invaded and taken over’.48 And in a 2016 campaign sound bite, hard-Brexit front man Boris Johnson used the (pre-existing) phrase ‘the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry’ to disparage the Remain campaign.49 In these examples, the iconic tapestry is interpreted as a monument to foreign oppression. The language of feudalism serves a closely related function. In December 2017, Johnson, now Foreign Secretary, worried that Britain might end up adopting EU regulations without having a say in them after exiting. He was quoted as saying that there was a danger of Britain going ‘from a member state to a vassal state’.50 In 2018, Rees-Mogg condemned the government’s strategy White Paper as ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’. Johnson, when resigning from the cabinet, spoke of the prospect of ‘economic vassalage’.51 These post-referendum statements were echoes of the Leave campaign’s pledge to ‘take back control’ for Britain. That scenario always insinuated that a malignant Channel 4 News, ‘.@Jacob_Rees_Mogg extolls the benefits of Brexit at one of the busiest fringe meetings of the @Conservatives’ conference. #cpc17’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 46 John Sutherland, ‘Brexit Lit’ (2018) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 47 ‘The Tapestry Is EU-rs’ (2018) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 48 Qtd in J. Sutherland, ‘Brexit Lit’. 49 Agnes Chambre, ‘Boris Johnson Blasts “Biggest Stitch-Up since Bayeux Tapestry” over No 10 FTSE Brexit Letter’ (2016) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 50 Heather Stewart, ‘Boris Johnson Breaks Ranks with Brexit “Vassal State” Warning’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 51 Both qtd in O’Toole, Heroic Failure, p. 157. 45

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continental European force was withholding freedom and sovereignty from Britain, whose natural greatness it thus stifled. Notions of ancestral freedom and foreign oppression, then, are two sides of the same coin. Cultural memories of early medieval England – in the form of a celebratory Anglo-Saxonism which sees the Norman Conquest and the subsequent transformation of English society as a national calamity – are the most powerful vehicle for these twin notions currently at the Brexiteers’ disposal. Regarding feudalism in England specifically, it is a common myth that this form of continental tyranny supplanted an autochthonous, free English social and political order.52 However, we should bear in mind that the language of foreign conquest and domination comes easily to today’s purveyors of ‘sovereignty’ all over Europe. The Leave side may have made constitutional arguments before the referendum, but the narrow result followed an ugly conclusion to the campaign that saw anti-­immigrant sentiment masquerading as a concern with national sovereignty.53 Hannan himself explicitly denies espousing either xenophobic or racist views. Yet, in his polemics, this leading Brexiteer and nostalgist of empire resorts to an essentialism and determinism that posits a fundamental political and cultural incompatibility of Britain and continental Europe, with his naturalising rhetoric making for particularly uncomfortable reading. If taken to its extreme, Hannan’s line of reasoning suggests that international agreements are worthless unless the parties involved share a narrowly defined set of cultural, social and political similarities – similarities determined by historical ‘lineage’. With Brexit, English constitutional medievalism has been catapulted to a place of relative prominence. In a sense, however, Hannan and his partners-in-medievalism may have got more than they bargained for. The language of sovereignty inherited from the nationalisms of the last two centuries has made the Middle Ages an attractive benchmark for nationalist movements once again. In the case of Brexit Britain, however, continuity medievalism is full of pitfalls precisely because the ‘home’ in its ‘home-grown history’ is so lopsidedly English. O’Toole remarks that the ‘most dramatic evolution of national identity in Britain in the last two decades is the resurfacing of the idea of England as a distinct political community’.54 Yet, before the Brexit vote, that resurgence had no national arena. This is an older problem made acute by the increasing strength of English nationalism. O’Toole argues that even after Brexit, the increasingly powerful English nationalism is a force ‘that its leaders [. . .] refuse to articulate’.55 In 2012, Hannan himself had 52 Siobhan Brownlie, Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 114–16. 53 Matthew D’Ancona, ‘Brexit: How a Fringe Idea Took Hold of the Tory Party’ (2016) [accessed 14 January 2022]. According to a report compiled by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the average Leave voter was concerned with reducing immigration first and strengthening sovereignty second: Kirby Swales, Understanding the Leave Vote (London, 2016), pp. 13f. 54 O’Toole, Heroic Failure, p.  185; see also Linda Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together – and What is Dividing It? (London, 2014), pp. 56f. 55 O’Toole, Heroic Failure, p. 193.

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argued that English, not Scottish, separatism was ‘the chief threat to the Union’. In How We Invented Freedom, he consequently rejects the idea that his Anglosphere ‘is somehow just an amplification of England’ (p. 244). But Brexit medievalism, including Hannan’s, habitually demonstrates where its allegiances truly lie: with an old English nation, with former English military glory and with former English constitutional achievements. 56

Daniel Hannan, ‘The Greater Threat to the Union Comes from England’ (2012) [accessed 3 October 2020]. 56

4 Freiheit statt Vögte: The Swiss National-Conservatives When they take away a nation’s memory, it loses its character, its identity, becomes manipulable and loses its autonomy, just like people do.1

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o a degree unparalleled in either Scotland or England, the medievalist repertoire of Switzerland has been co-opted, at the national level, by the representatives of a narrowly circumscribed ideological spectrum.2 Rallied around the SVP, the strand of conservatism commonly labelled ‘national-­conservatism’ currently has a strong hold on medievalist imagery. This imagery is derived from the Swiss liberation tradition, a cluster of national medievalisms which centre on the mythical medieval struggle against, and eventual vanquishing of, the nobility. The protagonists are the hardy Swiss peasants, a people uniquely attuned to freedom and (in later versions) committed to political neutrality. Twenty-first-century national-conservative medievalism maintains what is broadly the nineteenth-century narrative of Switzerland as a ‘special case’ (Sonderfall) in Europe. More specifically, it draws on a prominent offshoot of that narrative, the mid-twentieth-century ‘Spiritual Defence of the Homeland’ (Geistige Landesverteidigung). In contrast, the use of medievalist imagery by other political camps is rare on the national stage. In the face of the national-conservative claim, centrist and, even more so, left-wing political actors now hesitate to take up medievalist themes and imagery, and struggle to make an impact when they do. A partial exception to this is the figure of Wilhelm Tell, which has retained a greater ability to accommodate diverse political ideologies. Such counter-medievalisms to the national-conservative variants do not, however, exhibit a high level of independence but, rather, reinforce national-conservative dominance by ironising what is treated as the metaphorical property of the SVP.

1 The quotation is from a national holiday speech by Federal Councillor Ueli Maurer from 2015: ‘Ohne Wurzeln kein Baum [no tree without roots]. Rede von Bundesrat Ueli Maurer anlässlich der Bundesfeier 2015, gehalten am 1. August in Grosswangen und Nottwil’ (2015) [accessed 28 May 2019]. 2 The ideologically charged phrase ‘Freiheit statt Vögte’ in the chapter title translates as ‘freedom not bailiffs’.

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Since the national-conservative movement has generated one of the most visible strands of national medievalism tout court in present-day Switzerland, any discussion of contemporary political medievalism must revisit that movement’s rise to prominence at the turn of the century. I begin by sketching the way it has appropriated the Spiritual Defence of the Homeland. Officially lasting from the 1930s to the 1960s, the Spiritual Defence of the Homeland was an influential political and cultural movement meant to project Swiss independence and distinctiveness of values in the face of fascist and communist totalitarianisms in Europe. Thanks to its refusal to define clearly what these values were, it was initially a broad church. The narrative complex of the Old Confederates and the wars of liberation furnished a familiar and emotive framework for an ideology of military preparedness.3 Before and during the Second World War, national medievalism formed part of a consensus narrative shared – although with different emphases and very different ideological purport4 – by conservatives, liberals and leftists. That consensus broke down as the Cold War hardened anti-communist positions between 1950 and 1960, resulting in a Spiritual Defence reduced to a ‘narrow intellectual and political isolationism’.5 Its standing went into terminal decline following growing criticism, first from the political left in the 1960s and then from the historical profession in the 1970s. With this decline came a loss in significance of the national medievalisms attached to the movement. By the 1990s, the Middle Ages had been sidelined in the national debate by the question of the role of Switzerland in the Second World War.6 Meanwhile, the national Middle Ages and the memory politics of freedom and neutrality, successively vacated by the state, were taken on board by the national-­ conservatives and, most prominently, the SVP. They re-weighted national medievalism to underpin a hard stance of Swiss non-involvement in Europe (which by that time was rapidly integrating politically). The national-conservatives were aided in this by the fact that rural Switzerland and the mythical figure of the peasant have exerted an extraordinary influence on conceptions of Swiss identity since the fifteenth century and on modern nationhood after 1848. The persistent auto-­ stereotype of Switzerland as a ‘peasant state’ relies strongly if often implicitly on the liberation myth.7 Despite the decline of traditional rural life in the second half 3 Guy P. Marchal, ‘Medievalism, the Politics of Memory and Swiss National Identity’, in Evans and Marchal, Uses of the Middle Ages, pp. 197–220, at p. 201. 4 Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli, ‘Nationale Identität – allzu Bekanntes in neuem Licht’, in Marchal and Mattioli, Erfundene Schweiz, pp. 11–20, p. 18. 5 HLS, s.v. ‘Geistige Landesverteidigung’. 6 Marchal, ‘Medievalism’, p. 206. The Bergier Commission (1997–2002), convened by the Swiss Federal Assembly, investigated the role played by Switzerland during the Second World War. It took stock of Swiss refugee policy, economic relations with the Axis powers, the transfer of the assets of both victims and perpetrators of Nazi crimes to wartime Switzerland and the possible restitution of victims’ assets. See Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg, Die Schweiz, der Nationalsozialismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Zurich, 2002) for the commission’s final report. The Bergier Report offers a critical counterpoint to the so-called Réduit myth, which imagined a defiant Switzerland in a sea of totalitarianisms. 7 Matthias Weishaupt, Bauern, Hirten und ‘frume edle puren’: Bauern und Bauernstaatsideologie in der spätmittelalterlichen Eidgenossenschaft und der nationalen Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz (Basel, 1992); Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 31–51.

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of the twentieth century, a veritable ‘peasant ideology’ endures.8 It contributed to both the SVP’s becoming the dominant party after 1999 and their reintroduction of a medievalist master narrative – reconceived as a party-political asset – to domestic debates of Swissness.9 Channelling this peasant ideology – rife with connotations of simplicity, self-sufficiency and small-scale self-rule – has served the party well in bolstering its populist credentials as an opposition party even though it has been an integral part of government for many years. Similarly, though the SVP fields the largest number of members of the National Council (the lower house of the Federal Assembly), party functionaries have carefully curated the party’s image as the down-to-earth David to the ‘establishment’ Goliath and will fulminate on a regular basis against a sinister ‘classe politique’ bent on subverting the ‘will of the people’. The latter pose is, of course, characteristic of populist parties everywhere. Appropriating the Middle Ages: The National-Conservatives after 1992 Both the rise of the national-conservatives and their successful co-optation of national medievalism followed the surprise rejection at the ballot box of the proposed accession of Switzerland to the EEA.10 The upset was orchestrated by Christoph Blocher, then National Councillor for the canton of Zurich (SVP), and the Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (AUNS), which Blocher led at the time. The referendum result proved momentous. Firstly, it all but blocked Switzerland from joining the EU. Secondly, it marked the beginning of the multi-­ billionaire Blocher’s self-representation as a man of the people fighting against European encroachment, and of his remarkable rise to long-lasting political pre-eminence as SVP grandee and ideologue-in-chief.11 Thirdly, the result would usher in a conservative nationalism in the rural parts of the country that conceives of Swissness chiefly as opposition to Europe and the EU.12 In their campaigning, the opponents of the EEA prominently deployed medievalist themes. For example, the defeat at the Battle of Marignano in 1515 and its aftermath figured as a monument to armed Swiss neutrality. This quasi-­constitutional medievalism drew on an understanding of the battle that first emerged in the nineteenth century and later constituted a vital part of the Spiritual Defence of the Homeland.13 8 Michael Hermann, Was die Schweiz zusammenhält: Vier Essays zu Politik und Gesellschaft eines eigentümlichen Landes (Basel, 2016), p. 130. 9 On the way the SVP has turned traditional signifiers of the nation into ‘party nationalism’, see e.g., Thomas Zaugg, Blochers Schweiz: Gesinnungen, Ideen, Mythen (Zurich, 2014), pp.  117f. For the medievalist dimension of that process, see especially Marchal, ‘Medievalism’, pp. 211–17 and Gebrauchsgeschichte, pp. 417–24. 10 The ‘No’ vote came about by a chance majority of voters (50.3 per cent) and a clear majority of States (fourteen out of twenty ‘full’ cantons and four out of six ‘half-cantons’). Under the Swiss system, both voter and State majorities would have had to approve the constitutional amendment for it to pass. 11 Hermann, Was die Schweiz zusammenhält, pp. 40f. 12 Claude Longchamp et al., 20 Jahre nach dem EWR-Nein: Klares Bekenntnis zum bilateralen Weg. Studie im Auftrag der SRG (Bern, 2012), pp. 7f. 13 Georg Kreis, ‘Unser aller Marignano’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022].

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In that understanding, the military disaster was a salutary check to late medieval Swiss expansionism as well as the seed of a prudent policy of non-intervention that led to the modern Swiss state’s maxim of armed neutrality. The references to Marignano in 1992 – and again in 2015 – exemplify the way Blocher’s personal interests and affinities have shaped national-conservative memory politics for the better part of three decades. The figure of the ‘foreign judge’, meanwhile, took on the role of cipher for foreign influence of various kinds during the EEA campaigning.14 The topos of the foreign judge is derived from the liberation tradition, specifically, the Federal Charter of 1291.15 Unlike the Battle of Marignano, however, the foreign judge had formed no important part of the medievalism-centred complex of cultural memory of the nineteenth century, not even of the Spiritual Defence of the Homeland in the twentieth. According to Kreis, it first became a Eurosceptic watchword in the context of the national decisions to join the European Convention on Human Rights in 1969 and to sign the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1974.16 Part of a wider myth of resistance to heteronomy, the topos has since connoted, in the context of European referenda, the entirety of the liberation tradition.17 Consequently, opposition to the EEA and its supposed imposition of ‘foreign law’ was interpreted to continue a seven-hundred-year struggle against foreign judges. It is useful at this point to skip ahead to 2018 and the (unsuccessful) SVP Self-Determination Initiative (Selbstbestimmungsinitiative). Its full title was Swiss Law Instead of Foreign Judges (Schweizer Recht statt fremde Richter). Its purport, according to the initiators, was to prevent international law from taking precedence over the Swiss constitution and judges from Strasbourg or Luxembourg from meddling in Switzerland. Critics pointed out that the initiative’s true aim was the weakening of both domestic judges and the human rights of Swiss citizens and residents by facilitating the nearly unfettered modification of the constitution, even in ways that violate international law.18 Specifically, the initiative would have made the

Georg Kreis, Fremde Richter: Karriere eines politischen Begriffs (Baden, 2018), p. 31. The passage in the Charter from which the topos is derived reads: ‘We [the representatives of the States of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden] have further unanimously vowed and established that we in these valleys shall accept no judge who has gained his office for money or for any other price and who is not our resident or native’: The Federal Council, ‘The Federal Charter of 1291’, trans. Bundesbrief Museum (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. In the absence of a separation of powers at the time, the roles of judge and the bailiff – that is, the judiciary and the executive – were intrinsically linked. In staking a claim to furnishing their own judges, these States were expressing a desire for a direct relationship with the king without any intermediary power: Kreis, Fremde Richter, p. 15. 16 Kreis, Fremde Richter, p. 21. 17 Kreis, Fremde Richter, p. 36. 18 Niccolò Raselli, ‘Fremde Richter? Die Volksinitiative “Schweizer Recht statt fremde Richter (Selbstbestimmungsinitiative)” bedroht den Rechtsstaat’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 14 15

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reversal of Swiss subscription to the European Convention on Human Rights all but inevitable.19 The medievalism of the ‘Foreign Judges’ in the initiative title may be casual, and indeed the canvassing focused almost exclusively on the theme of ‘sovereignty’ while eschewing explicitly medievalist rhetoric or imagery. Nevertheless, this evocative medievalism followed the established pattern of using medievalism in support of a radical national-particularist philosophy, which here extended to the legal sector. As von Matt argues, attacks on human rights such as this are based on notions inherited from the German Romantic idea of an organic Volksgeist, an essence or spirit of a people that renders any law above the national level impossible if not altogether absurd.20 Eurosceptics not only in Switzerland but also in Britain have singled out the ECHR for criticism and frequently clothe this criticism in a medievalist garb, since national medievalism is so often a shorthand for wholesome ‘home-grownness’. To make one more point on the ‘foreign judges’: in the attack on international law one can see at its clearest the confluence of conservative and neoliberal tendencies that the SVP shares with Brexiteer extremism.21 In both cases, invocations of the Middle Ages posit an organic national community whose own established ways are best suited to its character. At the same time, such medievalism is used to prepare the ground for forces with even less respect for national boundaries than the shadowy foreign judges. International agreements on minimal standards concerning such issues as taxation, workers’ rights and the protection of the environment restrain a radical, anarchic free-market ideology – which thus stands to benefit greatly from a return to a purely national legal system. As Kreis points out for the Swiss national-­ conservatives, but as holds true for Brexit extremists as well, right-wing populists seek to rein in officials and judges of international organisations in the name of sovereignty but ‘bracke[t] the drivers of globalisation from the private sector’.22 Back in 1992, the national medievalism of the right was more explicit than that of the later Self-Determination Initiative  – not least because of a greater need to set itself apart from the medievalism of their opponents. An advertisement by the AUNS (Fig. 4) gives a sense of how central medievalism was to the ideology of the main anti-EEA players.23 The AUNS uses a scattergun approach, both criticising the tactics of pro-EEA campaigners and listing a miscellany of arguments for why joining the EEA – and consequently, they claim, the European Community (EC) – is ‘the worst of all possible solutions’. Side by side with the putative loss of autonomy and neutrality, depressed wages and ‘over-foreignisation’ (Überfremdung) is the old 19 The initiative was an attempt by the SVP to force a hardline implementation of the Initiative for the Deportation of Criminal Foreigners (Ausschaffungsinitiative), approved by voters in 2010. The Self-Determination Initiative aimed to resolve the contradiction between Swiss laws (such as ‘automatic deportation’) and international treaties (such as those confirming ‘the right to privacy and respect of family life’) in favour of the former, with treaties having to be abrogated ‘if necessary’: Raselli, ‘Fremde Richter?’ 20 Peter von Matt, ‘“Morgarten könnte auch unter Höhlenbewohnern spielen”’, Sonntagszeitung, 22 March 2015, p. 12. 21 On the latter, see O’Toole, Heroic Failure, pp. 82f. 22 Kreis, Fremde Richter, p. 108. 23 I am grateful to Roman Bonderer for drawing my attention to Figs 4 and 5.

Figure 4. AUNS, ‘Widerstand!!!’, 1992. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. QS 82.3.

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judiciary enemy: joining the EEA will usher in ‘foreign law and foreign judges’.24 The EEA/EC is, in sum, ‘unworthy of a free people’. The slogan crammed into the bottom of the black frame, ‘FREIHEIT STATT VÖGTE’ (‘freedom not bailiffs’), drives home the point that this free people is essentially the same as that which supposedly shook off the yoke of foreign domination in the late Middle Ages, and especially in the Tell myth. In the ad, the medievalist dimension might be partly obscured by modern-day concerns such as a potential surge of unemployment and a loss in revenue for social security. However, medievalism frames these disparate concerns and amplifies their exhortative appeal by offering the normative vision of a Swissness that is both timeless and ever endangered by foreign agents. The prospect of joining the EEA is thus represented as not merely impolitic but positively un-Swiss. And yet, in 1992 national medievalism still featured as a matter of course in pro-European campaigning materials as well. The poster reproduced in Fig. 5, commissioned by the Romand Committee Yes to the EEA (French: EEE), shows Tell and his son Walter confidently striding on a rainbow across a black void and towards an EEE-shaped door opening on a picturesque alpine view. The poster continues the centuries-old tradition of having national hero Tell stand for the whole of Switzerland,25 but this particular poster’s effectiveness hinges on the viewer’s readiness to accept a reversal of Tell’s usual role of defender and resistant. That role has found its most arresting, and iconographically most influential, expression in Ferdinand Hodler’s 1897 painting Wilhelm Tell (Fig. 6). The Tell of the pro-EEA ad, on the other hand, literally embraces – he spreads his arms wide – a bright national future that is supposedly made possible only by joining the international EEA. The Swiss did not follow Tell to the end of the rainbow in 1992. Although Switzerland has since become closely integrated with Europe economically, it is now arguably further than ever from formally joining the EU. The early 1990s were also the end of a period in which the liberation myth, including Wilhelm Tell, could still conceivably appeal politically to the entire Swiss nation. Over the following thirty years, reference to national medievalism became more restricted, specifically to the Eurosceptic cause of continuing on an imagined centuries-old Swiss Sonderweg (‘separate path’). Examples collected by Guy Marchal show that the SVP, AUNS and right-wing extremist groups had a tight grip on national medievalism already in the early 2000s. For instance, they continue to this day to stake the strongest claims to the Rütli, 24 The key term Überfremdung goes back to 1900 and Carl Alfred Schmid. In Schmid’s original conception, the problem of Überfremdung was to be solved not with closed borders but a policy of expedited naturalisation. Jakob Tanner, ‘Einleitung’, in Nationalstaaten und Migrationsbewegungen – das Beispiel der Schweiz (St Gall, 2016), pp. 3–27, at p. 13. The term shifted from a quantitative to a qualitative meaning in the interwar period to reflect the Social Darwinism and anti-Semitism newly underpinning restrictive immigration policy. Although the target of exclusion has adjusted over time, the notion of Überfremdung retains that qualitative aspect to this day, suggesting that members of certain cultural groups cannot be assimilated to Swiss culture: André Holenstein, Patrick Kury and Kristina Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Baden, 2018), pp. 244 and 359. 25 For a selection of Tell in political advertising, see ‘Wilhelm Tell und das politische Plakat’ (2004) [ac cessed 12 January 2022].

Figure 5. Ruedi Wälti for the Comité romand oui à l’EEE, ‘Oui à l’Espace Économique Européen’, 1992. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. QS 82.3.

Figure 6. Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Wilhelm Tell, 1896–97. Oil on canvas. 256.0 x 196.0cm. Kunstmuseum Solothurn. Bequeathed by Mrs Margrit Kottmann-Müller in memory of her husband, Dr Walther Kottmann, 1958.

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the symbolic cradle of the nation. On 1 August 2004, that is, on the Swiss national holiday in the bicentenary year of the publication of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, four hundred neo-Nazis held a minute’s silence on the Rutli for the ‘medieval heroes of the Confederacy’. Hands aloft in a three-finger gesture called the Schwurhand, traditionally used in Swiss oath-swearing, they recited Schiller’s wording of the mythical Rütli Oath.26 In the election year of 2007, then president of the Confederation and member of the Social Democratic Party (SP) Micheline Calmy-Rey decided to address the nation in the same place on the national holiday, speaking of the way the meadow symbolised that which united Switzerland and of the need to integrate immigrants rather than demonise them.27 The SVP and AUNS, considering her choice of place a provocation, swiftly proclaimed that the spirit of the Rütli resided elsewhere.28 The AUNS combated Swiss accession to the Schengen Zone, on which a referendum was held in 2005, with the claim that, ‘today, Tell would no doubt be fighting against entry into Schengen and the EU’.29 Finally, before the referendum on joining the UN in 2002, the national-conservatives were heard invoking the warning ascribed to the medieval hermit and national saint Niklaus of Flüe, that the Swiss should ‘not put up the fence too far’ (‘Machet den Hag nicht zu weit’).30 National-conservative medievalism continues to maintain porous borders to more extreme right-wing ideologies. Take another appropriation of Niklaus in a regional example from the campaigning for the Ecopop Initiative in 2014. This one cannot straightforwardly be linked to the national-conservative movement but nevertheless appeals to the same set of national medievalisms in the context of ‘immigration crisis’ discourse and xenophobic and racist agitation against Überfremdung. Ecopop linked environmentalist concerns with questions of immigration numbers and population growth, demanding a rigorous limitation of immigration to Switzerland and an investment of 10 per cent of Swiss foreign aid funds in voluntary family planning schemes in recipient countries so as to reduce birth rates. Considered too extreme by all major parties, it was overwhelmingly rejected by voters. The pro-Ecopop advertisement in question was placed in the Fribourgeois newspaper La Liberté by SanaSativa, a regional producer of organic hemp. Entitled Guy P. Marchal, ‘Die Schweizer und ihr Mittelalter: Missbrauch der Geschichte?’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 55:2 (2005), 131–48, at pp.  144f. This political re-enactment is an extreme extension of a long and widely supported appreciation of Schiller’s play in terms of its supposed historicity: Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p. 101; Barbara Piatti, Tells Theater: Eine Kulturgeschichte in fünf Akten zu Friedrich Schillers Wilhelm Tell. Mit einem Weimarer Pausengespräch zwischen Katharina Mommsen und Peter von Matt (Basel, 2004), pp. 182 and 188–92. 27 ‘Calmy-Rey erteilt Ausgrenzungspolitik eine Absage’ (2007) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 28 Marchal, ‘Medievalism’, p. 215. 29 Qtd in Marchal, ‘Die Schweizer’, pp. 144f. 30 Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p.  421. Sainted by the Catholic Church in 1947, the hermit Niklaus of Flüe (1417–87), often referred to as ‘Brother Klaus’, was considered a moral authority already in his lifetime. He was subsequently invoked in that capacity by both Catholics and Protestants and was a unifying figure and national patron saint during the two World Wars: Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p. 445; HLS, s.v. ‘Niklaus von Flüe’. Niklaus is part of a ‘trinity’ of key figures in Swiss medievalism that also includes Wilhelm Tell and Arnold Winkelried: Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p. 26. 26

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‘Fribourgeois/e vote ton existence’ (‘Fribourgeois, vote for your survival’), it displayed a medievalism straddling the divide between ‘acceptable’ national-conservatism and far-right conspiracism.31 Citing the ‘father of the nation’ Niklaus of Flüe, it voiced agriculturalist fears of displacement alongside a hazy mix of political isolationism, culture criticism, anti-immigrant sentiment with racist undertones, and concerns with public health. The advertisement asks rhetorical questions about the number of foreign agricultural products and foreign people which can be absorbed by the Swiss and Fribourgeois populations, claiming that ‘the plural of integration is disintegration’. Niklaus’s recorded warnings to the Confederates are then chaotically glossed as applying to all manner of modern-day ills: not meddling in foreign affairs entails Switzerland turning its back on the OECD, the EU, UN and NATO; eliminating the corrupting influence of money means combating consumer society, global trade and the loss of ‘cherished customs’. Under this last rubric, problems with ‘the veil and burka’ are listed alongside the ‘birth deficit’. The combination at the very least hints at the white nationalist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, according to which white Europeans are successively being replaced – at the instigation of corrupt elites – by non-white non-Europeans.32 The invocation of the virtually unimpeachable national saint Niklaus in this case is meant to justify racist notions of regional and national homogeneity threatened by immigration. The almost auto-parodic advertisement, though in many ways unrepresentative, illustrates two general tendencies of contemporary national medievalism in Switzerland. Firstly, it again highlights the way continuity medievalism lends itself to capture by right-wing, including far-right, thought. Secondly, the advertisement highlights, ex negativo, the way in which more mainstream national-conservatism has so far refrained from explicitly linking national medievalism with racist agitation. This may be surprising, given that the SVP has become notorious nationally and internationally for its divisive campaigns, many of which have been called out as racist and Islamophobic. Of course, as I have argued in the context of Daniel Hannan’s medievalism, there is no clear line between, on the one hand, the suggestion that the medieval Swiss were a homogeneous people and that present-day Swissness is directly derived from them (which is the hallmark of all autochthony medievalism) and, on the other hand, the rejection of people of non-normative race and ethnicity. Still, it is noticeable that, for now, mainstream national-conservatives are at pains to keep their medievalising constitutionalism and xenophobic and racist politics, dog-whistle or otherwise, separate. As the remainder of this chapter shows, the national-conservatives’ hold on national medievalism remained strong in the 2010s. As might be expected, there are limitations to its effectiveness in day-to-day politics: just as the UN and Schengen bills passed comfortably in the 2000s, the SVP’s Self-Determination Initiative suffered a heavy defeat in 2018. Nevertheless, the high-profile revival of medieval imagery in support of the SVP’s highly successful agenda-setting is remarkable. Medievalism is a key aspect of their framing of domestic debates in terms of Swiss I thank Déborah Demierre for sending me a picture of this advertisement. Amy Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto, 2020), pp. 88f. 31

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identity, neutrality and autonomy. I will demonstrate this discursive dominance with the example of the ‘super jubilee year’ 2015. Battle History and Metamyth The year 2015 was littered with centenaries that had varying claims to relevance for modern Switzerland: two hundred years had passed since the Congress of Vienna, five hundred since the Battle of Marignano, six hundred since the conquest of Habsburg Aargau by the Confederates and seven hundred since the Battle of Morgarten. The national-conservatives, pushing their revisionist and isolationist interpretation of Swiss history, made a concerted effort mainly to commemorate the two battle anniversaries but opened up multiple pre-modern fronts besides, obliging critics to face them on topics such as the origins of the nation, the lasting effects of its medieval wars with its European neighbours and the genesis of its neutrality. Attempts by the political left instead to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War were as nothing to the relentless onslaught of warlike medievalism. The national-conservatives thus managed to give a substantial airing to ideas derived from traditional – and long since refuted – historiography. In confrontational editorials, popular history publications and speeches, SVP members and sympathisers commanded public attention for weeks on end, displaying impressive message discipline in linking historical claims with the advocacy of a hands-off policy in Europe today. Historians such as Thomas Maissen, André Holenstein, Georg Kreis and Valentin Groebner voiced robust disagreement with these positions.33 Yet the power relations were perfectly clear. During a public debate, Blocher told Maissen – with whom he would clash repeatedly over the course of the year – that he was ‘pleased that history plays such a role now – mind you, that’s thanks to us!’34 These repeat skirmishes led some commentators to speak wrongheadedly of a Historikerstreit (‘Historians’ Dispute’). Ultimately, the term recalls the fierce West German public debate in 1986–87 on the historical singularity of the Holocaust and the political issue of what part the Holocaust, and the notion of German guilt, should play in (West) German cultural memory.35 The trivialising nature of the (implicit) Thomas Maissen, Schweizer Heldengeschichten – und was dahintersteckt (Baden, 2015) and ‘Streit suchen’, Die Zeit, 9 October 2014, p.  12; André Holenstein, Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte (Baden, 2014), ‘Geschichtsbilder im Gerede und Gebrauch: Beobachtungen im schweizergeschichtlichen Jubiläumsjahr 2015’, Traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte 22:3 (2015), 148–54, and ‘Vorwärts nach Europa’, NZZ am Sonntag, 6 September 2015, p.  65; Georg Kreis, ‘Das Jahr 2015 und die selektive Geschichtsversessenheit’, in Vorgeschichten zur Gegenwart: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 7 vols (Basel, 2003–15), vol. 7, pp.  253–61, and ‘Unser aller Marignano’; Valentin Groebner, ‘Mittelalterliche Jubiläumsschlachten: Was sind die Ursprünge der Schweiz?’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 34 ‘Blocher gegen Maissen: Eroberung des Aargau’ (2019) [accessed 1 January 2022]. 35 For a discussion of the original Historikerstreit in English, see Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston, MA, 1990). 33

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comparison of the Swiss debate with the Historikerstreit – including in broadsheets such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)– attracted criticism.36 So did the way the term dignified non-specialist national-conservative positions far removed from contemporary historical scholarship.37 The fake Historikerstreit certainly speaks to the success of the national-­ conservatives in neutralising fact-based criticism voiced by professional historians. The national-conservatives were, quite simply, operating on a different discursive plane. A strategy increasingly in evidence in their rhetoric since the turn of the century and most obviously around 2015 has been the appeal to metamyth: the two-step argument which moves from a concession that a given mythical narrative may be factually incorrect to an all the more forceful assertion of the significance of the myth as myth. It is increasingly common for national-conservative thinkers to claim a higher truth for untenable interpretations of history on the grounds that they supposedly reflect Swiss values and identity. Thus, it was not uncommon for national-conservatives in 2015 to claim that ‘myths, legends and fairy tales hold a special truth’.38 To be sure, metamyth is nothing new, nor is it intrinsically objectionable. What is new and objectionable about national-conservative medievalist metamyth is the transparent opportunism with which it is deployed. National-conservatives indulge in an ethos of se non è vero, è ben trovato (‘if it is not true, it is well invented’), their main ambition being to game the attention economy. As Philipp Sarasin puts it, the ideologues of the national Right, in a postmodern gesture flattened into utter cynicism, now call these myths just ‘good’ stories. History is to be ‘told’ in a way that serves your own political aims, which, however, collectively appear to be natural and self-explanatory – for they are legitimised by the mythical truth of history, which in that function is to be exempt from any scholarly critique.39

The intelligentsia of the conservative right, with publicists like Roger Köppel and Markus Somm in the van, galvanises its supporters by offering identity that masquerades as history.40 The reason why their interventions are so problematic is that they still claim authority as ‘alternative’ historians. At the same time as national-­ conservative metamyth lifts spurious historical claims out of the realm of factual accountability, it is still possible, paradoxically, to encounter the most vehement claims also to the factual correctness of these assertions. This is true particularly of the broad brush-stroke narratives of an obligating unbroken national continuity (of freedom, neutrality and so forth) since the Middle Ages, whose reality the

36 Remo Grolimund, ‘Politiker wider Willen’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 37 Kreis, ‘Unser aller Marignano’. 38 Christoph Blocher, ‘“Sie wollen die Schweiz auflösen!”’ (2018) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 39 Philipp Sarasin, ‘Die Debatte über die Schweizer Geschichte wird fahrlässig’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 40 Hermann, Was die Schweiz zusammenhält, pp. 61f.

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national-conservatives never tire of affirming. These concepts of freedom and neutrality are represented as core national values, eternal and non-negotiable. In this regard, Swiss national medievalism closely resembles Hannan’s, who also allows for the fact that myths are important factors in shaping national identity, and who also suggests, selectively, that the reader should focus on the truth of the message rather than the veracity of the myth (see Chapter 3).41 The Swiss national-­ conservatives are, on the whole, much quicker than Hannan to surrender the ‘factual’ position  – readily acknowledging, for instance, that the Rütli Oath did not actually take place – and to embrace metamyth instead. Nevertheless, both parties are in the happy position, firstly, of having at their disposal a wealth of ready-made continuity medievalism to feed into national political discourse and, secondly, of possessing the flexibility of principle to pose as historically competent actors but to turn the taint of myth-making into a badge of honour as soon as their competence is challenged. Virtually unassailable because of the elasticity of its truth, Swiss national-conservative metamyth flows from a strikingly indifferent concept of authenticity. National-conservative publications relating to the anniversary year 2015 run the gamut from claims to factual accuracy to overt metamyth. Ignoring minor cogs in the national-conservative memory machine that include niche publications from the conspiracy-theorist edge of the right-wing media scene, I will discuss instead two more representative examples. The edited volume Marignano 1515–2015: Von der Schlacht zur Neutralität (‘From the Battle to Neutrality’), published in 2014, is a tome of over five hundred pages and ‘the scholarly one’ of the two publications, though it is not aimed at a specialist audience.42 Its contributors range from established academics, especially military historians, to independent scholars to journalists; there is among them a strong showing of Swiss military officers. The latter fact, combined with the set of questions implied by the title, hints at what amounts to a toned-down but still perceptible national-conservative framing of half a millennium of national continuity. Language complicates the claims to national significance made in the book. Most importantly, Marignano historically has not been much of a memory site in French-speaking Switzerland. In fact, it is an example of how Swiss national medievalism exhibits regional  – in this case, language-regional  – differences. Marignano contrasts with the liberation tradition proper, especially the Rütli myth and Wilhelm Tell, which, as I have argued previously, possess considerable integrative force and were adopted more or less in full by the French-, Italian- and (very small) Romansh-speaking parts of the modern nation. As Christophe Büchi reminds us, the eight-state Confederacy that came into being in 1388 was an exclusively German-language construction which only gradually absorbed, or allied itself with, French-speaking territories. ‘In very simplified terms’, states Büchi, ‘Marignano means little to the Romands because at the time of Marignano there were as yet no

Hannan, How We Invented Freedom, pp. 97 and 107. Roland Haudenschild (ed.), Marignano 1515–2015: Von der Schlacht zur Neutralität (Lenzburg, 2014). 41

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Romands.’ Accordingly, the 2015 debate about the significance of the battle largely passed the Romandie by. Fishing for Romand opinions, a reporter for the SRF, the German-speaking branch of the Swiss national broadcaster (SRG), encountered shrugs from passers-by and thin-lipped amusement at the display of German-Swiss self-absorption by prominent Vaudois journalist Jacques Pilet.44 The Italian-speaking part of the country (which is almost entirely made up of the canton of Ticino) also did not share the German-language media’s take on the battle. The most expensive Marignano-related programme by the Italian-language branch of the national broadcaster (RSI), a docufiction entitled Il cielo di Marignano (‘The Sky of Marignano’), referenced the ideas of ‘Marignano the Myth’ and ‘Swiss neutrality’ but was more interested in recovering the perspectives of both the non-Swiss combatants and the Swiss military chaplain and later reformer Huldrych Zwingli.45 The disparity between the much more visible, breathless coverage of the supposed Historikerstreit in the German-speaking parts on the one hand and the indifference and mystification of the Romandie and the interest in joining the dots from Marignano to the international context of the Italian Wars in the Ticinese media on the other hand perhaps speaks more generally to a frequently Germanocentric ‘Swiss’ media discourse. Against this backdrop, it is significant that Marignano 1515–2015 takes some pains to stress its subject’s relevance and appeal across linguistic borders. Taken together, its French and Italian texts outnumber the German ones. Considering the marginality of Marignano in wider Romand cultural memory in particular, this demonstration of multilingual interest in Marignano is mostly compensation – a show of force to anticipate criticism of the kind voiced by the Romand Pilet: ‘We weren’t there!’46 Either way, Marignano 1515–2015 does not partake in, but rather complements, the more belligerent and emphatically German-Swiss style of exploiting the battle in the service of party politics. That belligerence is on display in the second representative publication from 2015, a special issue of the weekly Die Weltwoche, with articles on ‘The Swiss Battles’ since the early fourteenth century.47 It was a reissue, as the majority of articles had first been published in 2013. ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ was created on the initiative of Peter Keller, a trained historian and sitting SVP member in the 43

43 Christophe Büchi, ‘Weshalb Marignano die Romands kaltlässt’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 44 ‘Morgarten, Marignano, Mythenbildung – die Schweiz im Clinch’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 45 Il cielo di Marignano, film, dir. Ruben Rossel. Switzerland: Società svizzera di radiotelevisione, 2015, accessible at [accessed 1 January 2022]. 46 ‘Morgarten, Marignano, Mythenbildung’. 47 The verbose complete title reads: ‘The Swiss Battles: How the Old Confederates Fought for Their Freedom, Made World History, Bashed Each Other’s Heads In, Discovered Neutrality and Built a Nation of Peace’: Peter Keller, Markus Somm and Jürg StüssiLauterburg, ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten: Wie die alten Eidgenossen für ihre Freiheit kämpften, Weltgeschichte schrieben, sich gegenseitig die Köpfe einschlugen, die Neutralität entdeckten und eine Friedensnation bildeten’, 2nd rev. edn, Die Weltwoche, Special issue, 83 (2015).

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National Council for the canton of Nidwalden, who had previously worked as an editor at the Weltwoche and as a speechwriter for Blocher. Since his election, he has made a name for himself championing national-conservative memory politics, not least by submitting parliamentary interpellations on such subjects as historical investigations into colonialism as proposed by the Federal Commission against Racism EKR (which he deems an irrelevance) and revisions to the terms of use of the Rütli grounds (which he does not). While Keller contributes all the articles in ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ on medieval and early modern history, the magazine very much breathes a Blocherian spirit. The other contributors are a homogeneous group of fellow travellers, nearly all of them connected to Blocher by a personal relationship and/or party membership. As with Hannan’s polemic, ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ ranges far beyond the Middle Ages, but the Middle Ages are at the core of these authors’ conception of history. The magazine represents what can perhaps be described as a ‘best of ’ the national-conservative medievalist master narrative. All the key points are present: the Swiss ‘peasants and citizens’ (p. 17) achieve their freedom on the battlefield and defend it against an encroaching Europe, eventually settling on a neutral foreign policy in the early sixteenth century, a model that has been successful since but is now threatened by Europe. The early trajectory, the magazine informs us, went hand in hand with the ousting of ‘foreign judges’ and the development of early direct-democratic structures. True to its title, however, the magazine’s main emphasis is on what contributor Köppel calls the ‘origins of Switzerland’ as a ‘success story of military self-assertion’ (p. 3). The victory at Morgarten in 1315 kicks off a litany of ‘watershed’ battles, followed by (to name just a few) the expulsion of the Habsburgs at Sempach (1386), the victory over Burgundy’s Charles the Bold at Murten (1476), the alleged wresting of ‘national sovereignty’ from the Holy Roman Empire in the Swabian War (1499) and of course the adoption of armed neutrality after Marignano (1515). Following on articles about post-medieval battles and the (only figurative) Swiss battles during the Second World War, the second edition celebrates neutrality by adding articles on peace settlements ‘made in Switzerland’. The Eurosceptic national medievalism manifested here matches Hannan’s in key aspects. At a basic level, both reactivate outdated grand narratives of the nation, processing history into ‘a self-contained, meaningful plot’ informed by monolithic core principles:48 ‘freedom’ in both cases. This reactivation is again a conscious one. Just as Hannan explicitly emulates the Whig historians, ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ flaunts its allegiance to regressive historiography. This happens not least on a visual level: roughly a third of the many images included are, without any kind of qualification, nineteenth-century representations of Swiss battles, replete with romanticisation and idealisation. The front cover, for instance, reproduces Ludwig Vogel’s Die Eidgenossen bei der Leiche Winkelrieds (1841), a painting which represents the dead Winkelried as a quasi-religious saviour figure.

48 Simona Slanička, ‘Der Historienfilm als große Erzählung’, in Mischa Meier and Simona Slanička (eds), Antike und Mittelalter im Film: Konstruktion – Dokumentation – Projektion (Cologne, 2007), pp. 427–37, at p. 429.

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Like Hannan, Keller and his fellow Weltwoche authors combine historiographical atavism with a head-on attack on professional historians and the respective national curriculum. The anti-academic populism is at its most blatant in Köppel’s preface, which fires a broadside against ‘frivolous’ twenty-first-century historians who are ‘on the lookout for a bold, original thesis’ by debunking time-honoured myths (p. 3). The curriculum, too, is in for reproof: ‘The retelling of the Swiss battles and liberation wars used to be at the core of school teaching. Today, the official historians mock them with sophistic conceit’ (p. 3). Claiming medieval origins for the nation, the Weltwoche forces vastly disparate historical events into one neat line of military genesis for Switzerland, suggesting in the process that hostilities with Switzerland’s neighbouring polities are natural and inevitable. Vague analogies convert historical specificity into timeless political maxims. A lost battle in Lombardy is made a symbol for Swiss neutrality, just as Hannan’s English ‘discovered’ common law by working out its timeless implications. The resulting ancestral history all but determines the present with its ‘lessons’ and ‘truths’. Transhistorical national identity once again features as an organic body in the Weltwoche. Although this identity is ostensibly dissociated from racial definitions, the authors claim cultural filiation from decidedly homogeneous medieval origins, much as Hannan does. Both go as far as to postulate consistent character traits. Where Hannan has his ‘empirical, down-to-earth, practical’ islanders (p. 29), we read in ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ of a ‘staunch military spirit’ that has inhabited ‘Swiss’ territory for two thousand years (p. 64) and of an ‘anti-authoritarian, outof-time, stubborn’ Swiss character (p. 9). Keller flirts with biological determinism when he ascribes to the Swiss an ‘almost genetically fixed scepticism of overblown ambition’ (p. 9), as does Jürg Stüssi-Lauterburg when he claims that ‘soldierliness was in the blood of the Swiss’ (p. 69). The familiar organic and procreative diction brings up the rear: the Old Confederacy is ‘a bottom-up growth’ (p. 11) that produces ‘primordial cells of direct democracy’ (p. 11) in the fourteenth century, and the Federal Charter of 1291 contains a ‘revolutionary germ’ that will eventually see off the foreign tyrants (p. 11). This is the autochthonous Middle Ages in full view and entirely representative of national-conservative rhetoric. Yet the authors of ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ have clearly also mastered metamyth. In a section on ‘Myth and Truth’, Keller repeatedly stresses the notion of Switzerland as a ‘great story’ that ‘cannot be understood without its myths’ (p. 6). Again, to be clear, it is not the sentiment as such that is exceptionable. Myths clearly are effective in shaping group consciousness. (I would rather undermine the premise of my own book if I claimed otherwise.) What is questionable is the way in which such insight into that effectiveness, far from offering a clearer picture of competing narratives whose merit is not exclusively down to their truth content, is here exploited to naturalise one particular narrative while occluding the fact that such naturalisation is even taking place. The impulse behind this polemic, as much as it is behind Hannan’s, is a deep aversion to the EU and the threat which it is seen to pose to home-grown liberties. In the light of ancient origins, organic continuity and timeless national identities, European integration is made to look contrary to the very nature of Switzerland.

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A populist rhetoric pits a patriotic ‘people’ against European, or Europhile domestic, ‘elites’: the medieval peasant facing down the invasive nobleman supposedly anticipated this twenty-first-century antagonism. In one striking instance, Keller recalls the outcry in 2009 when Germany’s then minister of finance Peer Steinbrück threatened the Swiss with the ‘cavalry’ over a tax dispute. Keller proceeds to trace a difference in mentality between the Germans and the Swiss all the way back to the Swabian War, which in his reading ended in the Confederates putting the encroaching German king, Maximilian I, firmly in his place and winning Swiss independence in the process (p. 40). The syllogism is complete in the visual merger of the two high-handed foreigners, as portraits of the king and the finance minister are suggestively juxtaposed. Elsewhere, we can detect a transhistorical barb aimed directly at the EU when Keller mocks modern elite complaints about the ignorant populace as resembling medieval ones: ‘the stubborn people of isolationists on the one side, the enlightened elites on the other. O Holy Empire of the European Union’ (p. 8). ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ thus encapsulates the dominant memory politics of the country’s biggest political party in its historical and pedagogical revisionism, its assertion of obligating historical precedents, its metamythical line of reasoning, its anti-elitism and its Europhobia. Counter-Medievalisms In a faint echo of the memory wars of 2015, the six-hundred-year jubilee of national saint Niklaus of Flüe in 2017 saw some attempts by national-conservatives to bring the national conversation around to Sonderfall neutrality once more. The patron saint was commemorated by the Weltwoche as ‘The First Swiss’,49 and Blocher teamed up with the ultra-conservative bishop of Chur, Vitus Huonder, for a controversial ceremonial act in Klaus’s native region. In his speech, Blocher compared himself and Huonder to Klaus  – after all, they were all ‘provocative figures’  – and recycled familiar populist polemics against the political establishment, leftist academic myth-busters and of course the EU. The reason why the unpatriotic government had not organised an official ceremonial act for Klaus, Blocher claimed, was that they were flouting Klaus’s advice not to ‘put up the fence too far’: really, they wanted to ‘go out into the European Union’.50 However, Klaus resisted political appropriation, as strong alternative currents of commemoration highlighted his mysticism and pacifism. One such example was Simon Jenny’s Der Ranft-Ruf (‘The Call of the Ranft’, after the location of Klaus’s hermitage), a play that was staged in church venues across the country in 2017. It represented Klaus’s personal struggle to give up his temporal life as well as the struggle of his wife, Dorothea, to come to terms with losing her husband. The play portrayed with nuance a conflicted man’s spirituality and consistently put his link to the universal and religious above that to the national and political.

Weltwoche, 9 March 2017. ‘Christoph Blocher – Denkwürdige Rede am 19.8.17 in Sachseln – 600 Jahre Bruder Klaus’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 49 50

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The inability of the national-conservatives to replicate their success of 2015 is a reminder that not all medievalism in Switzerland lends itself to (right-wing) political monopolising. Klaus has long been an appealing figure across political divides. Perhaps Klaus’s case itself is not entirely representative of national medievalism more generally, however. It is not so surprising that this religious figure was less compellingly integrated into national-conservative memory politics if we bear in mind that today, religion tends to play a subordinate role in political national medievalism – in Switzerland, Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe. To conclude this chapter, I would like to explore some further, more representative exceptions to the rule of national-conservative dominance over national medievalism. Many of them focus on the figure of Wilhelm Tell, either reclaiming him from right-wing custodianship or, more usually, exploiting that custodianship to satirise national-conservative political initiatives. There was even a political campaign in the late 2010s that invoked the Rütli for pro-European purposes. I begin, however, with a project that set out to steal a march on the anticipated 2015 brouhaha around Marignano. Launched in time for the Swiss national holiday in 2014, it defied the very logic of the upcoming Marignano centenary by marking the 499th, not 500th, return of the battle. Hourra, perdu! 499 ans Marignano (‘Hooray, defeated! 499 years Marignano’) is a defiant collection of texts in German, French and Italian.51 As with many political counter-medievalisms in contemporary Switzerland, this campaign was not party sponsored but, rather, was the result of private initiative, in this case of the ‘Kunst + Politik’ (‘Art + Politics’) network, which supports literary campaigns on socio-political issues. The collection includes narrative fiction and poetry as well as sober historical accounts and opinion pieces. The campaign’s mission statement is unambiguous: ‘In 2015, the Battle of Marignano has its 500th anniversary. We believe this is no cause for celebration. Neither did the defeat of the quarrelling federation found the myth of neutrality nor does the megalomaniac butchery of that time lend itself to election campaigning today.’ Clearly, the author collective was raring for a fight with the inevitable glorifiers of Marignano. The main theme of Hourra, perdu! is quite simply that commemorating the battle fails to say anything meaningful about the Swiss nation of today. Contributor Donat Blum is aware of the organicising ideology at work in the conservatives’ insistence on celebrating Marignano and criticises the implausible transhistorical ‘People’ they envision: ‘The People exists not only today, no no, we also already existed 500 years ago.’52 Daniel De Roulet speculates that in the Swiss contribution to the world fair ‘Expo Milan’ in 2015, official Switzerland would doubtless showcase yet again ‘the benefits of our alleged neutrality in the world of today: a hatred of Europe, banking secrecy and five hundred years of conserving the primeval Swiss. Once again hokey 51 Hourra, perdu! 499 ans Marignano/Hurra, verloren! 499 Jahre Marignano (2014) [accessed 13 February 2023]. All quotations will be from the texts available on this website. 52 Donat Blum, ‘Gerade noch rechtzeitig’. Although the project website is defunct as of early 2023, all contributions can be accessed on the archived version of the website (see n. 52 above).

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Marignano [Marignan-gnan]’. Thomas Zaugg muses about the peculiar commemorative priorities of the national-conservatives, predicting that a celebration of the carnage at Marignano ‘will appear similarly original to people abroad as 1989, when the Federal Council thought the outbreak of war in 1939 was worth a ceremony’.54 In a Swiss-German poem whose title translates to ‘Marignano Music in M’, Pedro Lenz lampoons the procrustean logic of national-conservative memory politics.55 Using to his advantage the coincidence that numerous benchmarks of that memory politics start with the letter M, he exposes the process of mythologising in – and, figuratively speaking, as – heavy alliteration. Myth eventually takes over reality (I render the poem in my rough translation): 53

You begin to mash it all up a bit, you mash up some myths and you think you need to do more and more and always a bit more mythological wrenching, you think you need to prop up the militia army and freedom of speech with myth. [. . .] always Melchtal [i.e., one of the three legendary oath-takers on the Rütli], always Murten, always Morgarten, always Marignano, model figures of marching men from the Middle Ages, you turn them into a mantra of modern memocracy, of Melvetic meutrality.56

In this tail-wagging-the-dog scenario, a metastasising myth increasingly travesties that which it sets out to glorify. The counter-project to Marignano-style neutrality invoked most insistently in the collection is that of peace. This pacifist agenda informs a medievalism that proclaims its own irrelevance, expressing the idea that the medieval is fundamentally Other and has nothing to offer that would speak to our present concerns. Heike Daniel de Roulet, ‘À M. Ueli Maurer’. Thomas Zaugg, ‘Feiert Marignano, befreit Hodler!’ 55 Pedro Lenz, ‘Marignano-Musig uf M’. 56 Me mischlet afe mou, / me mischlet chli Mythe / und me meint, / me müess meh und meh  / und immer no meh  / mythologisch umemurggse,  / me müess d Milizarmee  / und d Meinigsfreiheit / mythologsich ungermuure, / [. . .] / immer Mäuchtau, / immer Murte, / immer Morgarte, / immer Marignano, / modäuhafti Muschter / vo marschierende Manne / us em Mittuauter  / macht me zum Mantra  / vor moderne Memokratie,  / vor Melvetische Meutralität. (Lenz, ‘Marignano-Musig uf M’) 53

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Fiedler points out the contradiction in glamourising age-old neutrality while exporting arms globally.57 David Collin sees unbearable perversity in celebrating the noble suffering of the medieval Swiss while ignoring the very real suffering of the people displaced by war in our time.58 Laurence Deonna appeals to an unnamed addressee to ‘let the young absorb accounts, sometimes unbearable ones, of our contemporary history so that their conscience pushes them to celebrate the peace-lovers rather than the war-mongers’.59 Deonna simultaneously indicts the marginalisation of women implicit in the national-conservatives’ memory politics: ‘Look, gentlemen, get on your telescopes: don’t you see any women around you? [. . .] Get back down to your own century.’ The Middle Ages invoked by these writers are not only irrelevant to modern Switzerland, but they are also the locus of a militarist and solipsistic masculinity. I show in Chapter 5 that this is in fact part of a wider gendering of national history. Predictably, Hourra, perdu! did not – could not – stop the national-­conservatives’ concerted efforts of 2015 in their tracks. But it took the battle to them by using their beloved Marignano medievalism in critiques of varying degrees of incisiveness. The respectable media response to the campaign suggests that Hourra, perdu! went some way towards enabling the subsequent wider debate about what role commemorations of long-past events should play in negotiations of modern Swiss identity. Again, however, this was a counter-medievalism: for the most part, it argued that its object was one of irrelevance rather than claiming it for a purpose of its own. Unlike the Swiss battles, Wilhelm Tell has avoided complete right-wing co-­ optation at the national level. His general recognisability as a literary figure of world stature ever since Schiller’s play has helped, as has the fact that Tell has not been linked to anti-European sentiment as frequently as has the Rütli conspiracy, let alone the medieval battles. The appropriation of national medievalism more broadly by the right has certainly left its mark also on Tell, however, limiting his usefulness for causes other than the national-conservative.60 Furthermore, he is often used by opponents of the national-conservatives in ways that implicitly acknowledge national-conservative ‘ownership’ of him, and by doing so shore up precisely that ownership. Three political campaigns against a series of SVP initiatives are worth mentioning briefly in this context. The first is a casual video game called Superwilli, launched in 2014 by the economic umbrella organisation Economiesuisse, which joined the Heike Fiedler, ‘.o..ai..a..e.’ David Collin, ‘Fêter Marignan, défaire la pensée’. 59 Laurence Deonna, ‘Cessez de remonter le temps, comme les saumons remontent les rivières!’ 60 The national-conservatives continue to stake claims to Tell as a matter of course. To take an example at random, some may remember an outrageous SVP Schlager song from 2015 whose title translates to ‘Freedom Song (Where There’s a Willy There’s a Way)’. Speaking insipidly of the will to remain a free country, it featured gambolling Bernese mountain dogs, shots of the Rütli, an assortment of rural visual clichés, and a group of SVP greats singing and swaying awkwardly to the music: ‘SVP Freiheitssong (Wo e Willy isch, isch ou e Wäg)’ (2015) [accessed 12 November 2021]. 57

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campaign against the SVP’s Initiative Against Mass Immigration. The Superwilli game sends Tell on a quest to put his ‘No’ vote in a ballot box. On the way – the game features a simple platform game mechanic – the player is beset by symbols commonly associated with the SVP, such as Ferdinand Hodler’s woodcutter figure and SVP party mascot ‘Zottel’, a portly he-goat. The game took the download charts by storm but was also fiercely criticised. The main complaints were not about the controls (suboptimal) but about the way Superwilli ‘abused’ Tell.62 National Councillor Balthasar Glättli (Greens), co-president of the committee directing the campaign against the SVP’s initiative, countered: ‘we won’t just abandon the claim to Willi Tell’.63 The reactions to the game expressed two themes that regularly emerge in contemporary Tell uses by actors to the left of the national-conservatives: firstly, there is a general impression that Tell somehow belongs to the SVP or at least fits the party particularly ‘naturally’; secondly, and conversely, this Swiss symbol will not be surrendered without a fight. These themes are evident in another pair of examples, two advertisement campaigns which responded to two closely related referenda and made near-identical points. The first, from 2010, was an abortive series of satirical posters produced by the Alternative Left (Alternative Linke, AL) to canvass for a rejection of the SVP’s Deportation Initiative. The posters portrayed well-known – in two cases, living – Swiss figures as having been deported for crimes specified by the updated penal code.64 The third poster depicts Wilhelm Tell, putting an ironic spin on the famed act of tyrannicide by stating that Tell has been deported for the offence of ‘violence and threats against public authorities and public officials’. The other advertisement is a spot called ‘Wilhelm Tell, 2017’, published by a group of independent filmmakers around Jela Hasler in the run-up to the SVP’s Enforcement Initiative six years later.65 A morose Tell has been convicted of the same violent crime as in the AL poster and is being escorted by a policeman to a ‘justice machine’. ‘Are you Swiss?’ the machine enquires, and asks him to scan his passport at the terminal. This Tell duly does, but his faux-medieval documentation fails to pass muster, and he is informed that he will be deported. Both pieces of advertising pick up on the main criticism these two initiatives met with: that they would make Swiss citizenship the sole condition of 61

Superwilli, video game. Switzerland: Kaden & Partner, 2014. Christof Vuille, ‘“Politisch motiviert”: Tell-Spiel bekommt im App-Store auf die Mütze’ (2014) [accessed 29 March 2021]. 63 Qtd in ‘Wenn Wilhelm Tell gegen Geissbock Zottel kämpft’ (2014) [accessed 12 January 2022]. 64 The figure convicted of ‘membership of a criminal organisation’ can be surmised to be Joseph Blatter, then-president of the FIFA. However, his identity has been suppressed, the poster says, ‘at the request of Attorney Gessler’. This was very nearly a case of life imitating art: here, ‘Gessler’ is not (primarily) the despotic bailiff of the Tell myth but the real-life attorney Dieter Gessler, hired by FIFA to stop the AL’s campaign. In the end, only the Tell poster was put up. Ruedi Baumann, ‘Rechtsanwalt Gessler lässt Wilhelm Tell hängen’, Tagesanzeiger, 15 October 2010, n.p. 65 Jela Hasler, ‘Wilhelm Tell, 2017’ (2017) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 61

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fundamental personal rights. The ads turn the tables on the initiatives by symbolically deporting the very image of Swissness. Both are variants of alterity medievalism. The video suggests that national identity does not remain unchanged over the centuries and hence refutes the premise of national-conservative medievalism. The poster campaign makes the additional point that if the SVP wins the day, so does ‘medieval’ tyranny. While all three campaigns make their point reasonably effectively, they are more interesting for the way they, too, speak to a perceived SVP custodianship of the Swiss Middle Ages: all of them use Tell against SVP initiatives because of this custodianship. They differ from the 1992 pro-EEA advertisement in being fundamentally defensive: since then, progressive and centrist Tells have ceased primarily to stand for a particular cause, but, rather, stand against the meanings of isolationism, Euroscepticism and nativism. What goes for these counter-Tells goes for national medievalism more broadly. It was therefore surprising to see, in late 2018, a colourful national medievalism that defied this trend. The SVP’s Swiss Law Instead of Foreign Judges initiative prompted Operation Libero, a liberal, transpartisan pro-European association, to launch a medievalist campaign of its own. Through effective mobilisation, especially on social media, Operation Libero had contributed substantially to a series of painful poll defeats inflicted on the national-conservatives since 2016. They did again on this occasion. Their campaign reframed the debate, away from the national-conservatives’ theme of ‘sovereignty’ and towards the idea of Switzerland being a reliable contractual partner internationally (which acceptance of the initiative would have compromised by forcing the Swiss authorities to default on international agreements should they contradict the national constitution). The campaign took as its object the iconic Rütli Oath and homed in on the gesture of oath-taking, the Schwurhand. The gesture is a key element of Rütli iconography, and Operation Libero juxtaposed it, in one of its poster series (Fig. 7), with the gesture of fingers crossed behind the Confederates’ backs to signal that the promise they are making is invalid. Presupposing the viewer’s immediate recognition of the scene as quintessentially Swiss, the subversion of the Old Confederates’ signature gesture allowed the campaign to suggest that the SVP initiative entails a perversion of a core Swiss characteristic. The Operation Libero campaign injected a welcome dose of originality into the mostly dour affair of political medievalism in Switzerland. Peter von Matt has rightly described the use of Old Swiss mythology by isolationist parties in contemporary public debate as ‘stereotypical repetitions rather than living images’.66 The near-monopolisation of political medievalism by the right has itself contributed to its ossification. Operation Libero, however, effectively used the potential of the Rütli scene’s universal resonance – limited for years to the obvious idea of a national defensive alliance against a hostile outside world – to make a broader, pro-European point about solidarity between reliable partners, all of whom stand to benefit from working together. In some sense it returned the myth to a pre-1992 state: as Marchal Peter von Matt, Das Kalb vor der Gotthardpost: Zur Literatur und Politik der Schweiz (Munich, 2012), p.144. 66

Figure 7. Operation Libero, ‘Nein zur Selbstbestimmungsinitiative’, 2017. Poster. © Operation Libero.

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and Mattioli note, in 1991, the Swiss seven-hundredth anniversary, the Rütli was repeatedly used to suggest Switzerland was ‘on its way to Europe’.67 Marchal thought that that rhetoric seemed ‘contrived and stilted’ in 1991.68 This was arguably less the case in 2019, when an almost exclusive focus on the motif of oath-taking allowed the campaigners more or less credibly to suggest that what was at stake was the very auto-stereotype of Swiss reliability. Certainly, unlike the other examples of medievalism from outside the national-conservative spectrum I have discussed, the campaign found something worthwhile in the Rütli myth beyond its ability to be turned against its putative owners. Also, unlike 1992, pro-European national medievalism was part of the winning team. It is entirely too early to tell whether this was mere apricity or whether the campaign did indeed mark the beginning of the end for national-conservative hegemony over medievalist memory politics in the European context. For now, that hegemony is a normality, despite the various challenges of academics, artists and political opponents. I therefore close this chapter with what is a much more representative example of contemporary political medievalism: the campaign launched by the Interest Group for Shooting in Switzerland (IGS) during the referendum on the EU firearms directive in 2019. Continued access to the Schengen Area was contingent on the Swiss accepting more restrictive gun laws, which the IGS opposed. Its well-funded campaign was understated yet slick and consisted mainly of photos of sporting markspeople, gunsmiths and re-enactors resting their left hands on their guns while holding their right aloft in a gesture of repulse (Fig. 8). The visual reference is, of course, to Hodler’s Wilhelm Tell (see Fig. 6). The campaign logo, a wedge severing the right ‘arm’ of the Swiss cross, is another coded reference to the Tell myth. As Peter Aeschlimann points out, it refers to a line of Tell’s in Schiller’s play: ‘I want my right hand, when I want my bow’ (‘Mir fehlt der Arm, wenn mir die Waffe fehlt’).69 The claim was, then, that the ‘disarmament bill’ constituted a dismemberment of Swiss patriots and was therefore both ‘dangerous’ and ‘anti-Swiss’. The campaign’s third Tell connection lies in one of the constituent societies of the IGS itself: Pro Tell. The chief player in the Swiss gun lobby, Pro Tell has fought against the tightening of gun laws since its foundation in 1978. It is currently presided over by SVP National Councillor Jean-Luc Addor, who has previously been convicted of racial discrimination and whose radically libertarian positions on gun control have been likened to those of the deeply controversial National Rifle Association of America.70 As with other national-conservative endeavours of late, discursive dominance did not translate into poll victory in 2019, and the bill passed with a comfortable majority of 63.7 per cent. But the conservative gun lobby’s unapologetic use of Tell in ways ranging from the subtle (the IGS campaign requires at least some intertextual competence to be parsed correctly as a Tell reference at Marchal and Mattioli, ‘Nationale Identität’, p. 13. Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, p. 443. 69 Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. Theodore Martin, accessible at [accessed 1 January 2022]; German original from Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, with a commentary by W. Grosse (Frankfurt a. M., 2013), 3.1.1537. Peter Aeschlimann, ‘Waffen: Das letzte Gefecht’, Beobachter, 7 (2019), 12–21. 70 Armin Köhli, ‘Die Schweizer Waffenbrüder’, Doppelpunkt, 25 (2018), 20–3. 67

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Figure 8. Interessengemeinschaft Schiessen Schweiz (IGS), ‘Nein zum Entwaffnungsdiktat der EU’, 2018. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich. DS 1608. Detail.

all) to the extreme (Pro Tell’s deregulation schemes in the national hero’s name) speaks volumes about who is currently winning the battle for the medieval imaginary of Switzerland. In some ways, this section comes full circle with Pro Tell, which has styled itself the country’s ‘lobby for freedom’.71 ‘Freedom’ is of course the watchword of virtually all the political continuity medievalisms I have discussed in this section, Scottish, English and Swiss alike. In the context of contemporary nationalist politics, this loose concept invariably involves pulling up the drawbridge on neighbouring states or supranational institutions. National medievalism does not consistently exhibit the kind of emphasis on military exploits which I have argued structures the Swiss situation: Scottish politics currently de-emphasises the warlike aspects of its continuity medievalism, and although Brexit discourse is certainly no stranger to narratives of medieval military glory and heroic defeat, a more significant strand emphasises constitutional superiority over Britain’s European neighbours. Nor, despite some examples to the contrary, is there a clear trend towards overt white nationalist racism in the political medievalisms of these countries. And yet, the suggestion that 71 Romed Aschwanden, ‘“Mir fehlt der Arm, wenn mir die Waffe fehlt”: Die Gleich­ setzung von Freiheit und Waffenbesitz ist ein gefährlicher Anachronismus’ (2018) [accessed 14 January 2022].

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the contemporary Swiss, Scottish and English (or British) political nations spring from medieval origins and persist essentially unchanged is, in a political context, hardly innocent. Such a preference for cultural autochthony indicates the ongoing culturalisation of politics taking place on both sides of the Channel. At its worst, as a form ethnic nationalism, this culturalisation narrows the achievability of full membership and participation in the nation for immigrants. Less directly, as I will show, national medievalism can serve to limit the political, social and cultural participation of women. It is to those less than fully belonging to the national community that I now turn.

Part II

The Others of National Medievalism I have argued that the Middle Ages are attractive for statements of national identity because they offer conceptual ‘localness’ and connotations of transhistorical national particularity and exceptionalism. The national Middle Ages have recently been championed in response to a set of connected international developments. Firstly  – and I have foregrounded this in my introduction  – this is a reaction to the oft-declared weakening of the nation-state at the hands of the economic and political drivers of globalisation. Secondly, it reflects increasingly negative perceptions of international migration and the cultural and racial diversification which it brings in its wake. This reaction to immigration and ‘multiculturalism’ is, thirdly, part of a wider culture war waged most acrimoniously, albeit with different emphases, in the US and across Europe. In addition to multiculturalism, disputes revolve around such social issues as gender equality, reproductive rights and LGBT rights, with right-wing populist discourse lamenting ‘political correctness’ and ‘wokeness’, which supposedly disseminate totalitarian ideas of feminism, queer liberation and racial justice. It is with a view to such issues that, increasingly, reactionary political and cultural actors invoke the supposed golden age of a harmonious and homogeneous earlier society to support their respective agendas.1 Obviously, not all variant nationalist interpretations of the deep past subscribe to ideas of a wholly unchanging national identity. Yet nationalism is programmatically at pains to present itself as timeless As Lauryn Mayer writes, ‘there is the effort to take ideologies that are under attack in the present and attempt to relocate them (in their most reductionist form) safely in the past, where they can simultaneously exist as a compensatory fantasy and as a template to be recovered by present action’: ‘Mythogyny: Popular Medievalism and Toxic Masculinity’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXVIII, pp. 21–31, at p. 23. For contemporary medievalism explored through the lens of critical race studies and gender studies, see for example the ‘Race, Racism and the Middle Ages’ and ‘Gender, Sexism, and the Middle Ages’ article series on The Public Medievalist [accessed 11 January 2022]. See Fugelso, Discrimination for further essays on discriminatory uses of the Middle Ages. For an overview of scholarship specifically on race and the Middle Ages, including their pernicious 1

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and natural. To the degree that they embrace essentialism, genealogical medievalism and the grand narratives it inhabits produce some of the most monolithic conceptions of collective identity. All the while, conservative national medievalism performs a paradoxical balancing act between, on the one hand, downplaying outside influences in the history of the nation and glossing over ruptures and false starts (which in this interpretation are able only to retard, not change, the national essence) and, on the other hand, exaggerating outside influences to suggest that a diversifying nation is a nation threatened in its essence. By definition, identity is exclusive and reciprocally related to non-identity.3 In-groups are set apart not only from, but also by, out-groups, which they therefore have an interest in maintaining. Other nations as competitors and aggressors to be fended off are near-ubiquitous in the national medievalisms I have discussed up to this point. These national antagonisms are loosely conceived and simplified, with modern-day nationalities – the French, the British, the Swiss – retrojected onto the Middle Ages. Besides asserting its presence with respect to (and often its superiority over) other nations, the nation – and consequently national medievalism – is also exclusionary internally. In the pursuit of national wholeness, certain social groups of ‘Others’ necessarily fall by the wayside.4 The most prominent Others are those demarcated along the fault lines of religion, class, race and ethnicity, and gender.5 The othering of each of these collectives takes distinct forms. To be sure, it is not uncommon for any and all of them to be simply subsumed under national storylines in a nationalisation of religious, class, racial and gender narratives.6 However, in the cases of gender and, especially, race and ethnicity, which are at the centre of my analysis here,7 the national Middle Ages are often territory between a dead zone and a minefield. The relationship between the national Self and these Others ranges 2

ideological appropriation, see Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski, ‘Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 8:4 (2017), 500–31. 2 Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, ed. Kobena Mercer, foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (London, 2017), p. 139. 3 Chris Lorenz, ‘Representations of Identity: Ethnicity, Race, Class, Gender and Religion. An Introduction to Conceptual History’, in S. Berger and Lorenz, Contested Nation, pp. 24–59, at p. 25. 4 Broadly speaking, ‘Otherness’ results from difference being transformed discursively into a characteristic that is elevated to the status of group norm and used to marginalise and exclude people perceived as not conforming to that norm (Jean-François Staszak, ‘Other/ Otherness’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 43–7, at p. 43.) 5 Compare David Cannadine’s account of the most potent forms of human solidarity to have emerged in history, namely religion, class, gender, race, civilisation – and the nation: The Undivided Past: History beyond Our Differences (New York, 2013), p. 3. Of these forms of association, the nation remains, I believe, unique in its ability to either eclipse or absorb the others. 6 Stefan Berger, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 363. 7 I intend to undertake an extended analysis elsewhere of the way class is represented in contemporary medievalism, including its interaction with national stories.

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from ignorance to benign neglect and awkward attempts at inclusion to active hostility and open discrimination. National medievalism is often gendered in a way that sidelines the perspectives of women and feminises the nation’s Others while ascribing supposedly ‘manly’ virtues such as bravery and ingenuity to the national self.8 The place of immigrants and ethnolinguistic and racial minorities tends to be even more precarious in medievalising self-conceptions of the nation. These categories often overlap in immigrants of ‘non-normative’ race or, almost inescapably, non-normative ethnicity. The supposed uprootedness of immigrants – who are literally foreign bodies – makes them particularly suspect in a national(ist) framework, which, in theory, exhaustively divides humanity into contiguous nationalities.9 These collectivities fly in the face of the national paradigm’s totalising tendencies just by highlighting that people have multiple identities. As Pierre Nora puts it, the prevalent ‘forms of being-together’ are currently being redefined in a context of a pronounced individualism. This redefinition takes the form of diversification and, Nora argues, comes at the expense of the national framework, which for the previous two centuries produced the dominant social formation.10 Indeed, a multitude of identities over which national identity formerly held sway – which it harboured, contained or erased – are increasingly emancipating themselves from it and asserting their right to exist alongside it. The concept of intersectionality helps to account for the interplay of such plural identities.11 It asserts that ‘codes of difference’  – that is, social categories such as nation, race, class, gender or sexual orientation  – ‘cannot be established individually of each other because they are interacting and mutually constitutive’.12 The concept strengthens attempts at recovering diverse forms of lived experience in critical analyses of social inequality, privilege and discrimination past and present. Far from invalidating the critical use of concepts such as nation, race and so forth, intersectionality demands that attention be paid to specific socio-political contexts, in which these categories ‘acquire their concrete meaning’ in the first place.13 Thus, while I discuss the nation’s gendered and racial/ethnic/immigrant Others in separate chapters below, they should not be considered discrete phenomena (as in fact some of my examples show). The greater scholarly and public sensitivity to intersectionality in contexts of power arises from the metahistorical sea change that occurred after the Second World War. Describing what he calls the present ‘age of memory’, Nora argues that a new ‘commemorative matrix’ emerged as the horrors of exterminative racism came to be acknowledged. Auschwitz, Nora writes, has reframed mainstream historical S. Berger, Past, p. 363; Hall, Fateful Triangle, p. 140. Frans Schrijver, Regionalism after Regionalisation: Spain, France and the United Kingdom (Amsterdam, 2006), p. 37. 10 Pierre Nora, ‘Foreword’, in Anheier, Isar and Viejo-Rose, Heritage, pp. ix–xi, at p. xi. 11 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1 (1989), 139–67. 12 Lorenz, ‘Representations’, p. 26. 13 Lorenz, ‘Representations’, p. 34. 8

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thinking in the West in a way that foregrounds instances of victimhood: ‘The Shoah has conferred quasi-historical status on the figure of the victim, whose image is now so powerful that the whole of past history is reinterpreted in its light, together with all human rights and laws – the rights of men, women, children, animals, even of nature itself.14 Although human rights are increasingly being challenged all over the world, contemporary struggles of minority groups for equality continue to draw on this commemorative matrix. Reappraising history and debating ongoing forms of oppression becomes an essential part of that democratising process. Rather strikingly, that process plays out primarily on the national stage even today. Considering the prominence which I have been arguing the Middle Ages have achieved in contemporary national memory, it therefore comes as no surprise that these struggles for recognition are reflected in recent medievalisms. As Jonathan Hsy points out, ‘thinking about the Middle Ages need not entail a nostalgic escape from modernity into an allegedly simpler time’.15 This section explores how marginal and excluded identities interact with, complicate and, perhaps, can overcome national narratives in medievalism.

Nora, ‘Foreword’, p. x. Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds, 2021), p. xiii. 14 15

5 Masculine Middle Ages: Gender

I

‘One people will we be – a band of brothers – no danger, no distress shall sunder us.’ ‘Ahem, hello? And the women?’ ‘Okay, okay, okay, brothers and sisters.’1

n contrast to some of the cases of racial, ethnic and immigrant othering which I discuss in the next chapter, national ideology does not usually other along gender lines to the point of outright exclusion.2 By this I mean that in medievalism women are not denied symbolic membership of the national body. As is widely accepted of medievalism more generally, however, women are rarely central figures in British and Swiss medievalism but, rather, are mostly restricted to traditionally ‘feminine’ and familial roles (mother, daughter, wife) that tend to provide only limited female agency. Some of the examples discussed here highlight the traditional men’s roles of warrior and wielder of influence, whereas others show that there is, in the early twenty-first century, a sustained interest in female perspectives in the context of medievalist identity narratives. Before I turn to national medievalism specifically, a word on gender and medievalism more generally.3 As Lauryn Mayer remarks, the modern Middle Ages are ‘a world of men’: women ‘are allowed, of course, but their presence usually only serves

1 Daniela Janjic, Tell, adapted from Friedrich Schiller, theatre production at TOBS, 26 May 2018. I base my translation of the first line on Friedrich Schiller, William Tell, by an unknown translator (Providence, 1838), p. 53. 2 At least it does not in terms of the traditional gender binary. This binary remains overwhelmingly untouched in national medievalism, leaving any other gender identifications and forms of desire all but unrepresented. The discussion of gender in national medievalism that follows therefore explores representations of femininity and masculinity that are  – sometimes explicitly – heteronormative. 3 While there are many excellent case studies, there is as far as I know little general criticism yet on medievalism and gender – although such work is currently underway: see especially Usha Vishnuvajjala’s forthcoming Feminist Medievalisms (with ARC Humanities Press). See also Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York, 2005) and ‘The Return of the King: Medievalism and the Politics of Nostalgia in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement’, Prose Studies, 23:2 (2000), 144–59; Amy S. Kaufman, ‘“His Princess”: An Arthurian Family Drama’, Arthuriana, 22:3 (2012), 41–56, ‘Purity’, in Emery and Utz, Medievalism, pp. 199–206, and ‘Muscular Medievalism’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, 31 (2016), 56–66; Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’; Jane Tolmie, ‘Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15:2 (2014), 145–58; Shiloh Carroll, Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 54–84.

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to reinforce the values of the patriarchy’. In medievalism, they tend to be portrayed as powerless and passive and hence either invite male protection or risk male predation. These two responses are, in Mayer’s account, the ‘benevolent’ and ‘hostile’ sides of the same sexist coin: ‘chivalry and violence towards women both operate under the assumption of feminine inferiority’.4 Variations on the theme of inferiority are reflected in a set of female stock characters. Mayer identifies some of them: ‘downtrodden female villagers (usually victims of starvation, rape, or both), [. . .] professional prostitutes, tavern wenches, or camp followers, or decorative symbols of female privilege’.5 Motherhood also looms large. Inferiority is not an issue here in the strict sense, but a disregard for the female individual is: many medievalisms are interested far less in the mother’s experience than in her ability to produce heirs (especially male ones). Mayer reaches a damning verdict on gender relations in medievalism: ‘By framing most of its women as either vessels to bear sons or objects to be raped, it lends itself too willingly as a compensatory dream for men who feel robbed of their masculinity by any advances made in women’s rights.’6 Mayer’s reference to rape points to what has become a common argument in feminist critiques of contemporary medievalism: gendered violence, especially sexual violence, is a marker of authenticity for the ‘grittier’, ostensibly more realistic modality of representing the Middle Ages. Amy Kaufman speaks of a ‘muscular medievalism’ that imagines the medieval past as ‘a man’s world in which masculinity was powerful, impenetrable, and uniquely privileged’. Muscular medievalism relies on ‘the suffering and exploitation of women in order to validate its vision of masculinity’.7 In Kaufman’s analysis, such diverse phenomena as the fantasy world of Game of Thrones and the propaganda of the terrorist organisation ISIS conjure up an age steeped in codes of toxic masculinity.8 She argues that there is a ‘fine line between critiquing a bygone era’s misogyny and celebrating it for the pleasure of its readers, players, and viewers’.9 Here, I will explore critical medievalisms that show violence committed against women in a way that undercuts glamourising accounts of a medieval past marked as national and masculine. British and Swiss national medievalisms that represent female perspectives on an equal footing with male ones remain the exception. In this, they are entirely unexceptional. Historiographies of earlier centuries have contributed significantly to this state of affairs. Jitka Malečková has shown that, from the start, national history-writing in Europe fed on, and in turn contributed to, concepts of masculinity: Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’, pp. 28 and 23f. For a sustained analysis of (white) masculinity in the context of chivalry, see Tison Pugh, Queer Chivalry: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, 2013). 5 Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’, p. 28. 6 Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’, p. 30. 7 Kaufman, ‘Muscular Medievalism’, pp. 58 and 61. 8 I use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ to describe those forms of masculinity that are harmful to society as well as to the mental and bodily health of men. Since these forms of masculinity are married to misogynist ideology, their victims (through violent and coercive behaviour) are frequently women. For a similar operationalisation in medievalism studies, see Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’. 9 Kaufman, ‘Muscular Medievalism’, p. 57. 4

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‘history has been largely written as a history of (abstract) men, implicitly considered to represent the experience of “humankind”’. It did not help that early professional historians almost invariably wrote political histories.10 Histories of constitutional development, diplomacy and war privileged the public sphere over the private. Owing to ideologies formed during the Industrial Revolution but with intellectual origins far older, this has meant privileging the ‘male’ sphere over the ‘female’.11 In a series of case studies, I hope to show that although different national emphases clearly exist, contemporary British and Swiss national medievalisms share significant similarities in the way they represent gender. It is true that female agency, heroism and leadership have become more commonplace in medievalism more generally: already in 1983, Marion Zimmer Bradley made female figures the focalisers of an adaptation of Arthurian myth in her Mists of Avalon,12 and the Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones series more recently presented an array of well-rounded female principal characters.13 However, specifically national medievalism – that is, medievalism concerned with national themes and identities – lags behind in this regard. The conventions of national history described by Malečková continue to make it harder for women to take on central roles in stories of the nation. In a first part, I approach the marginality of women in national medievalism from two different angles. I begin with the permanent crisis of female visibility in the male bastion of Swiss medievalism, which met with a notable public pushback in the 2010s. I then discuss the kind of national story that emphasises violent conflict, in which the predominance of men is especially entrenched, and which continues to be among the most prominent stories on both sides of the Channel. In the second part, two literary critiques of toxic masculinity continue the theme of violence but explore its detrimental effects on both the female victim and the male perpetrator. In emphasising human, and especially female, suffering, they deconstruct national memory sites that historically have relied on the glamour of warrior figures. The third part deals with medievalisms that are explicitly concerned with the historical contributions and experiences of women. Even these do not always avoid the emphasis on men that continues to relegate women to a supporting role. However, national medievalism is not hard-wired to perpetuate a female supporting status. My concluding example in particular shows how the transgressive currents which certain medievalist traditions contain can be harnessed to feminist ends.

10 Jitka Malečková, ‘Where Are Women in National Histories?’, in S. Berger and Lorenz, Contested Nation, pp. 171–99, at pp. 172 and 173. 11 Randi R. Warne, ‘Making the Gender-Critical Turn’, in Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (eds), Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (Copenhagen, 2000), pp. 249–60; Misty Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons in The White Queen’, in North, Alvestad and Woodacre, Premodern Rulers, pp. 111–29, at p. 115. 12 Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York, 1983). 13 Compare, however, Shiloh Carroll’s comments on the characterisations’ limitations in the latter two works: Medievalism, pp. 82f.

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Swiss Omissions and Medievalisms of War While national medievalism is strongly androcentric in all the nations considered here, this is particularly pronounced in Switzerland. In recent years, what can perhaps be called an ‘omission discourse’ has drawn attention to the inadequate representation of women in Swiss national history. Both on the national stage and at the local level, critics have argued that the Swiss past is represented as a largely woman-free zone in ways that reflect poorly on official present-day commitments to gender equality. This kind of gender discourse is more salient in Switzerland than the UK, not least because it has encountered more tenacious resistance. As compared to international standards, Switzerland has been slow to implement gender equality.14 Switzerland enfranchised its female citizens at the national level as one of the last European countries in 1971 (though it was the first to do so in a plebiscite); the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden only implemented this constitutional law in 1990. In 1991, a national Frauenstreik (‘women’s strike’), one of the largest political mobilisations in Swiss history, protested the country’s failure to implement constitutionally guaranteed equal rights in society, politics and the economy. In 2019, a second women’s strike protested a situation in which things such as the lack of recognition of unpaid care work and the gender pay gap persisted; sexual harassment and gendered violence, already an object of protest in 1991, were called out with new force in the post-#MeToo strike. Hundreds of thousands participated across the country (the organisers spoke of over 500,000), attracting attention internationally.15 Here, I consider critical responses aligned with this kind of feminist discourse to two medievalisms. In Chapter 1, I argued that the SRG’s four-part television docufiction Die Schweizer inherits much of its national history from the mid-twentieth-century Spiritual Defence of the Homeland. It is also an overwhelmingly male affair. After the films had aired, thirty parliamentarians addressed an open letter to then general director of the Swiss public broadcaster, Roger de Weck.16 They criticised the fact that the SRG, which grandly claimed to represent ‘the Swiss’ with its show, had chosen six men and not one woman for its protagonists. A wider debate in the media ensued, and under #Schweizerinnen, social media users compiled suggestions for women from Swiss history who could have been included.17 14 André Holenstein, Patrick Kury and Kristina Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Baden, 2018), p. 157. 15 Seraina Schöpfer, ‘Reaktionen auf den Frauenstreik in der internationalen Presse’ (2019) [accessed 14 February 2022]. 16 ‘Frauen-Aufstand gegen SRG’ (2013) [accessed 21 May 2019]. 17 ‘#schweizerinnen  – welche Frauen für die SRF-Doku vorgeschlagen werden’ (2013) [accessed 14 January 2022]; Christoph Bernet, ‘Empörung über Geschichte ohne Frauen’ (2013) [accessed 14 January 2022].

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Critics reserved particular disdain for the medieval half of the mini-series. The first film’s representation of Werner Stauffacher was especially singled out for criticism. The historical record has very little to say about Stauffacher. The comments of historians included in the film qualify the version of events shown in the enacted scenes, which speculate about events before the Battle of Morgarten, but still the filmmakers put the largely mythical Stauffacher at the centre of the film. Stauffacher’s wife  – usually called the ‘Stauffacherin’ or, since Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Gertrud – plays a notable role in Swiss origin myth as a hortative voice of wisdom. It is she who first suggests to her husband that the people of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden should form a Confederation and drive out the oppressive nobility.18 Some commentators wondered whether she might not have made for an equally suitable protagonist in the series seeing that myth-making was not an issue.19 Similarly, even senior staff at the SRG reportedly thought the second film’s story of national saint Niklaus of Flüe could have been told from the perspective of his wife, Dorothea, who ran the farmstead and cared for their ten children when he retreated to his hermitage.20 The criticism levelled at the series was in turn criticised by politicians associated with the national-conservative movement, such as Christoph Mörgeli and Peter Keller. Although not usually favourable to the SRG, they were pleased in this case about a history they could recognise as their own. Keller thought that a ‘dusty’ feminism was responsible for the bad press the series had received and keeping on life support an artificial ‘battle of the sexes’.21 It makes sense for national-conservatives to deny that the show has a woman problem, since that problem is due primarily to the very historiography they champion. This is not merely a matter of continuingly focusing on a narrow set of male figures. Rather, underlying the absence of women in the mini-series is a very specific premise deeply entrenched in Swiss national historiography. The public perception was that women had been ignored because the filmmakers chose to portray figures who exercised formal power – figures who, historically, were male. As Lucas Burkart argues, this is only partly true. Women did figure in key positions, he states, just not as part of a group accepted as ‘Swiss’ in patriotic historiography: ‘Among the nobility, there certainly were women in decisive positions. But in the perspective of the nineteenth century, the nobility does not belong to the core of the Old Confederacy. The Swiss need to be peasants and mountain dwellers; the nobility is the enemy.’22 HLS, s.v. ‘Stauffacherin’. The suggestion is made, for instance, in online comments to ‘#schweizerinnen’ and to Réda Philippe El Arbi, ‘SRF-Geschichte und die fehlenden Frauen’ (n.d.) [accessed 21 May 2019]. 20 ‘Erst unter Roger de Weck kippten die Frauen raus’ (2013) [accessed 21 May 2019]. 21 ‘“Club-Extra”: Wo sind die Schweizerinnen?’ (2013) [accessed 14 February 2022]. 22 Lucas Burkart, ‘“Die Filme zeigen eine Schweiz, die sich selbst genügt”’ (2013) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 18

19

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By contrast, dynastic traditions are of crucial importance to the national histories of England, Scotland and Wales. As the example of the television series The White Queen shows, a dynastic setting has greater potential to integrate national history with a focus on female experiences (although the degree to which that show’s representation of powerful women is actually empowering is debatable – see below). In the absence of such dynastic traditions, Swiss national medievalism is a narrower market for female figures than its British counterparts are. I have suggested before how readily Swiss national medievalism turns political – easily more so than comparable examples do in Britain. Die Schweizer is inherently political in the sense that it was produced with much fanfare by the country’s mostly publicly financed broadcaster. The Zurich holiday of the Sechseläuten showcases another shade of politicisation. The way the organisers of this major local festivity have selectively used medieval history to protect influential homosocial networks and justify the exclusion of women from public space reflects and intensifies the symbolic patterns discernible at the national level in Die Schweizer. The Sechseläuten is a highly popular event which takes place annually in April and is connected to the idea of driving out the winter. The ‘Böögg’, a white doll filled with straw and fireworks, is burnt on a pyre (the time its head takes to explode is supposed to predict the quality of the summer to come). Just as important as the burning is the procession of Zurich’s prestigious and influential guilds that precedes it. The guilds are all-male, and women are prevented to this day both from joining existing guilds and from taking part in the procession as an officially accepted all-female guild. Rather, they are confined to the part of spectators, purveyors of flowers to the men and, most recently, ‘guests’ marching in the procession at the Guild Masters’ pleasure. As Ruth Righetti has shown, this discrimination is based in some questionable history.23 The so-called ‘Frauenzunft’ (‘Women’s Guild’)  – more properly the guild-like Society of the Fraumünster  – has existed since 1989. However, all their attempts at being recognised and included in the official ceremony have been rebuffed by the Central Committee of the Guilds of Zurich (ZZZ). As of 2014, and provisionally until 2022, the Women’s Guild has been tolerated at the procession, provided that it participates as a semi-permanent guest of the Society of Constaffel. Nor are the women allowed to participate in the so-called ‘Auszug’ (‘moving out’) after the public part of the Sechseläuten, a reportedly bibulous occasion during which the guilds visit each other in their respective guildhalls. The media report on the marginalisation of women at the Sechseläuten almost every year, some framing it in terms of an image problem for Switzerland’s largest city. Meanwhile, some attempts by the guilds to justify the exclusion of women present it as purely organisational in nature. The staunchest attempts at justification are, however, about medieval history – or, rather, a hazy history that is medieval by implication. In a statement that explains why women cannot be admitted, the ZZZ avoided spreading untruths only thanks to an ambiguous temporal reference: ‘In accordance with their historical origins, the guilds of Zurich only accept men as Ruth Righetti, Die andere Sicht auf das Zürcher Sechseläuten: Männer, Frauen, Macht, Geschichte (Erlenbach, 2007). 23

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members.’ The time frame of those origins is kept conveniently fuzzy. Elsewhere, the guilds are proudly represented as medieval institutions. In fact, the all-male guilds envisioned here are the product of a modern rupture in guild history. The guilds mostly included women in their original, medieval, form up to 1798, even though women were not given the vote in the political capacity which the guilds held after 1336. Female guild membership was made more difficult to obtain over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but total exclusion occurred only after the guilds were dissolved following the fall of the Old Confederacy in 1798 and reconstituted as Zurich’s principal political body in 1803. The guilds were relieved of all political functions by the democratic municipal code of 1866; the successor guilds reverted to social and economic functions, but they retained the men-only membership policy. Even so, until 1950, female relatives or spouses of guild members could at least participate in the Sechseläuten processions.25 Only in 1951 did the Sechseläuten procession achieve its present, virtually female-free form. The historical arguments of those who oppose the recognition of female guilds or guild members are therefore largely spurious. While much is made of the medieval origins in other contexts – the Sechseläuten home page for example proudly lists medieval founding dates for thirteen of the guilds26 – the gender question triggers an opposite response. Here, taking a leaf out of the guild’s history book is actively being avoided. The guilds’ selective commitment to medieval history testifies to extremely conventional and strongly held beliefs – not exclusive to Switzerland – that the Middle Ages were a man’s world. More specifically, the Sechseläuten is a local example of a pattern discernible also at the national level: medieval origins are used selectively – some would say cynically – to lend prestige and ‘colour’ to elite-led self-­ representation steeped in issues of power. They are treated not as obligating but as ornamental, that is, in a way that ensures that the privilege of the current guild members goes unchallenged. There were welcome signs of a shift in guild policy even as this book was being completed. The guilds of the city of Basel, like their equivalents in Zurich, have been pressured to allow female membership, which led the Parliament of Burgesses to announce in 2021 that it would amend guild laws in a way that could be used to force guilds to accept female candidates. Commentators were quick to note that this could potentially establish a precedent for Zurich.27 In fact, Zurich’s largest guild, the Zunft zur Meisen, appears to be trying to get ahead of the curve by freely reconsidering allowing female membership.28 (At the time of writing in August 2022, the 24

Qtd Righetti, Andere Sicht, p. 36. Righetti, Andere Sicht, pp. 24–33. 26 ‘Zunftporträts’ (n.d.) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 27 Daniel Gerny, ‘Brisantes Rechtsgutachten kurz vor dem Sechseläuten: Zünfte könnten gerichtlich zur Aufnahme von Frauen gezwungen werden’ (2021) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 28 ‘Ist dies das Ende der Männerzirkel? Im Spätherbst sollen die Mitglieder von Zürichs grösster Zunft über die Frauenfrage abstimmen’ (2022) [accessed 29 July 2022]. 24 25

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deliberations have been going on for the better part of a year.) Still, it seems safe to predict that should this bastion of high-status male camaraderie fall, it will not be the history books that did for it. A different dynamic of exclusion is at work in histories of war of the sort mentioned in Chapter 1, which are particularly inimical to female participation. This applies to all the nations considered here. Whether in stories of glorious victory or heroic suffering, battle history revels in an imposing, masculine-coded physicality. In this context especially, femininity is the mark of weakness and at best inspires protective instincts in ‘the men’. At worst, femininity demeans male enemies pictured as effeminate and emasculated.29 As some have noted, exceptional female warriors command respect in national histories, Joan of Arc perhaps foremost among them. Yet the women who emulate ‘masculine’ qualities in this way can expect to earn praise only under exceptional circumstances,30 and even then, ‘strong female characters’ are what Shiloh Carroll calls ‘cathartic exceptions’.31 Numerous popular medievalisms, particularly audio-visual and hence, in the context of this book, English-language ones, have sought to install exceptional women as the (near-)equals of men on the battlefield in the twenty-first century. Most of these attempts remain half-hearted, however. Big-screen iterations of the two major medievalist traditions of Robin Hood and King Arthur are cases in point. Scott’s Robin Hood (2010) and Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) each cast the protagonist’s female love interest as a fighter but stop short of making her the equal of her male counterpart. In Robin Hood, Marion takes up arms to help fight off the French invaders but immediately relies on Robin to save her life. Furthermore, she immediately reverts to a motherly role at the end of the film, once the national emergency has been resolved and the merry band set up camp in the greenwood together with a group of orphans.32 The Guinevere of King Arthur, while a more seasoned warrior than Marion, likewise needs male protection. At one point she teases Lancelot, saying she would protect him from rape by a horde of Saxons, but it is she who needs saving by him during the climactic battle. The film concludes with Arthur and Guinevere’s wedding, which unites the Woads with the Roman Britons under Arthur’s kingship. In a telling detail, whereas Arthur keeps on his armour for the wedding ceremony, Guinevere sheds hers to don a pristine white dress with flowery ornaments,33 as if to signal that the protection of a powerful male leader will render female help in combat superfluous in future. Examples from the Robin Hood tradition in particular have shown assertive female characters for some time now. Stephen Knight documents the shift in literary representations of Marian since the 1990s from ‘vulnerable ornament’ to active and even dominant figure.34 Jennifer Roberson’s Lady of the Forest (1992), for example, makes Marian at least the equal of a tormented Robin, and Theresa Tomlinson’s The S. Berger, Past, p. 363. Malečková, ‘Where Are Women’, p. 179. 31 Carroll, Medievalism, p. 71. 32 Mayer, ‘Mythogyny’, p. 29. 33 Compare Nickolas Haydock, ‘Digital Divagations in a Hyperreal Camelot: Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur’, in Fulton, Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 525–42, p. 533. 34 Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY, 2009), p. 185. 29

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Forestwife (1993) represents Marian as self-determined healer. Knight notes that film versions have taken up this theme to a far lesser extent, even though a ‘dilution of outlaw feminism’ made it onto the television screen in 2001 with The Princess of Thieves, in which Robin’s daughter, Gwyn, takes up her father’s mantle.36 In fact, Ridley Scott’s Marion is no mere ornament either but a strong-willed authority figure. The point is, however, that few of these female outlaws make their mark when the nation’s fate is at stake. Robin Hood is, like Fuqua’s King Arthur for its own source tradition, not only the most authenticity-oriented and historicising version in recent history, but also by far the most interested in national themes: King Arthur’s concern with ethnogenesis is matched by Robin Hood’s revisitation of the Norman Conquest and its ‘origin story’ for Magna Carta. It is no coincidence that this desire for authenticity in stories of national origins results in only moderately successful female emancipation by combat. A comparable reluctance to make women fully fledged warriors in the national cause is evinced by the determinedly gritty English-language historical drama television series Vikings (2013–20) and The Last Kingdom (2015–).37 While both series depict formidable female warriors, they do so almost exclusively among the Vikings, who in both series harass a slowly consolidating English nation. That nation’s defenders are overwhelmingly male. In all these fictions, then, men overshadow women in the bloody work of nation-­building, repelling the French or Saxons or handling fractious English–Viking relations at sword point. The nation tames its women even as it first emerges. A less contested role that women can and do play in national battle histories is that of the mourning mother, daughter, wife or lover. Needless to say, this role is lighter on agency than the warrior’s is. Recent representations of Edith the Fair, or Edith ‘Swanneck’, are instructive examples of this. Variously the mistress, handfast wife or legal wife of Harold Godwinson, the Edith of legend goes to look for Harold after the Battle of Hastings.38 Unlike all other searchers, she identifies his mangled corpse, thanks to markings on his body known only to her. Edith’s arrival, search and grieving formed a coda to the 2016 Battle of Hastings re-enactment I touched on in Chapter 1. Her white dress standing out from the men’s steel-and-leather armour and the colourful battle standards, Edith said a brief farewell to Harold that doubled as an elegy for fallen Anglo-Saxon England: ‘So passed the last English king, Harold II, Harold Godwinson, my lord, my liege, my lover. And I shall follow him soon.’ It is worth noting, too, that the woman re-enacting Edith was not the only female 35

35 Jennifer Roberson, Lady of the Forest. A Novel of Sherwood (New York, 1992); Theresa Tomlinson, The Forestwife (New York, 1993); see Knight, Robin Hood, pp. 187–9 and 190f. 36 Knight, Robin Hood, p. 192. 37 Vikings, television series, dir. Ciaran Donnelly et al. Canada: History, 2013–20; The Last Kingdom, television series, dir. Jon East et al. UK: Carnival Film and Television, 2015–. 38 For an early account, see the Waltham Chronicle, ed. and trans. Leslie Watkiss and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1994), pp. 50–3. Edith’s search is the subject of Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Schlachtfeld bei Hastings’ (‘The Battlefield at Hastings’) of 1851. Heine has her loss stand in for the hardships the Normans have inflicted on all the defeated English, refracting political loss through the personal. The identifying marks on Harold’s body are old love bites, which the more recent wounds cruelly mock. Heinrich Heine, ‘Schlachtfeld bei Hastings’, in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine. A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Oxford, 1982), pp. 572–5.

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re-enactor – in fact, many of the fighters were played by women – but she was the only one not passing as a man. This commemorative performance envisages historical women who have no hand in deciding the fate of the nation but can only lament events after the fact. Andrew Kötting’s experimental independent film Edith Walks (2017) offers an enigmatic variant of this role assignment.39 The title character is part of an eccentric troupe of ‘six proud walkers’ who make their way from Waltham abbey to various places associated with Harold, including sites where pieces of Harold’s body are assumed to have been brought after his death. After stopping off at Battle, the walkers finally arrive at the sculpture of Edith cradling Harold in St Leonards-onSea. There, Harold and Edith are symbolically reunited as she spiritually ‘reassembles’ him. Edith Walks negotiates Englishness through physically and symbolically connecting memory sites associated with ‘1066’ by the ritual acts of walking, singing, fiddling on the spokes of a bicycle wheel and so forth. It thus seeks to defamiliarise a familiar landscape. Writers Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, featuring as themselves, offer their thoughts in voice-over. At one point, Sinclair states: ‘In the same way that you might explore the upper reaches of the Amazon, [. . .] we need to explore the outer reaches of the M25.’ This rediscovery of Englishness by its defamiliarisation works by reimbuing the land with the ‘spirit’ of Harold. The film treats Harold and Edith as timeless ‘archetypes’ (Sinclair). Moore speculates about a living past: ‘We never escape history. It’s there all the time, all of these figures, [. . .] they’re informing what we do. Nobody is ever safely dead.’ In Sinclair’s interpretation, Hereward the Wake ‘is a kind of emanation of Harold after he dies’, which makes the archetypical Harold a personification of resistant Englishness waiting to be channelled by the latter-borns. Just as much as Harold, Edith is a ‘multiple portrait that keeps coming back’ (Sinclair). The film never states what she is an archetype of, but from her actions we can conclude that she is a mourner figure. The film repeatedly intercuts video footage of children re-enacting the Battle of Hastings and ‘archive voices’ muse on the futility of war. The female mourner mourns all victims of war, not just the English ones, and heals the body of the community torn by warring men. That much is suggested also by the film’s self-description (on the Blu-ray cover) as ‘a tribute to Edith Swan Neck and men’s ongoing stupidity’. As the eternal mourner, Edith arguably achieves some agency by ‘working the magic’ to resurrect a positive national spirit (Sinclair). This is a reactive agency – men’s ‘ongoing stupidity’ shapes the course of events – but agency nonetheless. Still, it is no exaggeration to say that women are marginal to battle-centric national history as well as to national history more generally, and medieval history is especially susceptible to this imbalance. The underlying pattern of shunting women out of the way in favour of male figures of authority is the norm, not the exception, in the other countries, and in other practices of memory, as well.

39

Edith Walks, film, dir. Andrew Kötting. UK: Home Artist Film, 2017.

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Toxic Masculinity and Female Victimhood Another subset of national medievalisms retains the theme of violence but turns the focus on female agency assailed by male aggression and social constraints. Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake and Werner Ryser’s Walliser Totentanz (‘Valaisan Dance of Death’) are particularly unsparing examples of this. These historical novels depict, respectively, early and late medieval patriarchal societies in which women are bartered away for material gain, domineered, ostracised, assaulted, raped and murdered, in peace and in war. They thus represent exactly the kind of ‘suffering and exploitation of women’ that is at the heart of muscular medievalism, but I argue that they do so not in order to ‘validate [their] vision of masculinity’.40 Rather, these representations of violent control over women serve as a way to make the Middle Ages appear alien and alienating. By highlighting manifestly unjust gender roles, these novels disrupt rather than engender nostalgia for iconic moments in English and Swiss history. In other words, alterity disrupts uncritical continuity, countering the way women’s experiences of systemic violence are glossed over in celebratory national medievalism. As I argued in Chapter 1, The Wake is deeply concerned with the themes of cultural continuity and alterity. The novel presents these themes through the complicating perspective of the unreliable narrator Buccmaster. Close internal focalisation produces a situation in which Buccmaster’s nostalgia and immoral behaviour also tinge everything the reader learns of pre-Conquest gender relations. These gender relations constitute some of the most marked medieval alterity in the novel (at least they will do to any but the most unreconstructed twenty-first-century readers). The Old English patriarchy which Buccmaster reports imposes strict gender roles, which are shot through with notions of value and authority and enforced physically by men. The most egregious excesses of misogyny in the novel are Buccmaster’s own, but it is ultimately of secondary importance how representative they are of the novel’s fictional England. The more important point is that repeated displays of misogyny significantly shape the portrait of a cripplingly flawed narrator who strikes an unrelenting tone of national victimhood. The patterns of muscular medievalism which Buccmaster enacts are thus held up for criticism in a way that necessarily implicates his entire worldview, including his self-pitying nativism. A superficially innocuous division of labour into men’s work and women’s work motivates Buccmaster’s strong opinions about women’s worth in relation to that of men. As they haunt the Brunnesweald, Buccmaster and his miniature war band realise that they do not even know how to prepare their food, as their wives used to do this menial task for them when they were still alive (p. 160). Sometime before the Norman Conquest, Buccmaster is galled by his wife Odelyn’s uncomprehending response when he cryptically prophesies that ‘sum thing is cuman’ (p. 9). He muses: ‘sum times this wif she needed laws though there was many wimmen things she was learned in. it is no mans worc to spec of the loom nor the water pael nor to asc of brewan nor of reapan these things my wif done well and in stillness’ (pp. 9f.). Besides listing some of the farm work appropriate for women, the quotation 40

Kaufman, ‘Muscular Medievalism’, p. 6.

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makes clear the steep hierarchy in the marriage: Buccmaster lays down ‘laws’ for his wife to follow. In a later passage, Buccmaster describes why Odelyn ‘was a good wifman’: she ‘gifan me luf and children and duty lic a wif sceolde all men lusted for my odelyn thynne she was of wifly scape [. . .] all things a wif moste do she wolde do and if she did not she wolde cnaw cwic about it’ (p. 39). Not only is Odelyn a purveyor of affection and a breeding vessel, but Buccmaster controls her entire sexuality. He picks up the thought that ‘all men lusted for my odelyn’ again immediately afterwards: ‘i was thincan [. . .] that to haf a wifman lic this was good for many other men wants her and yet she is mine’ (p. 39, my emphases). Here is a man who compulsively compares his status to that of others. Other men’s desire adds to the commodity value of his objectified wife. The ideological basis for keeping his wife in her place is the familiar idea of innate female inferiority. For example, Buccmaster equates ruminative passivity with femininity: Weland the smith’s voice inside Buccmaster’s head (rendered in italics) tells him that ‘thincan is for wifmen [. . .] they is thincan while weafan and reapan [. . .] thincan while bean fuccd up the arse by frenc men’ (p. 170). By extension, femininity is Buccmaster’s insult of choice for men he considers beneath him. Essentially, that category encompasses all pre-Conquest Englishmen, who he thinks have only themselves to blame for their fate because ‘they was more lic wifmen sum of them runnan lic cycens round their ground’ (p. 22). Late in the novel, he despairs as he loses his sway over the war band and articulates his frustration in terms of a general English emasculation: ‘here now was the weacness and the smallness of angland. [. . .] in the eald times all wolde haf gan with a man lic this [i.e., himself] and done his will but now all was weac lic wifmen’ (p. 339). Buccmaster’s misogyny recalls patterns of muscular medievalism on several levels. His authority and self-esteem rely on bullying generally, but it also comes in a gendered variant. He uses extreme controlling behaviour and physical violence to assert his domestic authority. When Odelyn tells him that he should have given his son his sword to go fight in the fyrd, Buccmaster lashes out: ‘thu fuccan tells me what i sceolde sae to my son i saes what i sceolde do in my hus [. . .] and she saes naht only locs down at her feet lic a hund lic always and stands still to mac her self lytel’ (p. 48). He beats her – to teach her ‘to haf sum pryde in [her]self ’ – and represents himself as the gracious provider of wholesome guidance: ‘what wolde thu do without me i saes who wolde teacc thu these things who wolde teacc thu to be a wifman’ (p. 48). The despot demands compliance, but a lack of ‘pryde’ on her part will earn her a hiding too. The ultimate form of violent domination is, in Buccmaster’s mind, sexual. He consistently links the Norman invasion with the thought of rape. The Normans are indeed shown to rape women as part of the depredations they visit on England. However, Buccmaster thinks of rape chiefly in symbolic terms. He shows no compassion for a lower-class woman whom he finds actually raped and dying after the Normans have passed through. On the other hand, his farm being burnt down and his wife being murdered, and more abstractly, England being invaded in the first place: these things he conceptualises as rape, and consequently feels raped himself.

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Buccmaster dignifies his constant anxiety of personal humiliation by magnifying it into a feeling of national shame. He translates the feeling into an image of child rape in the following passage: ‘now we is lytel hores in their [the Normans’] beds lytel children used they fuccs us smercan they saes we is thy gods we has the flag [. . .] bend before me cilde i is thy fuccan cyng’ (p. 104). Seeking to instil similar feelings of humiliation in the villagers of Creatas Tun to goad them into joining his guerrilla war, Buccmaster invokes sexual horrors, making up gruesome details about the deaths of the parents of his young companion Tofe. He represents their deaths as acts of extreme sexual violence: Tofe’s mother was, he claims, raped and genitally mutilated, the father castrated (p. 199). With this, he suggests a parallel with all England, imagined as a woman taken from her rightful male owner, who in turn is violently emasculated. Underlying all this imagery is the anxiety of men vicariously ‘raping’ – i.e., humiliating – other men via their women. In a particularly disturbing example of this, Buccmaster fantasises about raping William’s wife, Queen Matilda (p. 272), as a means of getting to the husband. Characteristically, Buccmaster pictures the rape as a re-enactment of the old Germanic myth of Weland, in which Weland kills King Nithad’s sons and rapes his daughter as ‘wergild’ for his enslavement at the king’s hands (p. 96). Only gradually does it become clear that raping women to bolster his sense of self-worth is not confined to Buccmaster’s imagination. Well before committing numerous murders following the Norman invasion, Buccmaster kills his father and sister and burns them in a barn. He also rapes the sister, Aelfgifu, beforehand. Early in the novel, Buccmaster insists that he does not wish to talk about her to his interpolated audience (p. 25), but small details subsequently suggest he harboured incestuous desire for her even when they were children (pp. 147, 265f.). The eventual revelation of Buccmaster’s crime shows that the rape was motivated by frustration at a thwarted sense of male entitlement. We can infer from his increasingly fraying narration that he had defied his father and returned from banishment (his father had sent him away after Buccmaster had tried to give his grandfather a pagan funeral). In the novel’s concluding passages, Buccmaster argues with Weland’s voice about whether it was right to ‘tac her [Aelfgifu] that way’ (p. 330). Throughout the novel, Weland has counselled Buccmaster to be ruthless in taking what is his, and now he convinces Buccmaster that he was justified in raping his sister: ‘thu had thy right [. . .] she lufd thu [. . .] any man wolde do the same’ (p. 330). As Buccmaster’s mind falters, the narrative voice breaks up into crazed ramblings and renderings of Aelfgifu’s pleading. Buccmaster, self-righteous and resentful at being denied – ‘all saes no all is agan me’ (p. 343) and ‘she wolde not do what she sceolde’ – at last fully assimilates ‘Weland’s’ apocalyptic urging. He welcomes the destruction (‘rape’) of England just as he previously raped and destroyed his family: ‘beorn the hus beorn the land / beorn them all’. The novel’s conclusion thus shows the full extent of Buccmaster’s toxic blend of feelings of inferiority with a sense of entitlement and a violent streak. Buccmaster consistently preys on those weaker than him and makes such behaviour a matter of ideology. He assimilates the crude proto-social Darwinism of his grandfather, taught to him in an allegory of eels, crows and hawks (p. 37): there are those who surrender meekly, those who put up a fight and those who prey on others. In that

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view, ‘all of the world is blud’ (p. 36)’. Although Buccmaster may resent being at the receiving end of the right of conquest which the Normans claim over England, it is actually a normative belief he shares: late in the novel, he describes the Normans as ‘triewe men strong men’ and the English as ‘weac and eald’ (p. 342). In fact, the way he treats his family and fellow English mirrors rather than contrasts the actions of the invaders. When he abandons his men to die at the hands of the Normans at the end of novel, there can be no illusion of an ‘attractive’ muscular medievalism: Buccmaster has shown himself to be not only a rapist and a murderer, but also a liar and a coward. Muscular medievalism shows itself in all its moral emaciation. The novel is a grim vision of a grim time in English history. However, as I argued in Chapter 1, the choice of protagonist and focaliser, a violent misogynist and murderer, prevents The Wake from turning into a self-righteous statement of abiding national victimhood at the hands of foreigners – a reading which, bizarrely, Kingsnorth himself seems partly to endorse. This England has been a harsh place for the powerless well before the coming of the Normans. In fact, when Buccmaster and his men speak to the people of Creatas Tun, the Reeve ridicules Buccmaster’s talk of lost freedom: ‘we is all thralls my freond all the time and has always been in angland. [. . .] thralls for harald thralls for geeyome’ (p. 198). The Wake paints the picture of a society in which the weak suffer what they must, and women suffer more than most  – at the hands of both the Normans and fellow countrymen like Buccmaster. The world of Walliser Totentanz is similarly grim, but in this case, male predation is even an instrument of legal institutions.41 The narrative perspective is drastically different from that adopted in The Wake: in this case, zero focalisation allows the narrator to flit between the thoughts of his characters and a knowing perspective of historical retrospect. The focalisers are primarily the marginalised, and particularly marginalised women such as the de facto protagonist Magdalena Capelani, who are all eventually destroyed by a callous society. The novel was first published in 2009 and given a new edition in 2015. Particularly in that latter year, its rich and often shocking fictionalisation of both Old Confederate (i.e., national) history and Valaisan (i.e., regional and local) history contrasted startlingly with the political appropriation of the Swiss Middle Ages that foregrounded complacent narratives of national autonomy and cohesion.42 The Italian Wars (1494–1559) serve as a backdrop for much of the plot. The Valais was not then a full member of the Confederacy, but a close, ‘eternal ally’ (ewiger Mitverbündeter).43 Ties of a political, social, economic and military nature were strong, and are represented as such in Walliser Totentanz. Outside views represented in the novel amplify this close relationship: during military campaigns beyond the Alps, the Valaisan mercenaries are perceived simply as part of the hated ‘Swiss’ by the local population. The novel references an intricate web of shifting political alliances that convulse rural Valaisan society which supplies the warring parties with Werner Ryser, Walliser Totentanz (Visp, 2009). Ryser has stated that no intervention in the politics of history was intended: Markus Gasser, ‘“Walliser Totentanz” von Werner Ryser’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 43 HLS, s.v. ‘Wallis’. 41

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mercenaries. Specifically, the Valais is disrupted again and again by the conflict between Cardinal Matthäus Schiner, loyal to the pope, and military contractor and French factionist Georg Supersaxo, both of whom have strong ties to the region. Magdalena, an independent-minded herbalist, ekes out a living tilling a small plot of land by the town of Münster. By the end of the book, she has been broken by a society that allows the wealthy to buy their way to salvation, that has turned her brother Jodok into a failed father, rapist and murderer, and that has scapegoated, tortured and burnt her three daughters as witches. The novel’s back cover announces a fifteenth century that is ‘still deeply medieval’. Its versions of the Valais and the Old Confederacy are beset with hunger, plague and superstition mingled with a Christianity that easily turns persecutory. Above all, however, permanent warfare and the violent men it breeds corrode society in ways that affect those on the margins most of all. The omniscient narrator paints a picture of savagery as normalised behaviour in Italy: pillage, murder, torture and rape at the hands of invading armies are ‘nothing unusual for the time’ (p. 20). Repeatedly, author Werner Ryser describes in explicit detail scenes of utter barbarism in the aftermath of battle, and returnee mercenaries boast openly of their transalpine ‘heroics’. There is social pressure on able-bodied male villagers to conform to this behaviour: failure to join the mercenary bands is identified as cowardice and punished with shaming and marginalisation by women, other men and even children (p. 445). The entrenchment of toxic masculinity becomes apparent when Magdalena’s brother Jodok turns rapist on a campaign in Italy (p. 335). While marauding an undefended estate, Jodok comes across a girl in hiding, whom he rapes. Only, he seems to think of it as consensual sex because she does not struggle, and only afterwards does he realise that she simply feared for her life. His belated feelings of shame more than anything suggest that numbing and brutalisation are near-certain consequences of the mercenary life. By describing the rape and its aftermath from the perspective of Jodok, a formerly sympathetic character, the novel suggests a horrific warping of perception. The mercenaries dehumanise enemy fighters and civilians to the point of seeing them as legitimate objects of violence, including sexual violence. Jodok subsequently marries the girl and for a while cares for their children after she dies of the plague, but his moral ruin is irreversible. When Hanna Lagger, his pregnant second wife-to-be, loses a lucrative dowry, he discards her, leaving his three children for Magdalena to take care of as he goes on a vendetta that claims his life. Jodok’s corruption dovetails with Ryser’s wider deconstruction of the Swiss 44

The origins of the Swiss mercenary trade lie in the thirteenth century, but it flourished particularly after the victories in the Burgundian Wars (1474–77). It had a significant impact on the development of the Confederacy and continued in some form or other until the midnineteenth century: André Holenstein, Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte (Baden, 2014), pp. 32–40. During the time depicted in the novel, the mercenary trade was not only excellent business for the social elite (who earned massive profits recruiting mercenary armies) but also promised spoils to those recruited from lower estates. 44

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mercenary as a romantic figure of proud identification.45 The Swiss mercenaries represent the worst kind of masculinity, which is a symptom of, and in turn contributes to, a wider social malaise. Female victimhood is a constant theme throughout. Besides the hardship of physical labour and child-bearing (p. 223), patriarchal structures mean that young women are sold off in barter deals by their parents (p. 178), expected to subordinate themselves unconditionally to their husbands (p. 359), vulnerable to sexual exploitation when in the employ of men (p. 175) and blamed as ‘temptresses’ to explain male sexual aggression (p. 502). War rape abroad is matched by domestic violence at home that repeatedly escalates into domestic rape and occasionally even rape by outsiders facilitated by husbands and fathers (pp. 26–8, 190). Unmarried mothers are publicly shamed and driven to backdoor abortions by their relatives, which proves fatal in Hanna’s case (p. 518). Witch hunts that enjoy the backing of the law are the most obvious expressions of systemic misogynist violence in the novel. Women calumniated as witches face arrest, torture and burning at the stake. The authorities are perfectly aware that this is scapegoating: Magdalena’s daughters and an elderly herbalist are charged with witchcraft when natural disaster strikes the village, and when the prosecutor urges yet more arrests, the mayor coldly calculates that ‘four are enough. The people want someone to pay for the storm that destroyed the harvest. They don’t want a bloodbath’ (p. 593). The rape of female prisoners may not officially be part of the legal procedure but is tolerated; both Magdalena’s cousin, Maria Zussen and Magdalena’s adopted daughter Elsa are violated in custody. Describing Maria’s ordeal, the narrator briefly abandons his omniscience in a way that suggests sexual violence is horribly predictable: ‘the two men probably raped her during a brief halt [on the way to prison]’ (p. 44, my emphasis). The only reliable protection against an angry mob baying for a woman’s blood are lone men of integrity and authority, such as Niklaus of Flüe and the local pastor and magister Hildebrand in Superiori, both of whom are described as successfully defending women suspected of witchcraft (pp. 130f., 208, 572). This theme of female victimhood is not to suggest female passivity, however. Magdalena in particular is determined to live a life free from the control of others. As a survivor of rape, she is long disgusted by the thought of sex. The extra work on the farm is a price she is willing to pay to remain unmarried (p. 271). Gifted with second sight, she never truly belongs but for the most part is grudgingly respected: ‘People thought her uncanny, and the fact that she wasn’t put in the 45 As Holenstein, Kury and Schulz point out, such romanticisation of the Swiss mercenaries has been so thorough that it even made it into the HLS, which paints a primitivist picture when speaking of the ‘natural strength, based on elemental aggressiveness, of the impetuous farmers and herders’: HLS, s.v. ‘Kriegführung’; André Holenstein, Patrick Kury and Kristina Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Baden, 2018), pp. 49f. This romanticisation is particularly striking when compared against critical discourses of the sixteenth century, when Swiss self-idealisation as a people of pious peasants began to be seriously questioned as the ‘moral damages caused by the mercenary trade’ – atrocities and betrayal committed in Italy and corruption at home – became too many to ignore: Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte: Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2007), pp. 37f.

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dock in Ernen as a witch was due not least to the fact that nobody knew when they would next need her healing arts’ (p. 524). Her struggle for personal agency leads her to confront the hypocrisy of the clergy: remembering how unmarried mothers like herself have been whipped and humiliated on the pillory, she blackmails the parson, who himself has a child out of wedlock, into protecting her (p. 321). She also poisons Gon, the man who has raped her, saving Gon’s future wife from him in the process (pp. 261–3). Not coincidentally, Magdalena is the character most strongly linked to the dance of death in the title. To several dances of death, in fact: the phrase refers to as many as four discrete but interrelated phenomena in the novel.46 Firstly, and most obviously, it refers to the allegorical motif of the danse macabre, at whose core is the idea that death, the great equaliser, spares neither high nor low. Such a danse macabre is realised (as it was in the real world) in Niklaus Manuel’s Bernese Dance of Death mural, whose conceptual genesis the reader witnesses through Niklaus’s perspective. Secondly, the motif of the dance of death refers to the Valaisan belief in a spectral ‘Gratzug’ (‘ridge procession’), which Magdalena is one of very few to see (pp. 106, 539f.). This ‘dance’ consists of death personified beating the drum followed by a host of dead souls, who must walk the glacier ice in a purgatorial state. Thirdly, the title can be read as describing the daily struggle for survival under harsh circumstances, in which death – violent or otherwise – is a daily occurrence, suggesting specifically the idea of homo homini lupus. (Hildebrand is reminded of this adage when hearing the confession of an unrepentant murderer, p. 118.) Fourthly, and in response to this ubiquity of death, the dance of death refers to the originally pre-Christian Valaisan custom of playing music and dancing around the graves of the freshly deceased in an affirmation of life. As the novel shows, however, this last, hopeful dance of death relies on communal solidarity which its (female) Others are rarely afforded. Magdalena is uniquely positioned by virtue of her gender, supernatural gift and outsider status to perceive at the material and metaphysical level the pervasiveness of death and the way it continuously gives the lie to the egalitarian symbolism of the dance of death motif. This fuels her hard-dying compassion towards the living and makes her an astute observer of social injustice. She is aware that, in an instance of intersectionality, women are the first of several powerless groups to fall victim to unjust social structures that allow the powerful, especially powerful men, to use and sacrifice them to their advantage. Angry that her elder brother Franziskus is prepared to lose his life in some lord’s war, Magdalena echoes the sentiment voiced by the reeve in The Wake: ‘it doesn’t matter to little people like us if we pay the tithe to the lord bishop in Sion, the Duke of Milan or Jörg Uff der Flüe [i.e., Supersaxo]’ (p. 105). Late in the novel, she has a forceful realisation of personhood, and of its precarity: ‘Never before had Magdalena been so clear in her mind that life was unique and irretrievable, and that no one, neither Church nor Emperor nor King, had the right to sacrifice what time people had on the altars of their [. . .] ambition’ (pp. 568f.). 46 Compare Markus Gasser, ‘Totentanz im Wallis: Wenn das Sterben zum Verrecken wird’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022].

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If Magdalena emerges a ‘modern’ figure from my description, that is because she enacts what has been called the ‘emergence of the individual’. A powerful if ambiguous notion traditionally linked to discourses of periodisation, it posits a period of pronounced increase in self-reflection in Europe, with individuals recognising their very individuality to be worthy of communication. Suzanne Verderber discusses the shift towards greater representational ‘realism’ in the arts and the surge in autobiographical writing in the early twelfth century in terms of such an emergence of the individual.47 However, the emergence of the individual has been used more persistently and more sweepingly to describe the supposed overcoming of a stifling medieval collectivism with the Renaissance.48 Walliser Totentanz suggests precisely this latter situation.49 Aided by her outsider status, her desire for freedom and her refusal to defer blindly to authority, Magdalena appreciates the value of individual life in a way that sets her apart from the ‘deeply medieval’ world she inhabits. This puts her on the same plane as the artists Niklaus Manuel and Jörg Keller, whom we encounter briefly in the novel as they craft works of art that are implied to be infused with a humanist and individualist ethos and thus transcend their medievality.50 Magdalena’s modernity is part of an alterity medievalism as powerful as that of The Wake. When she deplores her society’s exploitation of women and the disdain of the powerful for the lives of others, she is backed up extradiegetically by a narrator who occasionally signals a knowing temporal detachment from his subject. He adopts a historian’s tone, for example, when he states that ‘these events [. . .] would later go down in Valaisan history as the Zussen quarrel’ (p. 58), or that, ‘out in the world, great things were happening’ (p. 144). More pertinently, quasi-­ anthropological observations validate Magdalena’s clear view of the cruelty and injustice of her doomed medieval world: besides the above-mentioned signalling of how predictable rape was, the narrator at one point comments that the local torturer, knowing he is about to rack an innocent man, ‘knew no pity. His heart had hardened like the time in which he lived’ (p. 202, my emphasis). But while Magdalena may step out of the mental confines of her time, she cannot escape its violence. At the end of the book, she has lost her home and all members of her family but one to war and persecution by her neighbours. We last see her, 47 Suzanne Verderber, The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 1–4. 48 Valentin Groebner, Der Schein der Person: Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Europa des Mittelalters (Munich, 2004), p. 9. 49 See also Roman Bucheli, ‘Ein einzig Hauen und Stechen’ (2015) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 50 Manuel’s Bernese Dance of Death (1516–19), though extant only in the gouache copy of Albrecht Kauw, has been attested significant individuality of expression: see e.g., Der Berner Totentanz des Niklaus Manuel (etwa 1484 bis 1530) in den Nachbildungen von Albrecht Kauw (1649), ed. and intr. Paul Zinsli (Bern, 1979). Manuel was a critic of the abuses of the mercenary trade and a spearhead of the Reformation: HLS, s.v. ‘Niklaus Manuel’. The woodcarver Jörg Keller is an eminent representative of late-Gothic statuary art and credited with several notable altarpieces in the Valais and Central Switzerland: HLS, s.v. ‘Jörg Keller’. The novel’s Keller is admired for his ability to capture the essence of the individuals he uses as models for his statues.

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aged and rambling, beneath the representation of the damned in the Bernese minster’s Last Judgement. She and her family are all destined for damnation: ‘Burnt, burnt, burnt. [. . .] The gates of hell are on the village square of Ernen’ (p. 604) – the place where her daughters have been burnt at the stake. Even had she known it, the egalitarian symbolism of Manuel’s Dance of Death would have given her cold comfort, since even the prospect of salvation in death is unequally distributed in her world. Only conformity is rewarded with relative safety in life, and salvation is for sale: Magdalena’s well-off co-conspirator in the poisoning of Gon later obtains an indulgence. In contrast, the marginalised, and especially marginalised women, perish prematurely with little hope of salvation in the afterlife. Both The Wake and Walliser Totentanz, then, represent societies in which man is a wolf to (wo)man. By a curious chance, the protagonists of both novels perceive the dynamics of predation that shapes their lives most clearly as they witness the desperate writhing of moribund eels. Buccmaster is inducted into the art of eel-­ fishing by his grandfather, who seizes the opportunity to teach him the allegory of the eels, the crows and the hawk. Magdalena, walking on pilgrimage to the Great St Bernard, passes by an elderly fisherman struggling with a large eel, and she has the thought that the workings of the world are ‘living and dying, killing and being killed’ (p. 229). But the realisation leads these characters to very different conclusions. Buccmaster, whose rejection of the religious and secular laws of his society springs from megalomania and delusional beliefs in the old gods, thereafter aspires to be a predator. Magdalena, on the other hand, works her way to a humanist realisation of the value of the life of the individual and solidarises with those preyed on by the rest of society. It is unarguable that this respective allocation of callousness and altruism to Buccmaster and Magdalena casually reflects common gendered stereotypes. In each instance, however, they serve a critical purpose. Both predator and prey break down as a result of the violence that pervades their lives; both envision their world aflame after a final traumatic event. Their stories are subversions, not displays, of a muscular medievalism that celebrates oppressive gender roles: Magdalena and other women like her, who claim agency and are victimised for it, are worn down by years of suffering; the male perpetrator Buccmaster becomes utterly lost in his own monstrosity. Women as victims in – rather than just of – national medievalism may fill some audiences with unease in a time of omnipresent media representation of violence against women, not to mention persistent actual violence against women. Both the English and the Swiss novels do respond to contemporary medievalist convention, shared internationally, according to which the devaluation of women increases representational authenticity. However, Ryser and Kingsnorth put these authenticity effects to work in squalid portrayals of periods traditionally regarded as key moments in national development. Any nostalgia and positive national identification which their respective choice of setting might have suggested is exploded. The treatment of the female Other contributes the point of the needle.

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Female Agency in a Man’s World The final examples I consider in this chapter emphasise, to very different effect, female agency in the context of national origin myths. They are part of the wider trend in medievalist fiction generally to include more female protagonists and focalisers. This is the case particularly in fantasy settings and in young adult fiction.51 The examples discussed here are historical fictions concerned with national themes and directed at adult audiences. The BBC’s The White Queen (2013) puts female characters at the centre of a fictionalisation of the Wars of the Roses, a period supercharged in reception with narratives of emergent modern national identity, while Rona Munro’s James Plays do the same for late-medieval Scotland. Eveline Hasler’s medievalism-within-a-medievalism Tells Tochter (Tell’s Daughter, 2004) portrays the struggle of an eighteenth-century salonist against oligarchic and patriarchal structures as continuing the true spirit of freedom fighter Wilhelm Tell. The White Queen is a condensation of Philippa Gregory’s historical novel series The Cousins’ War (which consists of The White Queen, 2009, The Red Queen, 2010 and The Kingmaker’s Daughter, 2012)52 and fictionalises the lives of Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort and Anne Neville.53 Over the course of ten episodes, they manoeuvre to achieve power for themselves as queen consort or, in the case of Margaret, queen mother, and to see their respective sons crowned king of England. The series was billed as a feminist take on the period. Emma Frost, series head writer for The White Queen and its sequels, The White Princess and The Spanish Princess,54 has described The White Queen as looking at ‘a well-chronicled moment in history through the perspective of the characters whose stories are not often told – the women’.55 The show’s tagline likewise suggested a privileging of female agency and power over male: ‘Men go to battle, women wage war.’56 By ironically contrasting the ‘woman’s weapons’ wielded by the principal characters with swords and armour,57 the promotional material suggested women’s weapons are subtler but more powerful than the men’s. In fact, however, the women’s weapons fully reflect the narrow focus on a domesticity that has value only to the extent that it caters to men. By far the most powerful female weapon in the series is 51 See e.g., Clara Bradford and Rebecca Hutton, ‘Female Protagonists in Arthurian Television for the Young: Gendering Camelot’, in Helen Young (ed.), The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre (Amerst, NY, 2015), pp. 11–34. 52 Philippa Gregory, The Cousin’s War, 3 vols (New York, 2009–12). 53 The White Queen, television series, dir. Colin Teague, James Kent and Jamie Payne. UK: BBC, 2013. 54 The White Princess, television series, dir. Jamie Payne and Alex Kalymnios. UK: Company Pictures, 2017; The Spanish Princess, television series, dir. Lisa Clarke et al. UK: All3 Media, 2019–20. 55 Emma Frost, ‘“The White Queen” Writer Emma Frost on Sex, Historical Accuracy and Making “The Real ‘Game of Thrones’”’ (2013) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 56 Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons’, p. 114. 57 Kavita Mudan Finn, ‘“Men Go to Battle, Women Wage War”: Gender Politics in The White Queen and Its Fandom’, in North, Alvestad and Woodacre, Premodern Rulers, pp. 131– 51, at p. 131.

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motherhood. Producing a male heir is ever at the forefront of the minds of Elizabeth and Edward and, later on, of Anne and Richard. Margaret has her own son, Henry Tudor, marked for kingship from a young age, and does little else besides praying and furthering his – and by extension her own – rise. According to showrunner Frost, the women’s ‘arsenal’ further includes ‘wit’, a ‘better psychological understanding’ than the men’s, ‘a network of language and gossip and rumor that they manipulate’ and ‘when appropriate, they manipulate the men sexually’.59 All this is primarily in aid of marriage politics. Elizabeth, the ‘White Queen’ from the title, is particularly successful, using her weapons to rise from middling nobility to queen consort over the course of a single episode, and later arranging for her daughter, Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ of York, to marry Henry VII. Crucially, in centring motherhood and wifehood, the show’s focus on domesticity goes beyond merely reflecting the undeniable limits on the agency of medieval women in the public realm. Misty Urban points out the manifold ways in which medieval noblewomen exerted influence that did not necessarily arise, as the series suggests, from their relationship to men: 58

medieval noblewomen were accustomed to overseeing their properties and running households; queens had a council, officers, and servants including personal attendants, knights, grooms, and pages on their payroll. Noblewomen could be feoffees of their own or their children’s estates and arbitrate disputes; Elizabeth Woodville had a place on her son Edward’s council, and Margaret Beaufort, after her son’s ascension, owned property in her own name. [. . .] Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, and Margaret Beaufort all served as benefactors of chapels and colleges and as patronesses of religious organizations and artistic endeavors like the new printing press.60

The White Queen chooses instead to represent all female agency as derived from, cajoled out of or employed in support of, male agency. In a criticism of the series that is also an apt description of much of contemporary popular medievalism, Urban notes that ‘the modern conception of the medieval gives less latitude to women than the medieval period did’.61 To compensate for the absence of other forms of female agency not derived from men, The White Queen equips the three Woodville women – Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, Elizabeth herself and her daughter Lizzie – with magic powers. The screen writers use this to account for certain twists in the fortunes of the Houses of York and Lancaster. Magic is shown as an exclusively feminine form of agency (in keeping with the connection of femininity with domesticity, it is practised unobserved at night and mostly in closed spaces). Tellingly, little good comes of it: magic is shown to be highly effective but treacherous to the women who wield it. Most cruelly, the Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons’, p. 122. Frost, ‘“White Queen”’. 60 Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons’, p. 116. 61 Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons’, p.  124; see also Tolmie, ‘Medievalism’, esp. pp.  148–53; Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, 1997), p. 26. 58

59

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curse Elizabeth and Lizzie place on whomever has killed the prince(s) in the tower and on the killer’s male offspring rebounds on Lizzie and her husband, Henry VII. Elizabeth had actually substituted an impostor for little Richard and so saved him from his would-be assassins, but years later, in The White Princess, Richard returns as the pretender Perkin Warbeck, and so Lizzie’s consent to having him executed amounts to cursing her and Henry’s own bloodline. Urban’s suggestion that magic be read as ‘a metaphor for and extension of female will’ in The White Queen is convincing,62 and while magic is shown to be the most destructive form of female power, all female power is, ultimately, suggested to be harmful. To be sure, female agency is shown in a positive light to the extent that it conforms to modern ideas of individual self-determination. However, these women sacrifice the common good  – and even people close to them  – in the pursuit of power for themselves and their closest family. In The White Princess, Lizzie, now queen, is fully cognisant of the disastrous consequences brought about by her mother’s lust for power. Lizzie herself is faced with the impossible choice of letting her brother Richard live to challenge her husband’s kingship or letting him be executed and thus incurring her mother’s curse. She tells Richard, ‘I hated her [i.e., their mother’s] ambition. What it did to us. Nothing else mattered but power.’ Yet power is what Lizzie will choose herself: in consenting to having her brother executed, she ensures her own and her husband’s short-term political supremacy. The show’s narrow and doubtful representation of female agency yet again exemplifies the tendencies of masculine-coded national medievalism more generally. With the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen chooses to represent a prime national memory site suggestive of national fission, civil war and eventual reunification. The series remediates the chief narratives that converge on this memory site to highlight the roles played by the aristocratic women involved, but it does this firmly within the national-historical paradigm. To be sure, these women are shown to be the string-pullers behind many an action taken by the men on whom, ostensibly, the fate of the divided nation hinges. But part of the problem lies precisely in this strategy of using female characters as ‘explanations’ for certain historical events without making these events appear in a substantially different light. The White Queen does not tell the story of Elizabeth, Margaret and Anne as much as it tells the story of the Wars of the Roses through Elizabeth, Margaret and Anne. In other words, while The White Queen purports to be a feminist counter-history, it reproduces traditional national histories of turmoil and ultimate proto-modern nationhood springing from dynastic stability, representing that nationhood as the inevitable vanishing point of late medieval England. The show’s modest achievement in historical revisionism lies in slotting female perspectives into the basic national plot lines widely known through Shakespeare’s English histories. A brief look at Rona Munro’s James Plays suggests that domesticity by itself does not entail that women are secondary players in national history. Despite what their titles may suggest, these plays do not focus exclusively on the male royals. In fact, female characters and their contributions to Scottish society are highlighted at various points without necessarily having to contribute directly to, or explain, the major 62

Urban, ‘Women’s Weapons’, p. 120.

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‘plot points’ of national history, which include the succession of the Jameses and their involvement in Scotland’s constitutional development. As Sarah Thomasson has pointed out, by ‘deliberately stag[ing] women’s labor throughout’, the plays’ genuinely revisionist history reveals ‘the key roles that women of all classes played in fifteenth-century Scottish history’.63 When James I first encounters his English wife, Joan, she lists her wide-ranging competence in husbandry, but also in diplomacy, and confidently states: ‘We’ll do well together if it’s in my power [. . .]. I know how to be an excellent queen’ (p. 28). Joan’s Scottish lady-in-waiting, Meg, similarly lists her diverse abilities and responsibilities. Besides her domestic competences, she is also a cultural attaché: ‘I’m here to teach you [i.e., Joan] Scots. Everything about the Scots. About Scotland. What we eat, how we talk, how we dance’ (p. 19). Both women are shown to deliver on their promises. When women take part in high politics, they do so as effective stateswomen.64 In James III, Margaret effectively runs the nation in the place of the feckless James, conducting diplomacy and reviewing laws. The play links this political activity with an interest in her personal growth, which it contrasts with James’s failure to do likewise.65 Margaret emancipates herself from her initial infatuation with her narcissistic husband and thereafter enjoys a self-determined life. The point is that Munro suspends the traditional hierarchy of concerns that is discernible in The White Queen: in The James Plays, the plot is as much the servant of the characterisation of women as the women are servants of the familiar plot of patrilineal dynasty and constitutional development. Munro refuses to organise the action exclusively around those traditional components of national history, which allows her to redefine that national history as more diverse and interested also in women’s roles as well as the ‘smaller’ histories of the lower classes. As this example suggests, no medievalisms are inherently unreceptive to feminist appropriation. The problem for The White Queen is that its choice of an overdetermined national-historical frame encourages the ‘behind every great man is a great woman’ trope, into which the series and its sequel buy unreservedly. In the tradition of political history that continues to haunt the big and small screens, the succession of familiar ‘great events’ with which we are presented poses as more or less the totality of representable history of that time. The very structure of that tenacious type of history works to obscure the female agency Frost purports to champion. When she claims to be telling ‘the real history [. . .] through the women’,66 she is referring to a history that comes pre-packaged in a national narrative unconcerned with women’s experiences and contributions unless they touch directly on the development of the nation. In consequence, The White Queen and The White Princess enlist the 63 Sarah Thomasson, ‘The James Plays. By Rona Munro. Directed by Laurie Sansom. Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. 20–21 August 2014’, Theatre Journal, 67:2 (2015), 328–32, at p. 331. 64 Thomasson, ‘James Plays’, p. 331. 65 The third play’s leitmotif, announced in the subtitle, is the ‘true mirror’: a perfect mirror imported from Venice, which leads James to despair of his supposed ugliness and the flattery of which he consequently suspects his courtiers. James gifts the mirror to Margaret in the hope of getting a similar reaction out of her, but she embraces her imperfections (p. 251). 66 Frost, ‘“White Queen”’.

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domestic female Other for, and subsume it under, a conventional master narrative of nation-building. The totalising tendency of the national category is on full display here: an emphasis on women may change the story but not the narrative. Eveline Hasler chooses a different path while still putting a woman at the heart of a story with strong national resonance in her historical novel Tells Tochter: Julie Bondeli und die Zeit der Freiheit (‘Tell’s Daughter: Julie Bondeli and the Age of Freedom’).67 Hasler represents her protagonist and principal focaliser, a mid-eighteenth-century woman of letters, as Wilhelm Tell’s spiritual daughter, and thus re-radicalises a key Swiss medievalism at whose heart is the idea of freedom from tyranny. Despite this national resonance, Julie herself escapes the tyranny of national history; despite what the subtitle might be read to suggest, her story does not exhaust itself in the wider movement towards, let alone the attainment of, any national telos of ‘freedom’. Like the Julie Bondeli of historical record, she is a patrician salonnière of brilliant intellect, hosting at her ‘little Sorbonne’ a set of cosmopolitan, reformist-minded citizens of Bern and international guests. She participates in intellectual exchange with influential figures such as Johann Georg Zimmermann, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Christoph Martin Wieland and the leading thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thus contributing to the Enlightenment ‘Republic of Letters’ at the local, national and international levels. As Julie’s multiple fields of action suggest, she defies co-optation by nationalism even as her story is animated by that old nationalist favourite, freedom. Julie strives not least for what is the deeply personal freedom of achieving a public voice of her own in the face oppressive gender norms: ‘the freedom of not having to appear that which I’m not’ (p. 249). The novel jumps between two time periods: Julie’s childhood education in the 1740s by the journalist, poet and later would-be conspirator Samuel Henzi, and Julie’s own activities as a political influencer, epistolean and savante in the 1750s and 1760s. During these decades, Bern is the most powerful city-state north of the Alps. The corrupt and paranoid Ancien Régime has a firm grip on power by ruthlessly repressing all shows of dissent. It maintains the semblance of republicanism but has long since lapsed into oligarchy, its famed liberties available only to a narrow and narrowing social circle.68 The Bernese social and political order is inimical also to female education, not to mention female activity in the public sphere. Julie’s formal education in languages, mathematics and philosophy alone marks her as unusual for her time, and she has to negotiate a public opinion which has a hard time accepting that a woman should express her own opinions publicly. Eveline Hasler, Julie Bondeli und die Zeit der Freiheit (Munich, 2006). The citizens of Bern were sovereign, whether actively ruling (in the city’s Small or Grand Councils) or merely regimentsfähig (capable and entitled to rule). The majority population of so-called ‘residents’ – the English term fails to capture the spatial hierarchy expressed in the German Hintersassen, literally ‘those who sit behind’ the lordship – had no political rights. They could hope to attain citizenship and the rights it entailed until 1651, when citizenship was closed off. Increasingly, the ruling citizens, the patricians, sought to exclude permanently also the merely Regimentsfähigen from public office and even from participation in sovereignty. In a process of aristocratisation, the Bernese patriciate developed ever finer distinctions between gradations of nobility. See Urs Helmensdorfer, ‘Kopf ab oder Tell in Bern’, in Samuel Henzi, Grisler ou l’ambition punie/Grisler oder der bestrafte Ehrgeiz, trans. Kurt Steinmann (Basel, 1996), pp. 153–83, at p. 163–5. 67

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The twin malaises of ossified political and gender hierarchies are embodied most prominently by the contradictory polymath Albrecht von Haller. A notable physiologist, biologist, scholar and poet, Haller contributed greatly to international Philhelvetism and especially Bern’s international reputation as an island of liberty, not least with his famous poem Die Alpen (‘The Alps’, 1729).69 In that poem, the simple and free life of the Swiss Alpine dwellers compares favourably with the perverted morals of urbanites. Yet the novel’s Julie comes to know Haller as ‘a poet of liberty who hates those who fight for liberty’ (p. 56). Haller plays the Bernese system to achieve office and becomes an intellectual pillar of the illiberal regime (p. 238). He is starkly opposed to Rousseau’s widely received notion of popular sovereignty and believes the Bernese Grand Council, of which he is a member, ‘has a duty to curtail [. . .] muddled thoughts of freedom’ (p. 86). A harsh critic of female education, he rejects female philosophers as ‘unnatural’ (p. 82) and attributes an increase in ‘nervous diseases’ and ‘hysteria’ among women to ‘the philosophising age’ (p. 77). The narrator’s verdict on Haller is not kind: the ‘free Alpine republic’ that Haller’s international audience has read about is a ‘mirage’, and Bern is ‘a state that he simply must have recognised was a caricature of his depiction of the Alps!’ (p. 110). On a symbolic level, the theme of debased freedom is reflected in the way the Bernese establishment appropriates the Old Confederate liberation myth as a legitimating tool. Most notably, the patricians spuriously appropriate the national identification figure Wilhelm Tell. However, Tell is also associated with two other parties in the novel, both of whom are represented as having a genuine moral claim to him: Henzi and his pupil Julie. Invoking the Tell myth diegetically in this way allows Hasler to put the question of women’s equality firmly in the frame of a wider national and international pre-Revolution discourse of freedom from tyranny. In the early 1760s, Julie witnesses a carnival scene that demonstrates just how hollow the establishment Tell rings. Some young patricians who are not yet eligible but who are, in effect, the rulers of tomorrow, hold a procession that includes figural representations of their estate’s emblem of the monkey, the city’s bear and the Confederacy’s Wilhelm Tell (p. 56). This procession is intercepted, however, by a noisy counter-procession by members of the populace, who bring a Tell of their own  – an imposing figure on stilts, brandishing a halberd and accompanied by wild-looking soldiers in archaic uniforms. This big Tell mocks his little counterpart and makes his own retinue move like clockwork figures (pp. 56f.). The unruly procession then moves on to the Municipal Hall, where a massive cardboard head is put on the big Tell’s halberd; when the head drops to hang from a thread, the crowd chant Henzi’s name. They are referring here to the Henzi Conspiracy or ‘Burgerlärm’ of 1749, which was the foiled attempt of disenchanted members of the citizenry to oust the ruling patricians. A leading conspirator, Henzi drafted a memorandum in which he outlined a restructuring of Bern that would include a guild constitution and require – to mention just some of its more radical demands – that the municipal assembly become the highest organ of state, elected magistrates be subject to restrictions of tenure, the treasury provide an annual statement of account, and archives be opened 69

Albrecht von Haller, Die Alpen (Bern, 1795).

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to the public.70 Betrayed to the authorities before plans for any putsch had been agreed upon, the conspiracy faltered under a coup de main by the government. An example was made of three ringleaders, including Henzi, who were beheaded in a gruesomely botched public execution. The hasty proceedings and harsh sentencing made headlines across Europe.71 Not only does the mockery the establishment Tell meets with in the novel draw attention to the transparent irony of celebrating unshakeable hierarchy with an inherently anarchic hero. Specifically, the revellers’ satire also holds up a mirror to the ‘gracious masters’ of Bern themselves, whose tyrannical methods make their use of Tell, at the heart of whose myth is an act of tyrannicide, manifestly incongruous. Henzi’s association with Tell is built on firmer ground. In addition to his efforts to liberalise the Bernese state and his short career as a revolutionary, the association rests on an intertextual relationship with Henzi’s own dramatised adaptation of the Tell myth. Written in French Alexandrine verse, Henzi’s Grisler ou l’ambition punie (Grisler is a variant of the name Gessler) was written in 1748/49 but published only posthumously in France in 1762.72 Grisler reproduces some of the most iconic scenes from the Tell myth – such as Tell’s refusal to pay homage to Grisler’s hat, the apple-shooting scene and Tell’s escape on the storm-tossed lake – only in retrospective narration. Henzi is more concerned with conveying in dialogue the intellectual foundation of his republican concept of liberty and criticising absolute rule. The eponymous bailiff embodies absolutist tyranny while Tell, who is here a déclassé nobleman, articulates the irrepressible Swiss desire for freedom in a flaming concluding speech. When the curtain falls, not only has Grisler been deposed, but he dies enlightened,73 having repented of his flouting of the law and given his blessing to Tell and the Confederates. Although Henzi’s own end was to be less happy than Tell’s, Hasler suggests a comparison between the two dissenters and spokesmen of liberty. There are two main points to make regarding Henzi’s play and the function it serves in the novel. The first concerns Henzi’s ideology of ‘freedom’ itself. In Grisler, Werner of Altinghauss, a lone Swiss nobleman who at first tries to reason with Grisler, warns the tyrant that the Swiss, while seemingly downtrodden, ‘are fierce lions / whose untamed hearts groan in chains’ and with whom ‘freedom alone has any appeal’ (pp. 64–5 and 67). As Urs Helmensdorfer points out, however, ‘freedom’ in this context does not mean the individual freedom and equality which the French Revolution will soon proclaim. By freedom, Henzi means the autonomy, the sovereignty of the community HLS, s.v. ‘Henzi-Verschwörung’. Manfred Gsteiger, ‘Verschwörer und Literat: Samuel Henzi, ein französischer Schriftsteller des bernischen Ancien Régime’, Schweizer Monatshefte: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, 64:5 (1984), 431–9, at p.  432. After Henzi’s death, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing glamourised Henzi as a patriot and noble defender of ‘freedom’ in a drama fragment. Haller accused Lessing of misrepresenting everything from the Bernese republic to Henzi’s character: Helmensdorfer, ‘Kopf ab’, pp. 153f. 72 Samuel Henzi, Grisler ou l’ambition punie/Grisler oder der bestrafte Ehrgeiz, trans. Kurt Steinmann (Basel, 1996). 73 Gsteiger, ‘Verschwörer’, p. 438. 70 71

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of which he is a part. [It] is no freedom within or from the state [. . .]. Freedom in this case is rather the right to a state, the right to rule oneself – according to traditional rights and accepted custom.74

Hasler’s Henzi, too, repeatedly appeals to ‘the old rights to freedom’ (p. 113) of the Bernese citizenry. An aggrieved citizen himself, Henzi fights the government over its continued power grab, but he is no radical democrat. It is not particularly evident in the novel, but the majority population, the residents, would have continued to go without political rights under Henzi’s reordered system of government. Secondly – and this is where Hasler’s novel takes its title from – Henzi introduces to the myth the character of Tell’s daughter, Edwige. An Enlightenment heroine, Edwige is torn between the cause of freedom that her father champions and romantic love for Grisler’s son, Adolphe, who is a conflicted friend of the people. When Grisler arrests Tell and commands him to shoot an apple from his daughter’s head, Edwige, rather than taking flight as Adolphe urges, chooses to sacrifice herself to speed the end of Grisler’s regime: Often, innocence is a necessary victim so that the heavens finally castigate the crime, and if freedom should demand all my blood let the headsman come and pierce my side. (3.4.1003–6)

Yet martyrdom is not her fate: her father does not miss his mark but escapes and shoots Grisler. The Swiss, spurred into action by Grisler’s cruelty and a letter of endorsement from Niklaus of Flüe (whose inclusion is a deliberate anachronism, as Henzi claims in the novel, p. 169), break open the castle and liberate the country. Henzi the character jokes to Julie that he has introduced Edwige to the narrative primarily as a concession to French audience taste, which demands a love story. In his mind, he casts Julie as Edwige, thinking what a lovely couple she and his son Rudolf would make (pp. 168f.). However, Henzi underestimates his own ‘self-willed creation’ (p. 168) in reducing Edwige, and by extension Julie, to mere figures of romance. Julie couples Edwige-like commitment to the cause of freedom with a curious and fearless mind. In fact, the novel encourages the reader to see Julie’s intellectual commitment to freedom as a true Tellian struggle – no less, and perhaps more, than Henzi’s. Unlike her teacher, Julie does not look to ancient rights and customs for her conceptualisation of freedom but breathes the universalising spirit of the Enlightenment. This emerges most clearly, and most relevantly for the purposes of this chapter, regarding women’s rights. Besides Henzi’s reassurance that ‘l’esprit n’a point de sexe’ (‘the mind has no sex’, after François Poullain de la Barre), his greatest gift to Julie is the instinct to question authority (p. 87). When challenged as a child by the family’s maidservant that Julie’s education would be useless for her future as a wife and mother, Julie rejects the mindless traditionalism of prescriptive gender roles: ‘Why shouldn’t you be able to change things? The mind is free. Henzi said you have to take your rights’ (p. 92).

74

Helmensdorfer, ‘Kopf ab’, pp. 161–3.

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Against the continued resistance of a society that doubts and patronises her when it does not seek to obstruct her, Julie cultivates an eagerness to learn that becomes her chief means of empowerment. Her childhood is a lonely one due to her precocity and education, and even when her intellect becomes the object of some local pride in adulthood, she feels like a curio whose head is being ‘displayed on a tall pole over the roofs of Bern’, as if to say: ‘be amazed! There she is, our brainy woman [Kopffrau]!’ (p. 227). And yet, Julie realises, that ‘knowledge is the one thing they can’t take from me’ (p. 242). The narrator describes her thirst for knowledge in terms of a historical, gendered catch-up: ‘she absorbed everything as if she had to garner knowledge on behalf of her mother, grandmother and ancestors, who had been denied learning’ (p. 88). Tellingly, she holds freedom to be contingent on knowledge: freedom is ‘being able to look truth in the face’ (p. 226). Not by coincidence does Hasler make her protagonist echo, and in the world of the novel anticipate, Kant’s ‘dare to think for yourself ’ (sapere aude!), which he declared the maxim for the Enlightenment in 1784.75 Tells Tochter thus restores to the Tell myth some of the transgressive spirit that has repeatedly troubled authors over the centuries. When the tyrannical state of Bern silences Henzi, the father of a revolutionary Tell, Henzi/Tell’s ‘daughter’ takes up the flame. However, Julie is no mere epigone: she fights for new rights that question authority more thoroughly than Henzi’s model political order foresees. Not only does she criticise social convention that works to silence women, denies them the networks fostered by occupational life, disenfranchises them and objectifies their bodies. By the end of the novel, she is also consulted by patricians as Haller’s ‘antipode’ on matters such as popular sovereignty and the separation of church and state (p. 238). She uses what platforms she has as a woman to make political interventions. Hasler quotes from an extant letter of Julie’s: ‘I use the privilege of women to speak outrageous truths with impunity’ (p. 231). The HLS states soberly that Julie Bondeli ‘exemplifies the possibilities and limitations of female intellectuality during the time of the Enlightenment’.76 Hasler’s literary portrait uses the pathos of the Tell myth to put this historical example of relative female empowerment in a context of resistance to tyranny and renders it relevant to all Switzerland. Her take on the Tell myth thus exceeds its familiar function as a locus of nostalgia. Even more decidedly, Tells Tochter refuses to limit the Tell myth to the national sphere. Connotations of national identity, while certainly invoked in the novel, fail to capture the protagonist’s cosmopolitan habits of thought. These habits are suggested evocatively in a fleeting scene from Julie’s childhood. Considering her own miraculous aliveness in an age of high infant mortality, she imagines all the spatial entities she is standing on simultaneously: ‘her feet were firmly grounded in [. . .] a spot in the Buchsigut [i.e., her family’s estate], in Köniz, in the Free State of Bern, which was part of the Confederacy, which was located in Europe, and Europe formed part of the world’ (p. 88). The novel thus contrasts the state’s reactionary use of an empty national Tell myth with a reclamation of Tell, through Julie, for 75 Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?, introduction by Friedrich Jodl (Frankfurt a. M., 1905). 76 HLS, s.v. ‘Julie Bondeli’.

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cosmopolitan, egalitarian and emancipatory purposes. The irrepressible desire for freedom embodied by the mythical Tell, the novel suggests, manifests itself in this female harbinger of a freer age, who questions authority from an ambiguous social position, enjoying a fool’s licence to counter the hostility of those who are invested in a patriarchy closely intertwined with the pre-revolutionary political status quo. It is no coincidence, I think, that of the examples discussed in this chapter, the one that arguably appropriates national medievalism for feminist historical fiction most successfully – and so, therefore, ‘de-others’ its female Other – is not set in the Middle Ages at all. Nor does the medievalism of Tells Tochter emphasise exclusively questions of national development. It should be clear by now that this correlation has nothing whatsoever to do with any intrinsic quality of the medieval past that predisposes it to either national narrative or androcentrism. It does have a great deal to do with powerful discourses of community and periodisation that still struggle to conceive of the nation as anything other than masculine, and of the Middle Ages as anything other than the most masculine period of all.

6 In Strange Lands: Race, Ethnicity, Immigration What happens when you leave a country, when you arrive elsewhere? Do you take your own story with you? Or are you like a new character entering an old story?1

T

he codes of difference of race and ethnicity have historically produced even more insistent othering in the national context than gender has. In post-war British and Swiss history, this has occurred especially in the discursive orbit of immigration. Not only are the stories of immigrants and racial and ethnic minority groups hardly ever deemed integral to national identity. The conceptual overlaps of nation, race and ethnicity mean that racial and ethnic others and immigrants will often be the very thing against which national identity constitutes itself. Such othering is particularly tangible in national self-conceptions that rely on the deep past. As I have suggested previously, notions of a cultural homogeneity pervade national medievalism to this day. Arguably, so do notions of ethnic and racial purity.2 My main focus in this chapter is the making of racial and ethnic difference as it interacts with the national Middle Ages. However, rather than focusing on medievalisms that uncritically replicate or actively weaponise the othering of racial or ethnic minorities and immigrants in national origin stories (low-hanging if sadly plentiful fruit), I will mainly show how the intersectional cluster of race, ethnicity and immigration has lately been reinterpreted and critiqued in contemporary national medievalisms. Racial and ethnic othering may be starker than othering along gender lines, but contemporary responses to it have also been more incisive.3 I will begin by establishing some context and making terminological distinctions. Mainstream accounts of the history of ‘race’ focus on the emergence of the ‘science’ of race, and hence scientific racism, during the Enlightenment, with race becoming a ‘category explaining all historical phenomena’ in the late nineteenth century.4 Over the last two decades, however, premodernists and critical race theoJames Robertson, And the Land Lay Still (London, 2010), p. 645. Helen Young, ‘Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, 28 (2013), 2–6, at p. 2. 3 For medievalisms produced by people of colour, sometimes deliberately in order to combat white supremacy, see Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds, 2021), with contemporary examples particularly at pp. 99–132. 4 Chris Lorenz, ‘Representations of Identity: Ethnicity, Race, Class, Gender and Religion. An Introduction to Conceptual History’, in S. Berger and Lorenz, Contested Nation, pp. 24–59, at pp. 41 and 40. 1

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rists such as Geraldine Heng have argued that post-Enlightenment scientific racism has blocked critics’ view of other, in some cases far earlier, forms of racial logic.5 According to Heng, this has led to premodernity being under-recognised as ‘racial time’.6 The view of the Middle Ages in particular as pre-racial time is regularly on display in medievalism. Heng’s own definition of race, in contrast, describes it as having ‘no singular or stable referent: [. . .] race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’.7 For her, race can merge with other, more specific, categories such as class, religion and nationality. This capacious definition of race is within hailing distance of common conceptions of ethnicity. Indeed, there is some ambiguity and even contradiction in the use of the terminologies of race and ethnicity across scholarly and non-scholarly discourses. In contemporary usage, ‘ethnicity’ is often used as a euphemism or code for ‘race’.8 More usually, however, and particularly in contemporary nationalism studies, ethnicity is used as the more encompassing term. According to Robin Williams, ‘ethnicity’ has been used to mean variously ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘religion’ or ‘people’, but the general meaning is that of ‘collective cultural distinctiveness’.9 According to Lorenz, that distinctiveness is usually ‘linked to ideas of common descent and of shared history’.10 In this usage, racial meanings may, but need not, be part of ethnicity.11 The concepts of race, ethnicity and nation thus intersect at the ethnolinguistic– cultural end of nationalism. In a model of fluid forms of nationalism, an absolute conceptual distinction between ethnicity and race is both impossible and unproductive. Instead, I will treat them as constituting different emphases in assertions of the cultural distinctiveness of ‘a people’ under ethnolinguistic–cultural nationalism. ‘Ethnicity’ tends to prioritise cultural, linguistic or religious difference (though it may comprise quasi-racial notions of inheritance and filiation); ‘race’ emphasises the bodily nature of the process by which difference is seen or imposed (though it clearly cannot be reduced to this biologistic sense). The same goes for the distinction between xenophobia and racism. In practice, it is not always possible to sharply distinguish the one code of difference or form of discrimination from the other. An example from Swiss public and media discourses of national identity and immigration may help to illustrate this point. In the early 2010s, commenters 5 See especially Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018); Literature Compass, 16:9–10, Special issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages (2019) [accessed 28 September 2021] and Post­ medieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 11:4, Race, Revulsion, and Revolution (2020). 6 Heng, Invention of Race, p. 16. 7 Heng, Invention of Race, p. 3, emphasis in the original. 8 Helen Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (New York, 2016), p. 10. 9 Qtd in Lorenz, ‘Representations’, p. 35. 10 Lorenz, ‘Representations’, p. 35. 11 However, compare Dorothy Kim, ‘Introduction to Literature Compass Special Cluster: Critical Race and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16:9–10, Special issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages (2019), 1–16 [accessed 28 Septem­ ber 2021]. Kim and the other contributors to the special issue embrace conceptualisations of ‘race’ as a more encompassing term.

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observed that a distinction was increasingly being made between people thought of as Swiss and those thought of as Eidgenossen (‘Confederates’). The latter refers to the country’s official designation, Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft (‘Swiss Confederation’), but more to the point, it invokes powerful cultural memories of Switzerland’s origins in the Alte Eidgenossenschaft (Old Confederacy). Eidgenosse is thus the more exclusive distinction, whereas anyone who undergoes naturalisation can become Swiss. There is no telling how prevalent the distinction is; an unrepresentative poll conducted by the NZZ in 2013 showed a contradictory picture. Many respondents claimed never to have encountered the distinction, while others critically pointed out its right-wing and nationalist slant, and still others believed it to be a legitimate reaction of old-established residents to an overly liberal citizenship process.12 Whatever its currency, the distinction has both a narrow racial and a wider ethnic logic to it. In Switzerland as elsewhere in Europe, immigration discourse is racially charged. More specifically, Eidgenosse is strictly hereditary and closed to racial others. Furthermore, it is exclusive also in broader ethnic terms, that is, in ways that exclude people who are considered ‘foreign’ on the basis primarily of their original nationality, language, customs and so forth. In this sense, it is directed also against other European or Western nationals who by virtue of their complexion may escape the opprobrium of racial alterity and by virtue of their passports qualify as ‘expats’ rather than ‘immigrants’. Under the ethnolinguistic–cultural nationalism which it expresses, the Eidgenosse label exalts an alleged connection to the autochthonous medieval past and thus ensures participation in the national body ‘proper’. The Swiss case may be distinctive in its use of temporalising terminology, but it is hardly unique. The hyphen in ‘nation-state’ always involves the possibility of separating again ‘true’ national identity from mere citizenship – anywhere. As my use of the word ‘autochthonous’ suggests, the difference between who gets to belong and who does not under ethnolinguistic–cultural nationalism is usually made by an instance of migration. The proposition that medieval ‘lineage’ in the sense of an absence of such migration should determine whether one qualifies as a full member of the nation is evidently linked to the idea that cultural memory is inscribed on place. The proposition is also deeply ironic. Narratives of migration referring to the Migration Period feature prominently in the kind of originary settlement myth whose renewed popularity in Europe Geary describes.13 Nevertheless, continuity medievalism as a fantasy of non-migration provides an effective discriminatory bulwark against racial and ethnic inclusivity. Conversely, connotations of non-migratory homogeneity have led many progressives to abandon the Middle Ages as a reference point for positive identification altogether. The disturbing international connection between medievalist proclivities and far-right, racist, xenophobic and anti-immigration politics and acts of violence has

12 Erich Aschwanden and Daniel Gerny, ‘“Schweizer – aber niemals Eidgenosse”’ (2013) [accessed 25 Sep tember 2020]. 13 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).

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been well studied over the past decade.14 The connection was propelled into wider consciousness especially after the highly visible medievalism of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, when white supremacists sporting medievalist insignias and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans descended on the city. Even mainstream media have since linked this to earlier and later acts of farright and white supremacist violence (such as Anders Breivik’s 2011 and Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 terrorist attacks) whose perpetrators revelled in Nordic and crusader medievalism.15 Scholars of medievalism, and especially medievalists of colour, have been aware of the connection for much longer.16 A fundamental problem, according to Young, is the way periodisation is rooted in geography: ‘medieval’ is ‘always a marker of time and place’.17 Young makes her observation in relation to fantasy medievalism, but it also sheds light on the nationalists’ preference for a static and hermetic Middle Ages. Johannes Fabian has described how cultural otherness was conflated with a supposed earlier stage in human history by the nineteenth-century social evolutionists.18 What Fabian calls the ‘denial of coevalness’ is a ‘persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’.19 This denial is ‘spatiotemporal distancing’ because it relies on notions of spatialised time, rendering the past an ‘elsewhere’ and, conversely, geographically remote place a ‘long ago’.20 Such notions are still widespread beyond Western anthropology departments. Although usually unspoken, they come with major implications for the way today’s nation positions itself regarding both the Middle Ages and immigrants. National medievalism tends to idealise a sedentary national community that remains stable through time; in addition, a common view effectively limits the Middle Ages to Europe, a white, Christian, north-western Europe in particular.21 In a sense, then, the irruption of geography in the figure of the immiE.g., Cord J. Whitaker, ‘The Problem of Alt-Right Medievalist White Supremacy’, in Louie Dean Valencia-García (ed.), Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Abingdon, 2020), pp. 159–76; Amy Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2017). 15 Daniel C. Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (Leeds, 2018), pp. 23–5; on Breivik’s medievalism, see also Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media, pp. 132–80. 16 Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms, p.  4. Medieval studies itself has come under fire from some of its practitioners as perpetuating discriminatory structures within its ranks: see e.g., Sierra Lomuto, ‘Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique’ (2019) [accessed 25 September 2020]. 17 Young, ‘Place and Time’, p. 5. 18 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), pp. 12–18. 19 Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 31, emphasis in the original. 20 Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 159 and 12. 21 Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms, p. 4f.; Paul B. Sturtevant, ‘“You Don’t Learn It Deliberately, But You Just Know It from What You’ve Seen”: British Understandings of the Medieval Past from Disney’s Fairy Tales’, in Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (eds), The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past (New York, 2012), pp. 77–96, at pp. 84f. 14

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grant in the present constitutes an irruption also of a ‘past’ that cannot be reconciled with one’s own idealised past, thus threatening the integrity of a core national reference point. Right-wing extremists simply weaponise mainstream notions of a non-migratory, pre-racial Middle Ages. Nostalgia for such a past is clearly problematic also at levels below extremist violence. Racial and ethnic discrimination continues to blight lives, also in Britain and Switzerland. The blanket demonisation of immigrants has increased again dramatically since the end of the 1990s, and many political actors have been practising at least a ‘soft’ ethnic nationalism, as I suggested on pp. 137–38. Both Britain and Switzerland are multi-ethnic and multicultural societies. In both, however, this multi-ethnic and multicultural reality is to this day unable to compete, in debates on national identity, with traditional signifiers, which include strong traditions of continuity medievalism. In Switzerland, migration hardly figures in national master narratives at all.22 What is more, migration is hardly ever discussed in the context of Switzerland’s status as a ‘post-colonial’ nation (albeit one without former colonies of its own). That status became the object of sustained enquiry only in the 2000s and 2010s.23 Early scholarship revealed the substantial involvement of Swiss individuals, companies, banks and state governments in the transatlantic slave and colonial trade and, in the post-colonial era, in neo-colonial economic structures.24 Subsequent research has tackled the cultural side of Swiss post-colonialism; for example, a collection of essays edited by Patricia Purtschert, Barbara Lüthi and Francesca Falk explores such diverse things as contemporary beauty pageants and children’s literature alongside the popular ethnological expositions (Völkerschauen) that toured the country in the nineteenth century, parading ‘primitive’ people from Europe’s colonies.25 In contrast to Switzerland’s less well-known post-colonial status, Britain’s past as a major colonial and imperial power ensures that migration is prominent in cultural memory. However, to the degree that migration is valued in hegemonic cultural memory, it is still predominantly directed outwards, not inwards, emphasising the various British diasporas rather than immigration to Britain from its former colonies. This of course occludes a key characteristic of post-colonial Britain. Both Britain and Switzerland experienced substantial post-war immigration. In both countries, a first anti-immigration backlash peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I can mention only some particularly salient moments here. In 1968, Tory MP Enoch Powell delivered his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he called for an end to immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth countries and former colonies, insinuating that ethnic conflict would otherwise become Holenstein, Kury and Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte, p. 19. E.g., Barbara Lüthi and Damir Skenderovic (eds), Switzerland and Migration: Historical and Current Perspectives on a Changing Landscape (Cham, 2019); Bernhard C. Schär, Postkoloniale Verstrickungen der globalen Schweiz (Zurich, 2018); Thomas David, Bouda Etemad and Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, Schwarze Geschäfte: Die Beteiligung von Schweizern an Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 2005). 24 Patricia Purtschert, Barbara Lüthi and Francesca Falk (eds), Postkoloniale Schweiz: Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien (Bielefeld, 2012), p. 16. 25 Purtschert, Lüthi and Falk, Postkoloniale Schweiz. 22 23

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inevitable. Powell was subsequently sacked from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, but a Gallup poll published in the same year showed that Powell’s sentiment was shared by 78 per cent of respondents.27 More than thirty years later, the authors of the so-called Parekh Report, published by the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, spoke of significant disadvantages still experienced by ethnic minorities in Britain at the turn of the century. The authors made recommendations to government, public bodies and voluntary-sector organisations on how to address these disadvantages.28 The report has been influential in debates on multiculturalism but attracted vehement hostility upon its publication.29 Since then, conservatives have repeatedly blamed immigration and multiculturalism for social breakdown and Islamist violence.30 In Switzerland, long-standing fears of Überfremdung (‘over-foreignisation’) intensified in the 1960s and led to the country becoming, according to Holenstein, Kury and Schulz, Europe’s ‘pioneer of politically organised xenophobia’.31 In two much-noted essays from the mid-1960s, author Max Frisch wrote critically about the discourse of Überfremdung, which he argued revealed a crisis of Swiss identity.32 He scoffed at the hypocrisy behind hostile Swiss attitudes towards Italian migrant workers: ‘A little Herrenvolk thinks it’s in danger: a workforce has been called for, and people are coming instead.’33 A high-water mark of fears of Überfremdung was set by a 1970 popular initiative championed by James Schwarzenbach, a former fascist Frontist who served as National Councillor for two openly xenophobic parties from 1967 to 1979.34 The Schwarzenbach Initiative demanded that foreign workers should make up no more than 10 per cent of the Swiss population, which would have entailed the mass deportation of (mostly Italian) workers. The initiative had a very high turnout of 75 per cent and was rejected by only a small majority of 54 per cent.35 The theme of Überfremdung gained significant traction again in the 1990s and midwifed the rise of the SVP to becoming the country’s biggest political party. Foreign delinquency and questions of cultural distance, integration and assimilation became mainstays of the wider national debate in the 2000s. 26

I am grateful to Alan Robinson for permission to use his unpublished overview of landmarks of immigration discourse in Britain 1948–2015. 27 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge, 2013), p. 243. 28 Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, and Bhikhu Parekh, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, repr. with corrections (London, 2000); Bhikhu Parekh, ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Reporting on a Report’, The Round Table, 362 (2001), 691–700. 29 Parekh, ‘Future’, pp. 697f. 30 Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf, ‘Introduction: Assessing the Backlash against Multiculturalism in Europe’, in Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf (eds), The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies, and Practices (London, 2010), pp. 1–31, at p. 8. 31 Holenstein, Kury and Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte, p. 322. 32 Max Frisch, ‘Überfremdung 1’ and ‘Überfremdung 2’, in Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt a. M.: 1967), pp. 100–4 and 105–35. 33 Frisch, ‘Überfremdung 1’, p. 100. 34 HLS, s.v. ‘James Schwarzenbach’. 35 Holenstein, Kury and Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte, p. 322. 26

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My analysis thus has as its context, firstly, societies of which sizeable proportions are somewhat or strongly hostile towards immigration, and secondly, the readily available stocks of British and Swiss continuity medievalism that I have argued have lately been highly visible in cultural production and politics. Race in National Medievalism: Two Controversies My first two examples, one each from Britain and Switzerland, originated in very different circumstances but in each case showed that the routine othering of racial, ethnic and immigrant communities in national narrative may result in heated debates when these Others make an appearance in the penetralium of national identity, the Middle Ages. These debates complicate the idea that a pre-racial Middle Ages can (let alone should) validate group identity in the present but also highlight the limitations of ‘colour-blind’ inclusivity. In Chapter 1, I suggested that The Hollow Crown adapts Shakespeare’s English history plays in a way that foregrounds concerns of national identity. Controversy arose from its colour-blind casting of several historical figures known to have been, in modern terms, white (or very unlikely not to have been).36 The casting was consistently registered in reception, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic approval to strong censure. To the extent that scholars of medievalism have commented on the critical voices, they have characterised them as expressing harmful misconceptions of a ‘white Middle Ages’.37 While this is no doubt true of some of these reactions, more is at play in the controversy than mere misconception or white supremacist leanings. Rather, The Hollow Crown itself evinces an unresolved stance regarding the question of what identity-building purpose Shakespearean history should serve in the twenty-first century – including the question whether it wishes to celebrate Britishness or Englishness in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere, and as Monique Pittman has argued more fully since, the show’s use of ‘authentic’, ‘period’ locations is married to a wider conservative, historicist and naturalistic aesthetics.38 With the partial exception of the more experimental Richard II, the series is emphatically committed to film realism. According to Peter Holland, realism is the hallmark of an old tradition of belief for which ‘Shakespeare is history and the task of the theatre of film is to display it’.39 Following the conventions of early modern theatre, Shakespeare bows out of providing an ‘accurate’ mise-en-scène. Yet even though there is a manifest paradox in trying to 36 This discussion of The Hollow Crown partially builds on a chapter in my ‘The Dark Ages in the Light of Adaptation Studies’ (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Bern, 2014). 37 Michael Evans, ‘“You Wouldn’t Want to Be Historically Inaccurate”: Online Responses to Race in Medievalist Television’, in Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism XXVIII, pp.  13–20; Ruth Morse, ‘The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare, the BBC, and the 2012 London Olympics’, Linguaculture, 1 (2014), 7–20, at p. 11. 38 M. Berger, ‘Dark Ages’, pp. 75–96; L. Monique Pittman, ‘Shakespeare and the Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender and the British Nation in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown’, Digital Commons @ Andrews University: Faculty Publications, 265 (2016), 1–30. 39 Peter Holland, ‘Performing the Middle Ages’, in Morse, Cooper and Holland, Medieval Shakespeare, pp. 204–22, at p. 206.

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find an ‘authentic visual language for plays that were never historically accurate’,40 that is precisely what The Hollow Crown sets out to achieve. The naturalistic aesthetics conspires to efface The Hollow Crown’s status as artifice by producing strong authenticity effects. These include, among other things, ‘original’ locations, (more or less) period set design and costuming and ‘gritty’ (i.e., dirty and bloody) medievalism during the series’ many battle scenes. Another major element, noted also by Pittman, is that The Hollow Crown curtails any ‘extra-diegetic intrusions’.41 An example of this is provided at the end of Henry V. In the play, the Chorus is a meta-theatrical device that by its obviously partisan and glamourising rhetoric reveals just how vulnerable the highly artificial narrative of national greatness and unity is. The film, by contrast, reveals the Chorus to be not an extradiegetic entity at all but a veteran of Henry’s wars: the Boy, a character who in the play offers, according to Janet Clare, an alternative ‘choric commentary’ that works against the official Chorus’ glorification of Henry by emphasising the view of the common people.42 The official Chorus in the film fully absorbs that critical voice, turning it into an eye-witness who tells the story how it was – and in this account, it was unequivocally glorious. Given The Hollow Crown’s emphasis on a Britishness powered by history, the naturalistic aesthetics here transcends its standard function of sustaining cinematic illusion. Rather, it sustains the makers’ reading of Shakespeare as authentic patriotic history. It is this authenticity paradigm that the makers of The Hollow Crown strategically suspend to allow, seemingly, for maximum inclusiveness thanks to colour-blind casting. Some actors of colour are extras, but others take on prominent and even key roles such as the Duke of York (Paterson Joseph) and the Bishop of Carlisle (Lucian Msamati) in the first series and Margaret of Anjou (Sophie Okonedo) in the second. Colour-blind casting is standard practice in contemporary British theatre and not least in Shakespeare productions, and it is no longer uncommon in such overtly fantastical film medievalisms as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and Robin Hood (2018) either.43 In this historicising television adaptation, however, it produces a far more striking effect. Michael Evans has documented the controversy the casting attracted.44 Some commenters in online forums and on social media took particular exception to Okonedo’s casting. Evans quotes a user comment posted on the British Medieval History Facebook page: ‘Not sure about the casting of Margaret of Anjou . . . Not [sic] reflection on her acting ability . . ., but I don’t think Queen Margeret [sic] was – well – a black Lady. . . . It seems BBC political correctness is getting in the way of historical authenticity again.’ Evans then goes on to mention more insidious 40 Helen Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Morse, Cooper and Holland, Medieval Shakespeare, pp. 1–16, at p. 15. 41 Pittman, ‘Shakespeare’, p. 5. 42 Janet Clare, ‘Medley History: The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth to Henry V’, in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare’s English Histories and their Afterlives (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 102–13, at p. 112. 43 Robin Hood, film, dir. Otto Bathurst. USA: Summit Entertainment, 2018. 44 I am grateful to Michael Evans for sending me a copy of his essay during preparation of this chapter.

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comments by ‘politicians from the British far-right parties the BNP and UKIP, and neo-Nazis on the Stormfront website’, who railed predictably against the cipher of ‘political correctness gone mad’. These far-right critics, he points out, ‘used the casting of black actors as a touchstone for their anxieties of embattled whiteness threatened by people of colour and their “politically-correct” allies’. Yet Evans comes to a more far-reaching conclusion: ‘Arguments over the casting of black actors have little to do with the reality of medieval history and more to do with an ideological denial that the European Middle Ages could be anything other than white, which reflects current anxieties over racial and national identity.’45 The reactions to the series by far-right commenters reveal delusions about the European Middle Ages as exclusively white. Furthermore, non-Shakespearean parallel examples from the English-speaking world leave no doubt that a segment of white viewers believe a racially coded national identity must be upheld by ‘authentically’ representing a white medieval past. By contrast, other online commenters cited by Evans mounted a two-pronged defence of the casting choices, arguing that casting actors of colour was a worthy decision on anti-discrimination grounds and that The Hollow Crown was, after all, drama, not history.46 However, there is a problem with the latter take: the epistemological confusion both evinced and engendered by The Hollow Crown does not simply go away by insisting that it is ‘just Shakespeare’. The filmmakers’ desire to represent a ‘true’ version of national Shakespeare (if not simply of ‘national history’) and their desire to represent diversity and create equal job opportunities for actors of colour in the present create a real enough tension. Another way of looking at the controversy is to focus on the mismatch between, on the one hand, what was a tacit gesture of national inclusivity-in-diversity on the part of the filmmakers and, on the other hand, an effect of defamiliarisation on its viewers. Underlying this are asymmetric assumptions of how race ought to be parsed in period drama. By having actors of colour play English aristocratic characters in the context of marked attempts at authenticity, The Hollow Crown is making a clear statement that it ought not to be parsed at all. The makers felt no need to discuss, in the numerous metatexts to The Hollow Crown, the signification processes that the colour-blind casting would initiate. What is more, it appears that they felt no need to discuss it in production either: Okonedo has stated that ‘it wasn’t an issue. I didn’t talk about it with [the director].’47 According to Pittman, silence around the subject of race is common in similar film productions. However, that practice fails to acknowledge ‘the way in which an actor’s skin colour sets in motion unintended

Evans, ‘“You Wouldn’t Want”’, pp. 15f., 18 and 20. Evans, ‘“You Wouldn’t Want”’, p. 16. See Alexa Huang, ‘Global Shakespeare Criticism beyond the Nation State’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford, 2017), pp. 423–40, at p. 429. 47 Sophie Okonedo, ‘My Body Is My Barometer  – My Instincts Are Physical’ (2017) [accessed 25 September 2020]. 45

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racialized meanings’. As Ayanna Thompson explains for theatrical productions of Shakespeare, 48

the various models of non-traditional casting can actually replicate racist stereotypes because we have not addressed the unstable semiotics of race (when we see race; how we see race; how we make sense of what race means within a specific production). [. . .] Colorblind casting assumes [. . .] an actor’s color has no semiotic value onstage unless it is invested with one by the director.49

Thompson shows that, in practice, colour-blindness frequently registers as meaningful colour-consciousness. And if such meanings emerge even on the stage, where greater suspension of disbelief at the abstraction of place, speaking behaviour and so forth is expected of the audience, it is naive to expect that no semiotic value would be interpolated by viewers of a television production that pleads authenticity as insistently as does The Hollow Crown. The series uses unrepresentative characters (English aristocrats) to make a representative point (that there were black people in medieval England) while pretending that it is not making a point at all. What counts as authentic in medievalism both varies at a given moment and changes over time, and we still need to get to the point where people of colour are accepted as an authentic part of representations of medieval Europe. Audiovisual media are powerful agents in the normalisation of conceptions of history.50 Nevertheless, I believe scholars of medievalism are doing the normalisation of diversity a disservice by summarily tracing all scepticism of colour-blind casting in historical drama – and certainly colour-blind casting for historically attested figures in a drama that protests its authenticity to the extent that The Hollow Crown does – to a (latently) white supremacist mindset.51 Just as importantly, we should not lose sight of the wider meanings in which the ‘semiotics of race’ is embedded. What, ultimately, is colour-conscious casting in aid of in a given medievalism? Critics praising The Hollow Crown for its inclusive casting might have been more attentive to the lopsidedly affirmative nationalism that the films transport, which is full of its own blind spots and exclusions. In addition to the uncritical glorification of the good English kings (and the comforting condemnation of the bad), the series’ multiculturalist ethos is not matched by a similar commitment to gender inclusivity, nor even a critical approach to gender stereotypes. Female speaking parts are fewer than male ones in the English history plays to begin with but are further reduced in the series. Furthermore, as Pittman argues concerning the first series, it shows the majority of women as making ‘little impact upon English history’ but as either sexually vulnerable or limited to the domestic sphere, unlike the plays, which ‘dramatize women both as agents and victims of L. Monique Pittman, ‘Colour-Conscious Casting and Multicultural Britain in the BBC Henry V (2012): Historicising Adaptation in an Age of Digital Placelessness’, Adaptation, 10:2 (2017), 176–91, at p. 186. 49 Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford, 2013), p. 77, emphasis in the original. 50 Paul B. Sturtevant, The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination: Memory, Film and Medievalism (London, 2018), p. 4. 51 Evans, ‘“You Wouldn’t Want”’, p. 20. 48

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an emergent British identity’.52 The problem of limited agency is less acute in the second series, where Okonedo’s Margaret plays an active role in steering the nation’s course (though she is the only woman to have such a role). On balance, however, the nation’s fate is largely in the hands of the royal males in a way that reflects the masculine emphasis that I have argued in the previous chapter is typical of national medievalism. Against this backdrop, it is interesting to observe that the non-traditional casting in terms of race is not attempted for gender. An audience attuned to a naturalistic aesthetics is evidently expected to be able to suspend disbelief regarding racial diversity but not regarding the breaking-up of the traditional gender binary. Strict adherence to that binary is, of course, in no way exclusive to The Hollow Crown but pertains to (film) medievalism more widely. However, one invitation to suspend disbelief raises expectations of another, and so the omission suggests that the gender coding of national medievalism outranks any racial coding. The Hollow Crown’s metatextual conflation of Englishness with Britishness is even more problematic. The second series is almost exclusively concerned with English matters anyway, but the first series too has a noticeably narrow English focus for a series hailed, during the 2012 ‘London Olympiad’, as quintessentially British. Here, any sense of the inclusivity of Britishness is undercut by the strong reduction to which the Scottish and Irish elements fall prey, and by the othering of the Welsh characters. It is hardly surprising that director Thea Sharrock removes the disputation between the four captains from Henry V, given that it drew much of its original effectiveness from condescending fun poked at the band of pidgin-­speaking junior partners in the English-British nation. However, this also means that the Irish are confined to the distal corners of the narrative, to be pacified offstage by Richard II, and the Scots are represented only in a blink-and-you-miss-it part by the Lancastrians’ enemy the Earl of Douglas. The Welsh are more visible but in many ways fare little better. Certainly, Fluellen, the only one of the four captains to make the cut, no longer serves as a figure of fun prattling endlessly about the ancient wars. However, in other instances the Welsh either are the visually marked, hairy-savage-type warriors of Richard II or appear outlandish and faintly ridiculous, as per Shakespeare’s caricature of Owain Glyndŵr (Glendower) in 1 Henry IV, by superstitiously reading signs and insisting on their own extraordinariness. Glendower’s daughter turns out to be rather better at singing than a hound ‘howl[ing] in Irish’, as Hotspur sneers, but her fascination remains, for the non-Welsh audience as much as for the uncomprehending Mortimer, one of foreignness. None of her utterances being subtitled (which would have been easy for a film that comes up with original lines in Welsh), viewers are presented another figure of alterity that barely exceeds Shakespeare’s minimal stage direction: ‘The Lady speaks in Welsh’.53 There can be no illusion that in the film, John of Gaunt’s famous eulogy-cum-indictment, ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, this land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land’, is somehow really about Britain. Pittman, ‘Shakespeare’, pp. 16 and 20. William Shakespeare, King Henry IV: Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London, 2002), 3.1.195. 52 53

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Despite the multiculturalist ethos of The Hollow Crown’s casting choices, then, I do not think the series is a progressive adaptation of Shakespeare at all. Rather, interpreted in a one-sided, affirmative fashion and scaffolded in a discourse of cultural heritage, Shakespeare’s plays are appropriated for a conservative take on English-as-British nationhood. The glaring silences and marginalisation – of dissent, of women, of non-English British nationals – required by its affirmative nationalism are not so dissimilar to those that led to people of colour having to fight for inclusion in the national community in the first place. It is ironic that such silences and omissions persist in an adaptation whose makers believe ‘Shakespeare is accessible to all’;54 ironic that The Hollow Crown should be applauded as an expression of inclusive Britishness. When race manifests itself in Swiss medievalism, it is more likely to do so in the opposite way to The Hollow Crown’s tacit gesture of racial inclusion. That is to say, it is likely to manifest itself in traditional racist imagery whose continued use some defend on the grounds that it is ‘medieval’. This was the case with the Bernese Guild of the Moor (Zunft zum Mohren), also known as the Guild of Tailors and Cloth-Shearers, which became embroiled in controversy in 2014 over its heraldry, which was accused of racist stereotyping.55 The criticism was first directed at the guild from within the City Parliament. City Councillors Halua Pinto de Magalhães and Fuat Köçer (both Social Democrats) submitted a parliamentary postulate to the city’s executive, demanding that it examine measures to address racist depictions like the Moor in the public sphere – not least in light of the fact that Bern is the de facto Swiss capital – and to increase institutional inclusivity.56 For a while, the case provided a prism for a wider discussion of racist representations in the Swiss public sphere, until interest subsided with no consensus in sight.57 In June 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests took place also in Europe after the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the US, the Bernese Moor made the headlines again – for being curtained off to deter any vandals. Although the circumstances in which the original debate took place were very different, it shared with the debate about The Hollow Crown its polarised nature and the fact that some members of the one camp summarily disparaged the other’s anti-racist concerns as contrived political correctness. As with Zurich’s Sechseläuten and its ‘woman problem’, defenders of the Guild fielded a loose notion of ‘medieval tradition’ to deflect criticism. Medievalism distracted from the less than glamorous

The statement is made by executive producer Pippa Harris in The Hollow Crown: The Making of a King, film, unknown director. UK: BBC, 2012. 55 The German word ‘Mohr’ is mostly confined to historical discourse, for example in the context of al-Andalus or adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello. If it is used in contemporary German at all, it carries pejorative connotations, often referring to any ‘person of dark skin’: Duden, s.v. ‘Mohr’ (n.d.) [accessed 13 January 2022]. 56 Stadt Bern, ‘Geschäfte’ (c.2017) [accessed 25 September 2020]. 57 Ralph Weber, ‘Grautöne: Über die Tugend des Hinterfragens in Zeiten schneller Mei­ nung’ (2019) [accessed 24 September 2020]. 54

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Figure 9. The coat of arms of the Guild of the Moor, 2021. Author’s photograph.

aspects of a past that is being used, selectively, to valorise membership in an elite social group that continues to wield subtle power in the city and canton of Bern.58 The main offending depictions were the coat of arms (Fig. 9) and the house crest (Fig. 10) adorning the guildhall’s entrances. The current design of the coat of arms goes back to 1891, when the Guild changed it for the city’s seven-hundredth anniversary. Bernhard Schär correctly points out that the depiction bears all the hallmarks of nineteenth-century scientific racism.59 The statue is of older origin, c.1700, and shows the Moor as an ‘oriental’ warrior.60 According to Schär, its time of Katrin Rieder, Netzwerke des Konservatismus: Berner Burgergemeinde und Patriziat im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 2008). 59 Bernhard C. Schär, ‘Vergessene Kolonialgeschichte’ (2014) [accessed 24 September 2020]. 60 Daniel V. Moser-Léchot, ‘Mohr und Mohrin in Bern – ein Rundgang’, Berner Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 79:2 (2017), 72–83, at p. 78. 58

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Figure 10. The house crest of the Guild of the Moor, 2021. Author’s photograph.

origin falls within both a very active phase of the transatlantic slave trade and the high point of the prosperity of the Bernese ruling patrician families. Both the city of Bern (1719–34) and the Guild of the Moor itself (1726–32) were shareholders in the slave-trading British South Sea Company to the tune of today’s equivalent of 740 million and 40 million Swiss Francs respectively, making Bern one of the largest shareholders in the company.61 In its reply to Pinto de Magalhães and Köçer’s postulate, the Municipal Council expressed sympathy with their aims but was reluctant to implement new measures in addition to existing ones, referring instead to its ongoing cooperation with anti-racist organisations.62 However, the Council did state its intention to have an

61 62

Schär, ‘Vergessene Kolonialgeschichte’. Stadt Bern, ‘Geschäfte’.

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external organisation make an inventory of racist symbols in the public sphere and to raise public awareness. The postulate was widely reported in the media and occasioned many, and varied, responses.63 Online comments on the postulate included some strongly worded protest against political correctness and fears of a new ‘iconoclasm’.64 Anti-­ discrimination groups approved of its aims, and in 2016, the Bernese Regular’s Table on Racism Collective (Kollektiv Berner Rassismusstammtisch) staged a symbolic trial of the Guild of the Moor, ironically called a ‘Kanakentribunal’ (roughly, ‘Wog Tribunal’).65 Historians were divided on the issue. Prominent scholars feared that such initiatives might lead to a ‘tabooing’ of cultural objects from the past and criticised Pinto de Magalhães and Köçer for dealing in a ‘tokenism’ that distracted from real measures against real racism.66 Other scholars praised the idea of taking stock of similar representations and setting up information campaigns.67 In short, the responses to the Moor controversy mirrored the range of positions taken worldwide in the more recent heated debates about the removal of monuments honouring historical figures implicated in colonialism, slavery and racism. At the Guild itself, the postulate met with irritation. The president, Rolf Henzi, insisted that the Guild was not guilty of racism. Its name, he claimed, was simply derived from the premises in which the Guild was first set up, the ‘House of the Moor’. Furthermore, he argued, ‘You can’t change something that’s over 600 years old [. . .]. [I won’t] rewrite history.’68 Eventually, the Guild softened its stance and attached plaques at both guildhall entrances. The inscription offers the minimal acknowledgement that these depictions ‘represent time-bound – and therefore prejudiced – ideas of black men’ (my translation). It mentions two theories of how the Moor may relate to the Guild. (1) He is a reference to the magus Balthasar, whose connection to the Guild it ascribes somewhat tenuously to the fact that the magi were ‘the patron saints of travel, which explains the prevalence of inns named after “the Moor”’. (2) The figure refers to St Maurice, the leader of the martyrs of the Theban Legion, who was ‘the patron saint of [. . .] dyers and clothmakers’.69 Due to his North African origins, St Maurice was indeed represented as black in certain areas of the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, a fact often pointed out in 63 Patricia Purtschert, ‘Democratising Switzerland: Challenging Whiteness in Public Space’, in Lüthi and Skenderovic, Switzerland and Migration, pp. 79–98, at pp. 89–93. 64 User comment on Adrian M. Moser, ‘Die schwarzen Figuren’ (2017) [accessed 25 September 2020]. 65 Raphael Albisser, ‘“Allein in Bern leben 10 000 People of Color!”’ (2016) [accessed 25 September 2020]. 66 André Holenstein qtd in Schär, ‘Vergessene Kolonialgeschichte’; Georg Kreis, ‘Zwischen Symbolpolitik und Realengagement’ (2014) [accessed 24 September 2020]. 67 Fabian Christl, ‘Jetzt geht es dem “Mohren” an den Kragen’ (2014) [accessed 24 September 2020]. 68 Qtd in Christl, ‘Jetzt geht es’. 69 ‘Zunftnamen / Wappen’ (n.d.) [accessed 25 Septem­ ber 2021].

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recent scholarship on race in medieval Europe. However, as an explanation of how the Bernese guild came by the name and emblem of the Moor, it is unconvincing. As Gude Suckale-Redlefsen has shown, representations of St Maurice as black are not known to occur in Switzerland, France or Italy but are largely restricted to the German area between the Weser and the Elbe, rarely if ever making it across the Danube to the south.71 In another echo of the Sechseläuten controversy, though, the reference to the Middle Ages is something of a smokescreen to begin with. Stressing the medieval origins of the Guild, its name and its token has allowed its representatives not only to sidestep the accusations of racism levelled at the depictions as they exist today but also to ignore the wider point that the two parliamentarians were trying to make: that the city and canton of Bern and some of its most prestigious institutions, such as the guilds, should publicly face up to their implication in a history of colonialism and racism. Then again, there is a specifically medievalist component to this evasion of uncomfortable history. In the statement that I quoted above, Guild president Henzi conflates the Guild’s medieval origins (the ‘600 years’ he mentions) with the supposed impossibility of the medieval  – and post-medieval  – depictions being involved in racism. A strategic ‘medieval defence’ against criticism emerges, according to which – just as accusations of sexism supposedly do not pertain to medievalist imagery and institutions – the original Moor, by definition, could not have been racist, and neither, therefore, can his later incarnations. Short-circuiting the present form of self-representation and its supposedly pre-racial medieval origins, the Guild can ignore the patent racism and colonialism inscribed on its heraldry. The controversy again revealed a Swiss guild whose defenders were unwilling to embrace the repeated renewal it had undergone in the past – and thus to face up to the possibility of renewing its self-representation in the present, well this side of ‘iconoclasm’. More fundamentally, it refused to accept that the meaning of representations inevitably changes over time. Such change is of course a problem that all traditions intermittently face. In fact, durable traditions will accept at certain points that not all their parts are worth preserving.72 In both The Hollow Crown and the Guild of the Moor controversies, the Middle Ages figured as finery and diversion simultaneously. For the Guild, proud continuity medievalism went hand in hand with a purblindness to – or calculated avoidance of – the racist and colonialist underbelly of guild tradition. In The Hollow Crown, conversely, it is not the Middle Ages that make excuses for racism but racial inclusivity that diverts attention from representations of the Middle Ages that are neither progressive nor particularly inclusive. 70

See also Heng, Invention of Race, pp. 222–42. Gude Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr/The Black Saint Maurice, foreword by Ladislas Bugner (Houston, TX, 1987), p. 17. 72 Martin Krygier, ‘Magna Carta and the Rule of Law Tradition’, in P. Waring (ed.), Papers on Parliament, 65: Proceedings of a Symposium Held by the Department of the Senate and the Rule of Law Institute of Australia to Commemorate the 800th Anniversary of the Sealing of Magna Carta (Canberra, 2016), pp. 11–29, at p. 23. 70 71

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Perhaps these inadequacies speak to respective British and Swiss tendencies in treating race in historical contexts more generally. The habit of ascribing near-­ sacrosanctity to medieval origins is deeply ingrained in a significant segment of national, regional and local cultural memory in Switzerland, as this book has shown repeatedly. Just as it has been slower than Britain to wake up to its post-migrant status, Switzerland is only slowly beginning to take note that identities derived from the deep past may come with a dynamics of ethnic and racial exclusion in the present. This belated realisation is thanks not least to ‘anti-amnesiac intervention[s]’ like Pinto de Magalhães and Köçer’s.73 Such challenges provoke a seemingly disproportionate public response, although the anti-racism protests that began in 2020 may yet turn out to be an inflection point in this matter. In fact, as this book was about to go into production, the Guild of the Moor performed a rather spectacular about-turn. Rolf Henzi let it be known in April of 2022 that the Guild rejected ‘all forms of discrimination and racism’ and that historical contextualisation of the Guild’s name and imagery was no longer sufficient: ‘what matters is the effect they have today – and that effect is discriminatory’. The Guild members would revert, in name and in spirit, ‘to what we really are: tailors and cloth-shearers’.74 The coat of arms would be taken down. The house crest, on the other hand, would have to stay: being a listed monument, it could be removed only by the public authorities. (At the time of writing, no announcement of its removal or otherwise has been made.) Judging by the Guild’s statements, however, it seems that a more in-depth reckoning with the Guild’s colonialist entanglements will have to wait for another time. Britain clearly has a head start in fostering sensitivity to racial exclusion (or in finding ways to navigate it) among leading cultural and political institutions. Yet mass-cultural productions like The Hollow Crown merely clothe a conservative and nostalgic rendition of canonical culture and a prestigious medieval past in what smacks of race-egalitarian tokenism. Inclusivity is subsumed by a hegemonic national narrative. This kind of memory culture wants to have its cake and eat it: to signal broad-mindedness in its approach to national community but also to bask in the heritage of yesteryear. Both countries are yet to produce a wide, good-faith debate of what it means to represent non-white bodies from, and in, the nation’s deep past today. Medievalisms of Welcome: Positive Immigration Stories Up to this point, what medievalisms I have discussed that address the topic of migration have done so mostly in ways that stress the non-belonging of immigrants and express resistance to them by parts of the majority population (especially in Chapters 3 and 4). In contrast, the examples I investigate in the second half of this chapter – all of them from the 2010s – question the idea that the nation is an Purtschert, ‘Democratising Switzerland’, p. 89. ‘Die Berner Zunft zum M*** will ihren Namen ändern’ (2022) [accessed 29 July 2022]. 73

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immutable monolith. The first two directly counter the idea that respect for the deep past needs to conflict with hybrid identities.75 Horatio Clare’s speculative fiction The Prince’s Pen (2011) is centrally concerned with forced mass migration to Wales and the conflicts it causes, and helps to resolve, there. Part of Seren Books’ novella series of contemporary adaptations of the Mabinogion, The Prince’s Pen is an adaption of the short tale ‘Lludd and Llefelys’, which is first attested as an addition to a mid-thirteenth-century Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae.76 The tale concerns three supernatural ‘plagues’ that beset Lludd’s kingdom of Britain: the Coranaiaid, a magical race that can hear every word the wind carries; two fighting dragons, whose screeches cause infertility and madness; and a magician who puts a sleeping spell on the court to steal all its food and drink. Lludd eventually overcomes them all by enlisting the wise counsel of his brother Llefelys. In his adaptation of the tale, Clare imagines an unspecified near future characterised by global upheaval, large-scale conflict and social discord after an unelaborated climate cataclysm. Narrator ‘Clip’ (real name: Katrin Williams), formerly right-hand woman, strategist and reader to the Welsh leader Ludo and now in voluntary exile, recounts how Ludo and his brother Levello saved the nation from three existential threats from without and within. The first is a military invasion and occupation by a global dictatorship; the second, religious strife in reaction to an imported Islamic orthodoxy; and the third, a home-bred economic and social breakdown brought on by poor leadership. The first two are of interest here for their link to immigration and multiculturalism and the way they include pointed references to the deep Welsh past. The bulk of the novella shows Wales as one of the last bastions of freedom resisting the totalitarian ‘World Majority Government’. The World Majority Government claims a civilising mission but really has its sights set on the resources of what it calls ‘failed states’ – in the case of Wales, its water supplies. The World Majority Government deploys a heterogeneous army of conscripts and mercenaries from all corners of the earth. This tactic is not without effect on the defenders: Clip states bluntly that she preferred it when her opponents on the battlefield ‘were Chinese or Koreans. I know it’s stupid. But if you’ve got to shank someone’s innards out with a bayonet it’s

75 Such works echo recent scholarly and educational initiatives in the UK and Switzerland. For instance, the British Migration Museum Project’s exhibition ‘No Turning Back’ (2018) and the Bernese Historical Museum’s exhibition ‘Homo Migrans’ (2019) in Switzerland sought to communicate to the wider public the historical normality, if not always the normal circumstances, of migration. In each exhibition, ideas of national communities remaining static and self-enclosed over time were challenged by information about the long history of people moving to and from these countries, mingling with settled communities, exchanging goods and ideas with them, and thereby changing them in dynamic ways: Migration Museum, ‘No Turning Back: Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain’ (2017) [accessed 24 September 2020]; Bernisches Historisches Museum, ‘Homo Migrans: Zwei Millionen Jahre unterwegs’ (2019) [accessed 20 December 2021]. 76 Sioned Davies, ‘Introduction’, in The Mabinogion, trans. with an introduction by Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2007), pp. ix–xxx, at p. xix.

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preferable he or she doesn’t look too much like anyone in your family, and it’s better you don’t understand what they’re screaming’ (p. 31). Yet, despite Clip’s suggestion that it is easier to kill outside your racial group, the Welsh resistance movement is anything but homogeneous itself and in fact depends on solidarity with newcomers from all over for its success. Levello forms an essential political alliance by marrying Uzma, the princess of Pakistan (the only other remaining free country besides Wales), and Wales takes in many refugees from an England mostly submerged by the seas. The resistance movement subsequently becomes a rallying point for people from all over the planet who oppose the World Majority Government. The motif of a banding-together in the face of an external threat is familiar from national narratives; here, it is a banding-together with foreign allies in a primarily national cause. In the drawn-out guerrilla war that follows, the multinational inflow allows the rebels to keep up the fight against a superior force waging a war of extermination. Only thanks to a Hungarian computer prodigy, Theo, do the rebels ultimately succeed in forcing the Invaders to withdraw. (He hacks their surveillance and combat drones so the insurgents can storm enemy strongholds across the country.) In his afterword, Clare points out that he deliberately departed from the original tale’s solution to the first plague, which is that Lludd sprinkles all attendants of a supposed peace gathering, human and Coranaiaid, with a magic fluid that destroys the Coranaiaid but leaves the humans unharmed. Clare consciously eschewed a solution that suggested the biological reality and exploitability of racial difference, stopping short of the full horror of the myth, in which biological (and presumably gene-based) warfare is used, in a monstrously casual and effective way. Perhaps consequently [The Prince’s Pen] misses an opportunity to explore a potential nightmare of the near-future. I don’t regret it: some things are too hideous to contemplate. [. . .] Fortunately, we no longer have the luxury of quite being able to believe in the dehumanisation of our foes. (p. 205)

The Prince’s Pen goes to some lengths to defuse the ethnic and racial hostility and triumphalism that often go hand in hand with national liberation narratives. Clip and Ludo continuously link their multicultural rebellion to former Welsh struggles against invaders, framing the conflict in terms of the familiar native tradition of self-assertion and resistance. According to Clip, Ludo ‘directed his own version’ of the military histories she reads to him: ‘People said he was the heir to Glyndwr and Llewellyn but he was more successful than either of them’ (p. 38). The proud tradition which Ludo continues goes back to the Roman invasion. Lying in ambush for an enemy platoon, Ludo reminds Clip that the enemy’s stronghold used to be a Roman fort, and he claims that history repeats itself: ‘Don’t you think your ancestors lay just here, waiting to scrag a legionary or two, on a brother night to this bitch?’ (p. 30). The Invaders themselves set up garrisons in the country’s many castles, all but re-enacting the Norman incursions (p. 45). One explanation for the Welsh tradition of resistance can be found in the subtly medieval land: ‘what a grand country is Wales for guerrilla war! Dimpled and rippled with ruins and wrinkles, furrowed

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with stream-cuts, rumpled with folded hills. Show me any view in Wales and I’ll show you double a dozen pockets where you can hide a platoon’ (p. 38, my emphasis). The conclusion of the war also invokes a fitting medievalist precedent. During the great insurgency, the rebels look to the national saint, St David, for tips, slightly adapting his stratagem of pinning leeks to the Welsh soldier’s clothes to distinguish them from their Saxon enemies (p. 109). The upshot is that when Ludo’s highly diverse forces achieve victory and the Invaders concede the status of ‘Autonomous Region’ to the British Isles, it appears the crowning achievement of an ancient Welsh desire for freedom. Although the novella does not say so, the implication for its hero is clear. In Ludo, Wales has at last found its Mab Darogan, the redeemer of the Britons, who are now the Welsh. The fact that the Prince’s Pen’s victorious Welsh are no longer an ethnically homogeneous group does not lessen their long-awaited triumph. The second threat to be averted from Ludo’s newly enlarged kingdom is that of religious strife. While invoking the twenty-first-century spectre of political Islam, Clare again skirts simplistic ‘us versus them’ thinking. During the war, Ludo and Levello must convert to Islam so as to make Levello’s political marriage to Uzma possible. After the war, Uzma becomes the figurehead of a rapidly growing British movement of ‘Believers’ who want to achieve a social order infused by (only vaguely described) orthodox Islamic teachings. This brings about a countermovement of implacable ‘Traditionalism’, a militant ‘scramble of faiths and disbeliefs’ (p. 119) that opposes what it sees as an emerging Islamist theocracy. The ‘Trads’ choose Clip as their figurehead even though she insists that she wants nothing to do with them. Between them, the two movements threaten to split the country, with mass protests and violent altercations leading some of Clips former resistance network to clamour for a ‘Rebellion Day Two’ that would see ‘decent government, secular government’ restored by force of arms (p. 120). As a last resort, Ludo and Levello force Clip and Uzma – the native red dragon and the foreign white dragon of ‘Lludd and Llefelys’ – to state the cases of their respective movements in a formal debate in Oxford. In the case for traditionalism that Clip reluctantly presents, she stresses the Trads’ ‘loyalty to an idea of these peculiar islands and their particularities, as they have grown and changed and collected here in the thousands of years’. Interestingly, this Welshwoman now speaks quite naturally for all Britain, as is more usually the English wont: she insists that the British are not a nation of ‘convictions’ but of ‘leanings’, an ‘archipelago of modest tones’ (p. 144). Their aversion to ideological dictates, however, is absolute. Britain has learnt from centuries of war led in their name: ‘We have made torn corpses of men, women and children too – here and abroad. We want no more of it’ (p. 144). Uzma responds by deflating Clip’s loose description of national identity, arguing that that noncommittal identity has brought about moral decay, meaninglessness and numbing materialism (pp. 147f.). But then, miraculously, she suggests moderation and mutual toleration: she will not fight her former fellow campaigners, family and friends (p. 149). The dispute ends in a show of affection between Clip and Uzma, who not so secretly are in love with one another and let their followers see it (p. 150). The figureheads of both movements reconciled, their followers relent. It turns out that this has been Ludo and Levello’s plan all along.

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This (perhaps somewhat too convenient) resolution again highlights Clare’s attempt to address equitably issues which in less exaggerated form are being debated in the real world: issues of migration, culture contact and accommodation between (at least historically) majority Christian countries and Islam. Clare refuses to perpetuate contemporary quasi-racial stereotypes of the Islamic Other.77 While it is true that, in the novella, Uzma helps to infuse Islam into the cultural mainstream, the movement of the Believers is only partly represented as an imported problem. Rather, it is a way of life actively chosen by roughly half of British society. The Believers’ controversial form of Islam is practised not along foreseeable ethnic lines but finds followers from across society; it has become a thoroughly British phenomenon. Nor are the Believers’ beliefs unequivocally a problem – Uzma and her followers appear impelled by genuine ethical motivations, and the violence between the two movements originates with the Traditionalists (p. 119). More importantly, while the accommodation between the two faiths may ultimately hinge on personal sympathies, it is, in yet another example of continuity medievalism, already foreshadowed by the country’s own deep history. In the debate, Clip asserts that the ‘most powerful religion in the old world came here, and touched and held people inspired, and for the basest reasons, perhaps, we made it make an exception for us’ (p. 145). This reference to Christianity echoes an earlier claim Ludo makes to convince Clip of the benefits of forging an alliance with Pakistan by converting to Islam. He too refers to the native precedent of a Christianity supposedly adapted to suit British idiosyncrasies: ‘Haven’t these islands converted once already? Augustine of Canterbury did it. We can do it. And then fat Henry adapted it to local conditions as they suited’ (pp. 54f.). Defying Huntingtonesque ideas of an inevitable clash of civilisations between Christianity and Islam, Clare’s solution is a historically reasoned act of accommodation, which is represented as perfectly in line with exceptionalist British ways. King Ludo develops an unorthodox form of Islam that finds many followers (pp. 79f.) and reunites the country after the Oxford debate. In The Prince’s Pen, Wales and Welsh-led Britain weather foreign invasion not by intra-ethnic solidarity, nor religious discord by jealously defending monoculturalism. Fittingly for a novella whose dedication is ‘aux Étrangers’, Clare’s Wales and Britain are places open to incomers, whose contributions to national identity can be accommodated – must be accommodated, because that has always been the nation’s way. In this reimagining of a tale from the most celebrated cycle of medieval Welsh literature, immigration and culture contact are represented in a positive light: challenging but rewarding, and wholly in keeping with native tradition. The obligating nature of native tradition in the service of inclusion is foregrounded also in the poetico-political project Refugee Tales.78 A rare activist medievalism from the left, Refugee Tales invokes a series of medievalist symbols of Englishness, most prominently Chaucer, to protest inhumane immigration policy 77 Heng, Invention of Race, pp.  20 and 26; Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (Abingdon, 2013), p. 148. 78 For a longer version of this analysis, see my ‘Medievalisms of Welcome: Medieval Englishness and the Nation’s Migrant Other in Refugee Tales’, in Mary Boyle (ed.), International Medievalisms: From Nationalism to Activism (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 157–71.

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that criminalises refugees and to imagine a more inclusive community in Britain. In an irony even more striking than in The Prince’s Pen, Refugee Tales’ medievalism harnesses meanings of long national continuity and rootedness to make its case for accommodating migrants’ experiences of discontinuity and deracination. The Refugee Tales project was started in 2015 by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group in collaboration with Kent Refugee Help. Its central demand was, and is, the abolition of the indefinite detention of those immigrants whose right of residence has been denied. The UK is currently the only European country with such a policy. An increasing number of critics have pointed out that its arbitrary nature conflicts with Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the UK is a signatory: ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.’79 British legislation remains unchanged, despite protests by such institutions as the Bar Council and the British Medical Association, the fact that former detainees have been asked to speak in parliament and to national broadcasters (RT III, p. 192) and the gradual increase in public awareness of Refugee Tales and its demands.80 Refugee Tales has two core components. The first is a large-scale annual, multi-day protest walk, the first of which took place in the summer of 2015. The routes have been different each year, but they usually foreground the project’s medievalist credentials. The walkers include refugees and ex-detainees as well as writers, poets, academics and others. At every stop on the way, established British or British-based writers (including such names as Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay and Abdulrazak Gurnah) give a public reading of tales relating the experiences of individual refugees and detainees. In recent iterations, there have been tales told not by a third party but by refugees themselves. The rest of the time, the writers speak on refugees’ behalf either because trauma makes public self-exposure impossible for them or because they prefer to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals by the Home Office, the criminal organisations on whom they have informed and so forth. In acknowledgement of the writers’ status as mouthpieces rather than authors proper, the tales are said to be ‘told to’ them rather than ‘told by’ them. The project’s other core component is four literary anthologies, from 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021, in which close to sixty tales are collected.81 They tell of a wide range of experiences of those displaced by war, religious persecution, slavery and government corruption, and who in Britain come up against an arcane and hostile immigration system. Other tales are concerned with the experiences of the lawyers, support workers, smugglers and citizens who interact with refugees.82 These anthologies literally wear their medievalism on their sleeve. Besides the reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the title, the book covers feature ‘vines’ 79 United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (n.d.) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 80 My manuscript was completed before the UK instituted the deeply disturbing policy of deporting refugees for ‘resettlement’ in Rwanda. 81 David Herd and Anna Pincus (eds), Refugee Tales, 4 vols (Manchester, 2016–21). I refer to these volumes as RT I, II, III and IV. 82 For brief readings of some of the early tales, see Sierra Lomuto, ‘Chaucer and Hum­ anitarian Activism’ (2018) [accessed 20 December 2021]; see also Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms, pp. 128–30.

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of barbed wire in a dark variation on the floral illuminations familiar from medieval and pseudo-medieval manuscripts.83 A medievalesque initial84 contrasts strikingly with the blocky, modern serif typeface of the remaining letters of the title. However, despite this immediate prominence of medievalist signifiers, medievalism is more actually a framing device than a consistent point of reference for the tales themselves. To be sure, some of the writers respond to Chaucer’s poetry in the tales they relate.85 For example, in ‘The Interpreter’s Tale’, Carol Watts juxtaposes epigraphs by Chaucer and the Home Office. Each stresses of the importance of not omitting anything in reproducing another person’s speech: Chaucer’s General Prologue: ‘He may nat spare, al thogh he were his brother; / He moot as wel seye o word as another.’ The Home Office’s Code of Conduct for Registered Interpreters: ‘Your duty is to inter­pret everything that is said.’ (Qtd in RT I, p. 63)

These imperatives result in empathetic literary ventriloquism in one case and potentially life-changing real-world responsibility in the other. ‘The Interpreter’s Tale’ is representative of the collections in suggesting that a balance between these two functions must be struck also by the writers involved in Refugee Tales. However, as Helen Barr has also concluded, the more significant references to Chaucer which Refugee Tales makes are those that surround the tales.86 Its several medievalisms – Chaucerian and other – have all had a history of being considered touchstones of English national identity. Firstly, Refugee Tales channels Chaucer’s framing conceit of an unlikely group of pilgrims and taps into a time-honoured discourse about Chaucer – a composite of the author and the fictional pilgrim – as the congenial, benevolent facilitator of community and exchange, and as a man of great humanity who is singularly accepting of human diversity. Connected to this, Refugee Tales harnesses Chaucer’s reputation as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ to pursue its own stated goal of ‘renewing’ the English language, away from the dehumanising discourse of the immigration apparatus and towards inclusivity and welcome. Secondly, the protest walkers interact with ‘medieval’ places, connecting static memory sites that are highly charged with national medievality and involving them in the deliberate act of walking and talking with those marginalised for moving. Thirdly, the project invokes a radical strain of the Magna Carta tradition that sees it as the origin of the due process of law and hence, in this context, as the guarantor of liberties withheld from those indefinitely detained. As I have written at length elsewhere about the enabling medievalist discourse of Refugee Tales,87 I Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 2008), pp. 3–328. 84 See also Helen Barr, ‘Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales’, Journal of Medieval Worlds, 1:1 (2019), 79–106, at p. 104. 85 Several tales in the first volume refer to ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, which Barr attributes to the simple fact that it is itself ‘a version of a migrant’s tale’. Barr, ‘Stories’, p. 87. 86 Barr, ‘Stories’, pp. 80f. and 104. 87 M. Berger, ‘Medievalisms of Welcome’. 83

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will now turn to the complications that arise for the project’s avowed post-national politics because of that discourse. The three core medievalisms of Refugee Tales have one thing in common: an appeal to some form of precedent. The language it seeks is new, as are its (human) geography and the law it demands. But in all three cases, the fountainhead of inspiration is the Middle Ages. There is a more general point to be made here. By appealing to tradition the way they do, Refugee Tales and medievalisms like it – including The Prince’s Pen – make use of a fundamentally conservative mode of argumentation in progressive causes. A close parallel to Refugee Tales in this regard is Protest: Stories of Resistance (2017), which sets out to represent a specifically British tradition of protest whose origins it locates in the Middle Ages, in this case in the English Revolt of 1381.88 Both collections, while originating in a contemporary universalist human rights discourse, simultaneously appeal to the particularism of national tradition. In their modus operandi at least, they are thus no different from conservative medievalisms that look back to medieval precedents in order to celebrate national identity and support political causes of their own. Perhaps the similarities in the approaches to tradition taken by these progressive medievalisms and some of their conservative counterparts are best understood in terms of a feeling of ‘obligation to do justice to the past’, as Emily Robinson puts it.89 Robinson suggests that we consider such similarities in terms of the theorising of nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, who distinguishes between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflexive’ nostalgia.90 Restorative nostalgia ‘stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’, thinking itself not nostalgia but, rather, ‘truth and tradition’, whereas reflexive nostalgia ‘thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately’. At its best, reflexive nostalgia ‘can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias’.91 Refugee Tales takes up that challenge. To be clear, then, the ‘conservative’ appeal to precedent by progressive medievalisms does not per se weaken their arguments. In the case of Refugee Tales, however, the appeal to medieval Englishness poses undeniable difficulties for the originators, who seem to wish to burst free from the narrow national framework that constrains and criminalises the movement of people. Herd states: ‘Serviceable as that language of national identity might once have been as a way of organising a relation to space, [. . .] such a way of orienting ourselves to space badly needs to be re-made’ (RT I, p. 138). And yet, Refugee Tales proceeds from some of the most powerful medievalisms of Englishness – which here plays its customary role of standing in for Britishness, a role Refugee Tales never questions. The use of these medievalisms in Refugee 88 Popularly known as the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’. Ra Page (ed.), Protest: Stories of Resistance (Manchester, 2017). 89 Emily Robinson, History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics: Past Politics and Present Histories (Manchester, 2012), p. 24. 90 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001); see also David Matthews and Mike Sanders, ‘Introduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious?’, in David Matthews and Mike Sanders (eds), Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 1–16, at p. 13. 91 Boym, Future, p. xviii.

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Tales emphatically does not serve to explode the national community they have long been enlisted to support; rather, they serve to expand that community. In fact, Refugee Tales keeps a national frame in sight at all times. Not only does it walk and appropriate medievalist memory sites of the nation, invoke Magna Carta and look for inspiration to a medieval author who has, for better or worse, been canonised as articulating a benevolent, demotic kind of originary Englishness. Its very call to action is in the first instance national in scope. Refugee Tales does not so much subvert signifiers of Englishness as claim that in them has always inhered a universal welcoming spirit: the tolerance, conviviality and mobility of Chaucer and the germs of human rights in Magna Carta.92 This is a stronger version of the national tradition of accommodation that The Prince’s Pen invokes, not least because Refugee Tales makes truth claims in a call to action in the real world. It is possible to see Refugee Tales as channelling a distinctively leftwing take on tradition: tradition as a series of ‘roads not taken’. It certainly suggests that the potential of the English Middle Ages has been squandered: the Chaucerian welcoming spirit suppressed, movement restricted, legal standards betrayed. It is the project’s progressive utopianism – in the sense of a belief in the perfectibility of society – which prevents it from becoming a misty-eyed appeal to a golden age. The rupture is not absolute, the aim not restoration but improvement. The kind of tradition that the medievalism of Refugee Tales invokes is about the past of better futures. Interestingly, the enabling medievalist discourse of Refugee Tales recedes with each new volume that is published. None of the tales in the third volume openly references Chaucer, and the foreword and afterword too are shy of referring to the Middle Ages. Besides for the first time including tales told by refugees themselves rather than through an intermediary, the third volume is also the first to include the tale of an ex-detainee not in the UK but in the US. The fourth volume, not once explicitly referring to medieval history or Chaucer, takes this move away from the project’s original symbolic core even further by including the accounts of refugees in Canada and several non-English-speaking European countries. This ‘going global’ is signalled yet again on the cover artwork, which features a pointedly un-medieval view of our planet as seen from space. It seems the strong national resonance of the prestigious medievalisms that originally propelled the project is becoming increasingly restricting as that project widens its scope to protest the injustices and cruelties of immigration policies worldwide. Depending on the prominence which host countries other than Britain are given in future iterations of Refugee Tales, we can expect Chaucer – at least in his role as the father of English letters – to henceforth play invisible host to its storytellers.

92 Lomuto makes a comparable point regarding the project’s use of Chaucer the father of English poetry: ‘Refugee Tales transforms the imperial power of English into a tool of resistance precisely by speaking through Chaucer  – a looming, masculine figure of the English canon and a visionary poet who wrote in a language that still held the potential for “welcome”’. Lomuto, ‘Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism’.

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The National Middle Ages Destabilised My final examples are representative of a small set of recent works that are fundamentally sceptical of invoking the Middle Ages as a way of establishing national identity in the diverse societies of the twenty-first century. Indeed, they are sceptical of the very idea of the nation and its stability over time. The two theatre plays which I explore here approach this problem from different angles, one arguing for a downsizing from the national – and the totalising stories it uses to sustain itself – to the local, the other deconstructing the flawed perception that underlies any act of othering people to shore up group cohesion. Playwright Daniela Janjic’s Tell is a loose, irreverent adaptation of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and was first performed in 2018.93 Tell signalled its revisionism already in the motif used for its publicity material: a pear. This is a sly reference to the apple Tell shoots from his son’s head in the myth. Apples and pears are juxtaposed in the German equivalent of the English idiom ‘comparing apples and oranges’, and Janjic’s play is indeed a very different fruit from Schiller’s. It retains the skeleton of the plot but updates liberally and adds a frame narrative set in the twenty-first century, including a sceptical chorus composed of young adults. The play originated in collaboration with these young adults, participants in Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn’s (Theatre Orchestra Biel Solothurn; TOBS) theatre-pedagogical initiative Junges Theater Biel (Young Theatre Biel). The question they explored was which stories could still help to establish collective identity. The answer they came up with was that the Tell myth could do so only through its own deconstruction. The cast and the stage on which they played are integral to Janjic’s adaptation. Tell’s cast, which teamed up the young adults with the permanent TOBS ensemble, was ethnically and racially diverse and included many second- or third-generation Swiss. Unlike The Hollow Crown’s colour-blind casting, diversity was not meant to be taken for granted in this case. Rather, it strongly shaped the play’s theme of people who, instead of jostling for room under the old umbrella of nationhood, are now looking for new ways to form a community. The play was also very much written for the Biennese stage. Biel/Bienne, as it is officially called, is the bigger of only two officially bilingual (German and French) cities in the country. Over a fifth of the population reports speaking three languages or more. Biel has a relatively high percentage of non-citizen inhabitants (33.4 per cent, according to a 2017 survey) and is known nationally as a strongly multicultural city. It also has the highest proportion of welfare recipients of all Swiss cities, over half of them non-citizens. This fact, combined with some high-profile controversies over the last ten-odd years about Islamic radicals suspected of disseminating jihadist propaganda, has earned Biel some nationwide notoriety. That notoriety may account in part for the defiance which the young adults displayed in Tell. In any case, Biel was well chosen for a pointedly multicultural riposte to the heritage Tell that we see in traditionalist performances such as the Interlaken Tellspiele (Chapter 1).

93 I am grateful to Margrit Sengebusch of the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn (TOBS) for providing me with a copy of Janjic’s script and the video recording of a performance to supplement the notes I took during the performance of 26 May 2018 in Biel.

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Tell’s action keeps jumping between the frame narrative set in the present, in which the chorus contends with three overbearing female personifications of Swissness, and the thirteenth-century plot derived from Schiller, a play-within-a-play presented by the Swissnesses and commented on by the chorus. However, the sceptical, presentist attitude of the chorus, whose members also take on roles in the embedded plot, keeps bleeding into that plot. For example, the idealistic character Berthold von Bruneck is fighting the Habsburg rulers by shooting a critical documentary film about Swiss arms exports to warring countries, and female conspirators complain that the Rütli Oath they are asked to take has not been worded in gender-inclusive language. The play opens with the chorus members addressing the audience directly, as they do throughout. They ask what it means to be a ‘hero’ or a ‘villain’ in the present, what role myth-making in the vein of Wilhelm Tell can still play in contemporary Switzerland, and they raise the question of their own sense of belonging. This self-questioning is brought on by the many things that are ‘fucked up’ in the world. These include the unjust causes of and inadequate responses to forced migration: prisoner camps, shoot-to-kill orders, failure to render assistance and a hostile environment after the refugees arrive in Switzerland. In the light of such systemic injustices, the Swiss can no longer afford the comfort of a parochial and morally unambiguous myth: ‘How nice it would be if this were like the myth. Where the roles of foe and friend are clearly defined.’ In these lines, Tell’s medievalism protests its own irrelevance to express the idea that the medieval is fundamentally Other and has little to offer that would speak to our present concerns. Accordingly, the play subverts Tell’s greatest claim to heroism, his shooting of the tyrant Gessler. In his monologue before the shooting, Tell reflects on how Gessler’s cruel toying with the life of Tell’s son Walter has forced him, Tell, to now become a murderer, a monster. In the performance, the scene was lit in bilious green and accompanied by an ominous droning noise. The hollow way in which Gessler meets his end was represented by the members of the chorus, who adopted a threatening stance towards Tell as they spoke his lines in unison. However, they turned their backs on the killing itself: in an extreme act of violence, Tell shot Gessler half a dozen times before finishing him off with his bare hands. In the chorus’s final assessment of him, Tell is an unstable and violent man unfit to be considered a hero today, a lone wolf who cares only about himself and his family, not the community at large. Tell’s deconstruction of Wilhelm Tell is guilty of a rather one-sided reading of Schiller, in whose version the tyrannicide is far from morally unambiguous, as for instance the Parricida scene in the final act demonstrates: there, Tell sees himself uncomfortably compared to an ambitious kin-killer.94 In fairness, however, that scene has a history of being omitted in the interest of uncomplicated pathos in the more patriotically minded renditions.95 Tell offers an effective rebuke to that kind of Schiller reception. Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, with a commentary by W. Grosse (Frankfurt a. M., 2013), 5.2. 95 Peter von Matt, Das Kalb vor der Gotthardpost: Zur Literatur und Politik der Schweiz (Munich, 2012), p. 244. 94

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Meanwhile, the three Swissnesses are at pains to uphold a patriotic reading of the myth. Reflecting the Swiss self-conception as a proudly multilingual country, they comment on the goings-on in the country’s three major national languages, German, French and Italian. All fake smiles and steely glibness, these toga-­wearing, television presenter-like figures insist that Switzerland is the cradle of freedom and Tell its hero. Belying their superficial affability, the Swissnesses employ despotic methods to stifle criticism: they patronise, silence, drown out and even manhandle dissenters in order to maintain a simple patriotic narrative. When the chorus criticises the displacement of people by war and the profits which Swiss arms firms make from it, the Swissnesses applaud the ‘Swiss youth’ for their ‘commitment’ but immediately shoo them off the stage. When the impassioned Berthold wants to debate the issue of Swiss arms dealing further, they direct clichés about Swiss excellence at the audience: ‘Young man, it is the buyers who decide what they do with our exports. Our priority, whether it’s about cheese or chocolate, is quality.’ Dragging the critic offstage, they plough on, conjuring a vision of timeless freedom and justice: It has always been this beautiful spot That has ever made a stand against oppressors And all the while remains fair, humanitarian and forever the same!

They repeat these lines at the end of the play, by which time the ambivalent Tell plot and their own tyrannical behaviour have revealed these to be meaningless platitudes. In thus discrediting Swissness personified, the play also reflects on the arbitrariness of the boundaries of national identity. Specifically, it takes aim at the self-­ declared Willensnation, which it suggests has lost its will to accept newcomers. In the key scene on the Rütli, the leading conspirator, Walter Fürst, recalls the Swiss origin myth, much as Stauffacher does in Schiller. It is an immigration myth that he tells, of an ancient people to the far north who in a time of dearth forced a tenth of their own to emigrate. The exiles took lands by Lake Lucerne and from there expanded their dominion to places where ‘another people speaks in other tongues’. At this point in the story, two conspirators disagree, in the respective language, whether that people was the French or the Italians. The distinction becomes moot, however, as Fürst continues: From all the foreign tribes, which since Settled in the midst of their country, The Swiss people evolves.

‘Migrants turn into aboriginals!’ one of his co-conspirators enthuses in distinctly modern terms, highlighting a core paradox of nationalist origin myths. After the inevitable Rütli Oath, however, a maudlin Swissness takes the stage. She thanks the oath-takers and praises the idea of the Willensnation: ‘The moments of unity, solidarity, community, the Willensnation. Together.’ But, in an instant, she swerves from the theme of togetherness into territories of exclusion. There are, she insists, historical deadlines immigrants must meet, lest they become ‘those who from now on won’t be part of the club’. None too subtly, the play drives home the

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point that Swissness may clothe itself in the garb of a winning multilingualism and the language of voluntary solidarity but has long since betrayed these ideals and turned instead to a stealthy form of ethnonationalism. The play concludes with the young adults returning to the question of belonging in the present. The aporias of nationhood, paraded in a deconstructed national myth of hypocritical Swissness, lead the young adults to embrace a purely local community as an anchor for positive identification: they feel Biennese first and foremost. For them, Biel is a place where questions such as ‘where are you from?’ or ‘where are your parents from?’ – questions anybody marked as non-normative racially or ethnically is familiar with – hold little relevance. At the close, the chorus rejects the national category and the medievalism which its gatekeepers employ to enforce it. They ask, rhetorically: ‘We don’t belong? If anything, it’s the entire country that doesn’t belong. But not us. Where did we grow up? [. . .] Where do we walk the streets day after day? Here! We’re from here!’ Tell contends that nationhood has failed to accommodate immigrants and people of non-normative race and ethnicity and must therefore be abandoned in favour of a smaller-scale local identity – and so must the medievalism that supports it. In place of the old nation-building on medieval(ist) foundations, Tell champions analogous, local community-building. In ultimately evading the question of what kind of alternative mythology that community is to be built on, however, it stops short of fully apprehending the processes that underlie the creation of racial and ethnic Others, and hence the nature of racial and ethnic prejudice. In contrast, Scottish playwright David Greig’s Dunsinane questions the whole concept of stable collective identity.96 A play ostensibly deeply concerned with questions of Scottish nationhood, it nevertheless puts Scottish otherness centre stage. Dunsinane strikes me as one of the most successful examples of an increasing number of literary, dramatic and film medievalisms to engage critically with the othering involved in negotiations of any national identity. Dunsinane is an announced sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.97 The action sets in with the English army storming Dunsinane castle in order to supplant the Scottish ‘tyrant’ (who remains unnamed and never enters the stage). The battle is over quickly but, contrary to the well-intentioned commander Siward’s expectations, the English occupation turns into a protracted mess. Scotland proves to be a strange country inhabited by an even stranger people. The dead king’s widow – who is not once referred to as Lady Macbeth but is given her proper name, Gruach – leads the Scottish resistance to the English-installed King Malcolm. Siward resorts to increasingly ruthless means in a vain attempt to pacify the country. The play ends with mutual disillusionment and a political stalemate. Dunsinane is a play about Scottishness, albeit an ambiguous and ambivalent Scottishness. This makes it not only a sequel to Macbeth, but also a pointed response to it. After all, Shakespeare’s so-called ‘Scottish Play’ is not a particularly Scottish 96 David Greig, Dunsinane (London, 2010). I am grateful to Charlotte Gross at the National Theatre of Scotland for granting me access to the video recordings of a performance of Dunsinane from 2011. I base my reading on both the published text and the recording. 97 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Katherine Steele Brokaw, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London, 2019).

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affair. Unlike Shakespeare’s medieval Scots, who all speak in the same ‘measured and dignified cadences of English’ as the Englishmen led by Siward,98 most of Greig’s Scots address each other in Gaelic. Particularly in the play’s staged form, where the Gaelic goes unsubtitled, this is a consequential move, given the very small speaker numbers today. Not just for the average international audience but for a domestic one as well, such marked linguistic alterity has the immediate effect of rendering Scottishness at least somewhat ‘other’.99 This impression of otherness is driven home by the Scots’ markedly exotic linguistic practices. As we can tell from those Scots that do speak English, they use language in a way that seems, to the English, subtle to the point of impenetrability. King Malcolm explains to Siward that the Scots are experts in equivocation; they are very very careful about the way we hear and understand words. So for example – if a person in Scotland says ‘It seems a person has died’ we tend to hear that word ‘seems’ – ‘seems’ – and of course that word makes a difference. Isn’t that infuriating? It’s silly and of course it means that every discussion is fraught and people have to pussyfoot around when obviously one simply wants to cut through the nonsense and describe the facts of the world as they are – but there it is. (p. 28)

Cryptic Scottish language practice also shades into a seemingly arcane Scottish culture more generally. Malcolm describes Scottish thinking as ‘circular’, whereas the English way is ‘straight’ (p. 52). It will become important for my argument later on that these are the generalisations of a powerful, Anglicised individual whose ethnological discourse on the Scots is deeply problematic. For the straightforward military man Siward, however, Malcom’s description rings true: intricate patterns of loyalty, feuding and intermarriage between the various Scottish clans consistently mystify him (pp. 29, 108), as do elaborate cultural protocols such as kisses signifying mistrust and the presence of a certain ambassador amounting to a ritual snub (pp. 78f.). Seemingly, this Scottish outlandishness is the result not only of differences in cultural convention: Gaelic itself is claimed to be full of intrinsic difficulties for the English mind. Before things turn sour, Siward embarks on a romantic relationship with Gruach. When she suggests that he could learn her language, he retorts that ‘Your language is hard to learn’ (p. 76). ‘We like it that way,’ she replies, and remarks that there are fundamental differences between English and Gaelic: Your English is a woodworker’s tool. Siward. Hello, goodbye, that tree is green, Simple matters. A soldier’s language sent out to capture the world in words. 98 Christopher Highley, ‘The Place of Scots in the Scottish Play: Macbeth and the Politics of Language’, in Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester, 2004), pp. 53–66, at p. 60. 99 The effect is less striking but still there in the published text, which is in English only. The lines supposed to be in Gaelic are set off typographically with square brackets.

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Always trying to describe. Throw words at the tree and eventually you’ll force me to see the tree just as you see it. We long since gave up believing in descriptions. Our language is the forest. (p. 76)

Siward certainly believes this. He thinks the country is full of symbols that resist rational analysis: ‘In this country anything can contain a message’ (p. 62). His suspicion appears to be borne out when Gruach mysteriously manages to stage an incursion of Scottish rebels under his very nose. Language is just the most conspicuous part of a construction of two seemingly diametrically opposed national identities. Another notable part of it is the association of the Scots with magic, and of the English with no-nonsense realism. This is a variation on the contrast between pragmatic, arbitrary (in the semiotic sense) English and Scottish Gaelic as a magical language in which the word equals the thing. When the English Boy Soldier first encounters Gruach, her ladies ‘prepare a drink over a cauldron. As they work, they sing’ (p. 59). Not only to the audience familiar with Shakespeare’s play but to the Boy Soldier, too, this scene evokes witchcraft. Gruach tries to rattle him by claiming that what he thinks is ‘nice singing’ is really an incantation, and that the drink will ‘turn you into a bird’ (pp. 60f.). At Gruach and Malcolm’s abortive wedding, during which Scottish rebels storm the castle and Gruach escapes (after the boy describes her as looking ‘magical’, p. 85), there is a suggestion that the ‘wedding song’ the Scots were singing triggered the attack; the Boy Soldier is uncertain whether it succeeded because of ‘witchcraft or [. . .] treachery  / Or some combination of the two’ (p. 87). Gruach’s son, Lulach, later feeds English fears of Scottish magic, claiming that his fugitive mother and her women are witches who cast weather spells and poison the English (pp. 121f.). Importantly, however, the reality of Scottish magic is never confirmed. A third, related, aspect of the apparent English–Scottish dichotomy is the discursive gendering of Scotland as female. On a basic level, this is simply a consequence of the characters we get to see: whereas we encounter Scottish women such Gruach, her ladies and a Hen Girl, all the English are men, and soldiers to boot. What is more, the play’s primary antagonism is that between Siward and Gruach, who thus tacitly assume the role of representative of their respective nation; as Siward puts it during their final confrontation, they are ‘a man and a woman who have to work out how best to organise their world’ (p. 133). The suggestion that ‘masculine’ English weapons – literal weapons – are matched by beguiling, ‘feminine’ Scottish ones further contributes to the feminisation of Scotland. Gruach immediately charms Siward (in the metaphorical sense), and he perceives an equivalence between military and romantic conquest: ‘Look at you smiling [. . .] and your women laughing at me. Which of us is really the conqueror here and which of us the conquered?’ (p. 77). If this is reminiscent of The White Queen’s ‘woman’s weapons’, so is the link between a soft, indirect way of ruling with femininity. The man’s man Siward essentially accuses Malcolm of being a girly ruler: ‘When you talk about kingship you talk about who’s friends with who and who said what and what things mean and what gifts to give. . . . You make the problems of being a king sound like the problems of

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being a woman’ (p. 112). These and other supposed collective attributes of the Scots and the English can be condensed into something like this: Table 1 Dunsinane’s English–Scottish dichotomy

The English

The Scots

• literal, descriptive language; inelegant (‘a woodworker’s tool’)

• metaphorical, non-arbitrary language; lyrical

• ‘straight’ thinking

• ‘circular’ thinking

• appealing to pragmatic realism

• appealing to natural magic and the irrational

• forthright

• ‘pussyfooting’, dissembling (‘traps’), corrupt

• committed to future clarity in power-relations

• bound by constraints imposed by a confusing clannish past

• living in a ‘lovely’ country of plenty

• living in a wild, ‘cold’ country

• collectively gendered as masculine

• collectively gendered as feminine

In constructing this dichotomy, Greig taps into centuries-old cultural stereotypes. Construed either negatively or positively, many of the attributes listed on the right are common tropes of Celticism.100 They were influentially articulated (though not invented) by Matthew Arnold in his lecture series ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ at Oxford in 1867.101 Conceived as a valorisation of Celtic culture in the face of the powerful cultural model of Saxonism of the time, Arnold’s lecture series went on to fix a number of stereotypes and supposed character traits of ‘the Celt’ in the popular imagination. According to Arnold, the Celtic mentality includes a fey tendency towards dreaminess and otherworldliness, as well as a ‘chafing against the despotism of fact’.102 Whereas the ‘Saxons’ – i.e., the English – look to a future of commerce and industry embodied for Arnold by the city of Liverpool, the Celts remain locked in a state of pastness, represented by the Isle of Anglesey: ‘Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to it.’103 Arnold’s Saxon–Celtic binary is, moreover, a gendered one. According to him, the Saxons embody masculinity, whereas ‘the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the

100 On Celticism, see e.g., Terence Brown (ed.), Celticism (Amsterdam, 1996); Marion Gibson, Shelley Trower and Garry Tregidga, Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity (London, 2013). On Celticism’s relationship to Gothicism, see Joanne Parker (ed.), The Harp and the Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin (Leiden, 2016). 101 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867). 102 Arnold, Study, p. 103. 103 Arnold, Study, p. 2.

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Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy’.104 The Celts emerge a fundamentally Other people to the ‘default’ English. By having his characters ascribe such Celticist attributes to the Scots, Greig puts much of the identificatory potential on the down-to-earth English invaders. In fact, by its very setup, the play favours the English perspective. Besides the constraints imposed on audience identification with the Scots by the Gaelic language, there is the fact that Siward, who like his namesake in Macbeth carries the epithet of ‘England’, is clearly the play’s main character. Furthermore, there are mediating monologues by the Boy Soldier at the beginning of each of the four acts, letters written to his mother in Kent in which he marvels at the strange country he and his comrades are garrisoned in. Indeed, to a man, the English are disconcerted by the unreadable behaviour of the Scots – and so, in consequence, are we the audience. Dunsinane is, at heart, a performance of Scottish self-othering by means of self-Celticising. It is in this context that we should consider the play’s strong contemporary resonances: Dunsinane nods heavily to the twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, the question of a drawn-out process of disengagement after toppling a ‘tyrant’ is a central motif in Dunsinane. Siward repeatedly states his good intentions (p. 132) of bringing peace and good governance to Scotland, which reflects the Bush and Blair administrations’ pre-war spin on preventing the deployment of Weapons of Mass Destruction and bringing democracy to Iraq. In the final confrontation between Gruach and Siward, Gruach highlights the dire consequences of a ‘moral’ interventionism gone astray: ‘You’re a good man, Siward. It would have been better if you weren’t. There would have been much less blood’ (p. 137). The alien cultural protocols and tribalism of Dunsinane’s Scots, thirdly, echo British and American narratives of a culture shock in Afghanistan and Iraq.105 That these Anglo-American attitudes and Western media reports on the wars were tinged with elements of Orientalism has been argued before and needs no further elaboration here.106 There are numerous parallels between the stock-in-trade of Orientalism and the Celticist stereotypes listed above:107 notably, connotations of irrational behaviour Arnold, Study, p.  108. Arnold takes this idea of Celtic ‘femininity’ from his contemporary Ernest Renan’s The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays, trans. with introduction by W. G. Hutchison (London, 1896), p.  8. Compare this also to the much more recent reflex of gendered Celticity in fantasy fiction, which tends to associate ‘pagan prehistory with increased freedom for women’: Jane Tolmie, ‘Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15:2 (2014), 145–58, p. 152. 105 For similar interpretations of these contemporary resonances, see Ariel Watson, ‘Birnam Wood: Scotland, Nationalism, and Theatres of War’, Theatre History Studies, 33 (2014), 226–49, at p. 236; Sila Şenlen Güvenç, ‘“[You Can’t Kill Me]”: Scottish Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Union in David Greig’s Dunsinane’, Scottish Literary Review, 6:2 (2014), 93–113, at pp. 94 and 100. 106 E.g., Judith Brown, ‘Orientalism Revisited: The British Media and the Iraq War’, in Alexander G. Nikolaev and Ernest A. Hakanen (eds), Leading to the 2003 Iraq War (New York, 2006), pp. 97–111. 107 On the relationship between orientalism and medievalism, see especially John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York, 2005). See also Kathleen Davis, ‘Time behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The 104

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and pre-modern magical thinking, a seemingly wilful adherence to apparently inscrutable, clannish norms of social behaviour and the prominence of, or even personifications of, the culture as a whole by seductive yet dangerous female figures. Greig makes use of this productive ambiguity. In Dunsinane, a dwindling ethnolinguistic minority of today’s Scotland is repatriated to the Middle Ages; at the same time, it stands in for the Iraqis and Afghans who, as has been suggested for instance by Bruce Holsinger, have routinely been denied ‘national’ status along with their very ‘coevalness’ by the Western invaders.108 What the Bush administration called the ‘Greater Middle East’ has been the space of a pre-modern, non-national Other to the Western occupying forces. The upshot is that, in Dunsinane, the Islamic Other of contemporary European discourse spills over to a ‘Celtic Other’ thus set apart ethnically and even racially. Over the course of its action, Dunsinane goes on to thoroughly re-deconstruct the dichotomies suggested by its Celticism-slash-Orientalism. The initially sympathetic English protagonist, Siward, becomes increasingly compromised morally. His refreshing rationality gives way to obstinate cultural illiteracy, his commitment to ‘clarity’ is exposed by Malcolm as ‘crudity’ (p. 108), and his idealistic desire for peace slides into fanaticism. Even Siward’s morally lax English lieutenant, Egham, is taken aback when Siward responds to the Scottish rebels’ harbouring of the fugitive queen’s son by burning a village’s entire male population: ‘It’s a bit Scandinavian, isn’t it?’ (p. 94). The reference is, of course, to the barbaric Viking of popular imagination. On another level, Egham’s line can be read as a sly reference to the historical Siward’s probable Danish, i.e., Viking, descent.109 Either way, the implication is that Siward’s synecdochic epithet of ‘England’ does not do justice after all to what clearly is no monolithic formation but is in its turn the incongruous product of invasion and conflict. The other Englishmen, too, increasingly lose their inhibitions (and presumably the audience’s sympathy) the longer they occupy Scotland: Egham himself is perfectly happy to sell captive Scottish boys to Danish slavers (p. 102), and a soldier ‘playfully’ shoots an arrow at a terrified servant girl he wants to sleep with (p. 118), an act which leads to both their deaths. English identity, the play suggests, is not necessarily stable or coherent, let alone benign. Gradually, the English perspective on Scotland is revealed to be biased and unreliable. The fact that the English blunder into a country which they have no real desire to understand, but only to shape in their own image, is made worse by the way imperfect acts of cultural translation persistently warp their interactions with the Scots. As head of the Scottish resistance, Gruach has a clear motive for confusing, mystifying and distracting the English commander. The English-installed Malcolm in his turn is thoroughly Anglicised and freely admits to not understanding Scotland, but he nonetheless presumes to ethnologise about its people (p. 29). Having been raised in England, he much prefers that country to his newly acquired realm: ‘I like the way people speak in England. I liked hunting in those broad oak Postcolonial Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 105–22. 108 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007). 109 Timothy Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Leiden, 2009), pp. 135f.

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woods. I liked the dogs there and the horses. I liked the way nobody in England wanted to kill me’ (pp. 49f.). He publicly chides the clan chiefs for having left him a wretched Scotland: ‘Every time I try to become excited by the prospect of ruling this country the truth comes sidling in [. . .] and my heart feels cold again. [. . .] It’s a country of your making’ (p. 80). Neither the condescending ethnologist Malcolm nor the hostile Gruach, then, is a reliable source of cultural knowledge for Siward. The English othering of the Scots is subverted most powerfully by Macduff, Siward’s Scottish lieutenant. An accomplished bilingual, Macduff defies easy categorisation into nationality along linguistic lines alone. Near the end of the play, he challenges Siward’s simplistic notion that the Scots ‘don’t behave in the way people I understand behave. They’re a mystery’ (p. 120). The Scots, Macduff counters, are not mysterious at all. He explains: There wasn’t always war here, Siward. [. . .] When war comes it doesn’t just destroy things like harvests and monasteries – it destroys the names of things as well. [. . .] We don’t know where we are anymore. We are not mysterious people, Siward, we’re just lost. (p. 120)

While more or less agreeing with Siward’s impression of a deformed Scotland, Macduff attributes this to circumstance, not intrinsicality. What is more, it is implied that Macduff ’s bleak assessment of an anomic society is in turn skewed by personal tragedy and trauma: Macduff ’s family was slaughtered and his castle burnt down by the old king’s henchmen. Besides, it is hinted that Scotland, if it has been ‘lost’ at all, is finding its bearings at the end of the play. The Boy Soldier comments in the last act that the saltire flag is flown ‘from every castle now’ (p. 129). Ironically, it is the English presence that has unified the country. While Scottish alterity has not been completely neutralised by the end of the play, the most pervasive Celticist stereotypes  – of irrationality, clannishness and a reliance on womanly wiles rather than putting up a proper fight – have become apparent as precisely that: stereotypes. They are at least in part a fiction upheld by, and for the benefit of, the English. By extension, the Orientalism implied at the play’s contemporary level of meaning is an equally spurious Western phantasm. In the real world, of course, Scots and English alike had been part of recent British invading armies when Dunsinane came out. By framing his ostensibly medieval story in terms of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Greig presents a contemporary Scottish audience with a transtemporal multiple vision that potentially aligns them with two sets each of invaders and invaded. They are asked to relate, all at once, to their slightly weird medieval ‘ancestors’, the more readily relatable but ethically compromised medieval English invaders, the present-day Western soldiers participating in cross-continental military interventions, and the people in Iraq and Afghanistan on the receiving end of these interventions. With such a variety of spatio-temporal identifications on offer, one of the first casualties of this modern–medieval war is the conceptual localness of the Middle Ages so beloved of nationalists. Dunsinane thus thoroughly destabilises notions of coherent national longue durée. Stressing change over continuity, it offers neither easy nor exclusive identification

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with the medieval Scots but, rather, suggests a fluidity of allegiances both national and non-national. This makes for a powerful rebuttal of conceptions of internally stable national identities. Furthermore, it highlights the ways in which the othering of people in the interest of sharply drawn cultural–national boundaries constitutes a failure of understanding on the part of those doing the othering. The cultures that clash in the play are incompatible not because of any intrinsic properties; they are incompatible because of a misplaced trust in (self-)ethnologising discourse. Siward does not understand the Scots because he does not try to, choosing instead to believe the easy generalisations he is offered by doubtful sources. Which is what othering, by ethnicity or otherwise, is really all about.

Conclusion: The Demands of the Past He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward.1

I

Most of our history is invented and it is better that way.2

n 2016, David Rieff asked: might twenty-first-century societies be remembering too much for their own good?3 The question was not, in fact, a new one. Others had proposed, as Rieff does, that under certain circumstances, ‘Lethe is a cure’.4 Rieff was thinking primarily of cultural memories of historical wrongs. He argues that, absent the possibility of achieving both peace and redress for past injuries, it is often better to forget and make one’s peace than to meticulously keep alive memories of those injuries. Too often, he writes, ‘collective historical memory as understood and deployed by communities, peoples, and nations [. . .] has led to war rather than peace, to rancor and ressentiment [. . .] rather than reconciliation, and to the determination to exact revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness’.5 Rieff sees the drive to remember wrongs committed within living memory as merely part of a continuum which also includes the current appetite for commemorating keystones of collective identity much further in the past. According to him, this proliferation of memory contributes to a situation in which societies risk becoming ‘childish’ – and dangerous.6 Rieff ’s bleak view of the current flowering of commemorative culture is informed by the many years he spent as a war correspondent. I mention him here because, as I take stock of my findings, the question inevitably lingers: what functions do cultural memories of the nation’s medieval past serve in the twenty-first century? It is an 1 2 3

2016).

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London, 2004, orig. 1954–55), p. 53. Robert Irwin, Wonders Will Never Cease (Sawtry, 2016), p. 85. David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven,

Translated from Rudolf Burger, Kleine Geschichte der Vergangenheit: Eine pyrrhonische Skizze der historischen Vernunft (Vienna, 2004), p.  25; for a critical appraisal, see Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich, 2006), pp. 106–8. 5 Rieff, In Praise, p. 39. 6 Rieff, In Praise, p. 36. 4

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urgent question, considering the deeply problematic uses of the past in evidence as national medievalism is currently – among other things – used to enable discrimination and exclusion and to lend prestige to ideologies of nationalist resentment and self-aggrandisement. Few recent medievalist works have shown greater awareness of this fraught dimension of cultural memory than Ishiguro’s Buried Giant, which, by showing cultural memory exerting real influence on collectives and the relations they have with each other, captures core social functions of national medievalism. If one looks beyond the novel’s specific meanings of ethnicity-based violence and trauma, its representation of the power of myth to shape the fate of nations has much to say about our own relationship with memory. Both the glorification of a dubious Arthur, on the one hand, and Wistan’s insistence that the past predetermines (retributive) action in the present, on the other hand, resonate with the allure which the Middle Ages again hold in our time. The allure is strongest for those who want to make and remake national communities in the name of a normative past – and they are out in force in the early twenty-first century. The idea that breeds this allure is that the past makes demands on the present. It comes in many metaphorical forms: of paths taken long ago and blessings to be counted; of standards to be kept, organisms to be tended and borders to be patrolled; of ancestors to be revered and tradition to be maintained; or, simply, of the inevitable to which to bow. The Swiss and British national medievalisms I have explored here exemplify the strength that this basic idea has in the early twenty-first century. The demanding past is a defining characteristic especially of political medievalism. In the particularly topical case of England, feelings of resentment at the wrongs supposedly committed against the nation’s status by its continental neighbours are expressed in lurid medievalist fantasies of foreign invasion, subjugation and liberation. The re-­ emphasising of old stories of constitutional distinctiveness in neo-Whiggish fashion complements these fantasies. Again, however, while a sense of insularity supposedly determined by national history may be particularly evident in overheated Brexit Britain, other European countries with strong Eurosceptic currents show similar tendencies of using the Middle Ages as a bulwark against internationalisation. Indeed, Swiss readings of the medieval past in these terms are every bit the match for the British, or English, variety. Furthermore, the Swiss isolationists use national medievalism particularly cynically: factual challenges to their history of an eternally and splendidly aloof nation are neutralised by Teflon metamyth. I believe these examples have much to tell us about the wider crisis of international governance in the face of reinvigorated exceptionalisms. It becomes clearer by the day that the threat to the continued existence of human civilisation as we know it  – posed primarily but not exclusively by catastrophic climate breakdown, environmental degradation and humanity’s own bellicosity – makes deeper international collaboration more and more necessary. At this very moment, however, that collaboration is undermined by a renewed emphasis on national sovereignty in the name of the supposedly immutable cultural and political ‘dispositions’ of nations. It is in cases such as these that Rieff ’s note of warning rings true. There comes a point where those who profess themselves uniquely attuned to the whisperings

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of the authoritative past develop such proprietorial attitudes towards that past that they may succeed in making their politics appear natural and inevitable, no matter how destructive it is internationally  – or how exclusionary at home. These more aggressive forms of the politics of autochthony are highly divisive in increasingly diverse societies such as the UK and Switzerland. The Swiss national-conservatives skirt particularly close to xenophobia and racism, and while the charges of racism that have dogged them are not usually directed at their medievalist campaigns, there can be no doubt that they promote an essentially hereditary national identity and seek to preserve it by political means. Such uses of the Middle Ages by figures close to the political mainstream are distinct from, but not unrelated to, more extremist ones: the memory sites of the conservative right often adjoin the memory sties of the extreme right. Both share, in turn, basic properties with a certain kind of small-c conservative medievalism that lies mostly outside the realm of politics: a medievalism that casually and often unreflectingly hews to the vision of a (desired) homogeneous and hierarchical originary society. The ‘medieval defence’ repeatedly employed by the Swiss guilds to protect long-standing homosocial privilege or avoid hard questions concerning histories of colonialism and racism is a particularly clear example of this. All these invocations of a traditionalist Middle Ages – in extreme right, mainstream conservative and civic discourses – are problematic to the degree that they undergird a (proto-)political nationalism bent on maintaining inequality or practising exclusion and isolationism. It is somewhat ironic that in Scotland – whose political Braveheart moment in the 1990s Rieff cites as an example of troubling ideological exploitation7 – national politics is currently less likely to look to the traditionalist Middle Ages of hereditary enmities for binding precedent. Scottish pro-independence agitation, and particularly in the cultural sphere, absolutely still relies on medieval references to make its case, but the more militant medievalisms, specifically those whose primary interest is the enmity with the English, have been de-emphasised in favour of constitutional and cultural development. I have mentioned the way that the official English commemorations of the Battle of Agincourt in 2015 downplayed stories of national identity and pointedly involved French representatives. In fact, the organisers may well have picked up tips at Flodden two years previously. The disastrous Scottish defeat had historically lent itself to nostalgic narratives of loss and anti-English resentment, but in 2013, Flodden’s five-hundredth anniversary year, the official commemorations were respectfully bilateral and included both religious services in Scotland and an on-site ceremony that highlighted a symbolism of ‘peace and reconciliation’.8 This is in keeping with the way much of political medievalism in Scotland has been de-weaponised since the late 1990s. A significant subset of politically minded Scottish medievalisms are now pointedly universalist in outlook. I insist on the political dimension here not in order to trivialise the playful, thoughtful and critical articulations of identity which I hope I have shown Rieff, In Praise, pp. 113–15. “Battle of Flodden: 500th Anniversary Marked” (2013) [accessed 15 January 2022]. 7

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medievalism also enables. They are certainly no less consequential than the propagandistic political variants, to which an increasing number of authors, filmmakers, activists, museum curators and embroiderers offer perceptive, powerful ripostes. I do not mean to raise anew the spectre of the ‘abuse’ of history, nor to suggest that medievalism necessarily contains political ‘messages’. However, since the community being imagined in national medievalism is essentially a political one, and since the link between medievalism and various forms of national thought in Western Europe is stronger now than at any time since the Second World War, it bears thinking closely about the existing gradations of politicisation and ideologisation. I hope this book’s discussion of the various forms of national medievalism has taken some steps towards enabling this. What unites the great majority of national medievalism is a sense that the medieval past is not wholly in the past. The idea of a unique continuity of culture and politics may be particularly conspicuous in England and in Switzerland, but there are not very many other countries in Western Europe more attuned to their medieval heritage than Scotland is, and even though Welsh identity may attach itself somewhat less habitually to memories of the Middle Ages than the other three, the attachment is currently strengthening and was no less great to begin with than for most other Western European national identities. With ideas of unique continuity supporting so many national exceptionalisms, we have good reason to suspect that they may not be so exceptional after all. The quite real differences – and there are many – between the objects, forms and functions of Swiss, English, Scottish and Welsh cultural memories of the Middle Ages should not distract the observer from the fact that they also share a great many of their objects and forms (such as institutions, histories of battles and great men, etc.) and functions (expressions of cultural pride, entertainment, political propaganda, discrimination, etc.). Nor is continuity a straightforward given in any of these four nations in the first place: ironically, they are perhaps least unique in the way they have to rely on significant mnemonic bridging to uphold the idea of continuous identity at all. The past is high-maintenance if it is to be a vehicle for national identity. Our time is a time of great change, and the desire to arrest change is clearly an important factor in the current proliferation not only of cultural memory and nationalism but specifically of national medievalism. The knowledge that a grand sweep of history has led up to one’s own condition has a great pathos to it, and the Middle Ages are, for better or worse, the point where the history of arguably the most powerful collective identity in existence has generally been agreed to begin. For all the comforts that such nationalism offers, however, there is a danger in considering one’s nation  – to paraphrase Max Frisch’s critique of Switzerland in the 1960s – as something that has become rather than something that is becoming.9 The future holds fear and uncertainty for many in this twenty-first century, whereas the deep past seems to offer constancy and reassuring greatness vicariously experienced. A need for belonging is only natural, and so is an interest in one’s Max Frisch, ‘Überfremdung 2’, in Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt a. M., 1967), pp. 105–35, at p. 110. 9

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historical origins. However, it is an illusion to think that collective identities are constant or pure. Rieff is right to point to the dangers inherent in essentialising collective identity in a political context, and so is Patrick Geary, who observes that ‘the peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be’.10 To put this another way, the Middle Ages are in no position to make demands on us. Where there is a duty to remember, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that this duty is to the past: it is to ourselves, the living. It is we who go digging for roots. We are accountable for the things that we find.

Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), p. 157. 10

Afterword: National Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19

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hen the global pandemic hit Europe in early 2020, nationalist uses of the medieval past suddenly seemed a little more esoteric than they had only weeks before. And yet, the national Middle Ages would soon enough resume operations. Two years in, they appear to have taken on greater urgency, and in some cases downright feverishness, amid generally raised stakes. The medium- to long-term impact of the pandemic on national medievalism is harder to predict, however. The debate about whether hard national borders are desirable is certainly being led more urgently now than it was before. This is relevant to my theme because the opening and closing of borders are not just neutral means of ensuring public health but, rather, come with precisely the kind of cultural-political baggage of nationalism that I have been talking about and are known to feed back into discourses of national identity. Border controls went up and barriers went down worldwide after the spring of 2020. While the (short-term) public health benefits of such measures are fairly uncontroversial, cautionary voices have pointed out that the closing of borders, carried out in the name of public health, may also end up serving nationalist, xenophobic and racist agendas long after the crisis has passed. ‘Infection as an excuse for nativism continues today’, writes Charles Kenny,1 and indeed we soon saw the understandable desire for national leaders to look after their own perverted into a sordid blame game. (During his final year as US president, Donald Trump, never one to miss an opportunity to provoke abroad to score points with a dubious audience at home, dubbed the new coronavirus ‘the Chinese virus’.) As many have pointed out, the only real solution to this global problem is a global response. However, responses have more often than not been disjointed and in too many cases guided by nationalist ideologies of exceptionalism. Perhaps predictably, as soon as the first vaccination campaigns got going at the end of 2020, so did the unedifying spectacle of vaccine nationalism.

1 Charles Kenny, ‘Pandemics Close Borders  – and Keep Them Closed’ (2020) [accessed 22 September 2020].

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It seems that early on in Britain national medievalism indirectly affected executive decision making, and not for the better. The campaigners who had led the Leave side to victory in 2016 now held the key government posts and transitioned seamlessly to a new rhetoric of war, the enemy now being an invisible one rather than the usual targets of English nationalist wrath. But before long, Boris Johnson – by now comfortably installed at 10 Downing Street – offered the public a reminder that the habits of national exceptionalism die hard even amid a global health crisis. On 19 March 2020, he announced that the British public’s right to a drink at the pub would have to be suspended. This was entirely regrettable, Johnson continued, because that right was nothing less than ‘the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom’.2 And there it was: the old Anglo-Saxonist myth, barely disguised though in bizarre miniature, of the free-born Englishman, whom Johnson imposed awkwardly on all UK citizens in the familiar way. As O’Toole suggests, tragically, the same exceptionalist sentiment which Johnson projected with this statement helped to shape the government’s disastrous initial response to the COVID-19 crisis, which disregarded the evidence from the Continent and justified its inaction by arguing its risky strategy aimed for a bespoke British ‘herd immunity’.3 All the while, the less than convincing UK government handling of the crisis has been contrasted unfavourably with the measures taken by the devolved Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments, even by English voters, and there have been signs that the UK government’s perceived failures actively boosted Scottish separatism.4 As the pandemic has dragged on, the Middle Ages have found themselves dragged into it all also ‘from below’. Disgruntled citizens in several European countries have taken to citing familiar medieval memory sites to protest government measures – such as the temporary closing of businesses, work-from-home orders, restrictions on the freedom of assembly and mask-wearing rules – which they consider disproportionate or downright illegal. In England, as a vocal minority began using the language of ‘arbitrary government’ and ‘tyranny’ in the second half of 2020, several business owners who refused to follow lockdown rules justified their revolt by invoking clause 61 of the original Magna Carta.5 The charter’s so-called ‘security clause’, clause 61 granted twenty-five barons the right to force the king to keep the promises made in Magna Carta if they thought he had reneged on them. ‘Ancient British Rights to a Drink in the Pub Have to Be Suspended  – Johnson’ (2020) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 3 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Coronavirus Has Exposed the Myth of British Exceptionalism’ (2020) [accessed 15 April 2021]. 4 ‘English Prefer Welsh and Scottish Governments’ Handling of Covid-19 to Their Own – Poll’ (2020) [accessed 14 January 2022]; Libby Brooks, ‘How the Covid Crisis is Changing Minds on Scottish Independence’ (2020) [accessed 14 January 2022]. 5 I am grateful to Will Brockbank for alerting me to this. 2

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The clause was struck from subsequent versions of the charter and never made it into English statutory law, and it explicitly applied only to a small set of named nobles to begin with. But that did not stop the intransigent owner of a tearoom– bookshop in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, from putting a sign in her window that read: ‘Under article 61 of Magna Carta 1215, we have a right to enter into lawful dissent if we feel we are being governed unjustly.’6 Cases like this may be fairly few in number, but a pattern emerges. Magna Carta is appropriated in ways that are fundamentally familiar – think of Refugee Tales’ invocation of the few clauses actually still in force today – but nudge closer and closer to conspiracist thinking. Commenters have read these specific examples in the context of a growing trend of people using ‘pseudolegalist’ defences in court that also refer to such fictions as the ‘freeman on the land’ and the ‘sovereign citizen’. In fact, as Alistair Coleman points out, clause 61 has been popular among farright and anti-establishment circles and held up as ‘the one true law’ in their battle against undesirable ‘elites’.7 At the very least, in choosing Magna Carta as their symbol, the COVID dissenters communicate that they, far from wilfully endangering their fellow citizens, are the true defenders of the nation and its identity.8 Switzerland has seen equivalent forms of medievalist protest. For a while, Wilhelm Tell’s myth put in regular appearances with its core message of resistance to tyranny played on by opponents of the government’s anti-COVID measures. The protesters’ prime target has consistently been Federal Councillor Alain Berset (SP), Head of the Federal Department of Home Affairs and therefore Switzerland’s minister of health. Berset has been accused of being a ‘dictator’ and, inevitably, heir to the evil bailiff Gessler. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this book that that discourse has been championed by the SVP, whose president, Marco Chiesa, was not above publicly suspending a hat of the type Berset wears from a pole, in unmissable imitation of the ritual humiliation Gessler inflicts on his long-suffering subjects in the Tell story. The SVP played out its little charade in early 2021 as they submitted – to the hat, no less – a petition signed by close to a quarter of a million people demanding the immediate end of lockdown. The SVP was not the first to brand Berset a Gessler, however: placards brandished at the unauthorised (and pointedly not socially distanced) anti-lockdown protests in Flüelen und Altdorf in September of 2020 had already claimed that the government-prescribed face masks were ‘the new Gessler hat’.9 Always implicit in these references to Gessler is the resister figure and rugged tyrannicide himself. Fig. 11 shows a poster I saw not far from where I live in the Biennese periphery in late 2021. Sponsored by a regional business that deals in 6 Alistair Coleman, ‘Covid Lockdown: Why Magna Carta Won’t Exempt You from the Rules’ (2021) [accessed 20 January 2022]. 7 Coleman, ‘Covid Lockdown’. 8 See also Robert Shrimsley, ‘Magna Carta Offers No Way to Get Out of Lock down’ [accessed 20 Jan­ uary 2022]. 9 ‘Der neue Gessler-Hut | Kundgebung gegen die Corona-Massnahmen in Flüelen und Altdorf am 5.9.2020’ (2020) [accessed 20 January 2022].

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Figure 11. Billboard displaying a poster sponsored by Afimag that reads ‘Keine Willkür, keine Diktatur’, 2021. Author’s photograph.

small houses and solar panels, the poster shows the famous Altdorf Tell monument by Richard Kissling alongside the words ‘no arbitrary government, no dictatorship’ emblazoned in white on a red background. No further elaboration of its target or even its context was offered. Nor, thanks to the suggestive force of national medievalism, did it need to be.

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Index Acts of Union between England and Scotland 44 Acts of Union between England and Wales 55 Adam, James  38 Æthelred II, King of the English  101 After Cilmeri 52 Agbabi, Patience  193 Agincourt, Battle of  57, 92, 109 al-Andalus 10 Alba Party  94–5 Albrecht von Bonstetten  69 Alfred the Great  108 Alps  21–2, 23, 118, 166–7 Alte Eidgenossenschaft  7, 16, 20, 66, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 113, 128, 147, 149, 156–7, 174 alterity medievalism  4, 12, 51, 62–3, 131–2, 134, 153, 157, 160, 182, 198 see also continuity vs alterity under medievalism Alternative for Germany (AfD)  11–12, 104 Alternative Left (AL)  133–4 anachronism  38, 42, 101, 169 Anderson, Benedict  26–7 Anglicanism  15, 100 Anglophobia  33, 35, 81, 94, 210 Anglo-Saxonism  60–1, 62, 65, 97, 100, 101, 103, 110, 203, 214 and racism  21 n.76, 62, 65, 103 free-born Englishman myth  99, 101, 102, 103, 110, 214, 215 Anglo-Saxons, see early medieval England Anglosphere  24, 60–1, 99, 101–3, 106, 111 arms dealing  131–2, 198–9 Arnold, Matthew  203–4 Around Switzerland in 80 Maps 69 Assmann, Aleida  34, 208 n.4

Augustine of Canterbury  192 Auld Alliance  92 AUNS, see Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (AUNS) under Swiss national-conservatives authenticity  30–1, 32–4, 45–6, 62, 64, 73, 125, 151, 180–1 authenticity effects  22, 31, 62, 65, 144, 161, 178–9 banal medievalism  13, 67 Bannockburn, Battle of  33–5, 71, 83–4, 87–9, 91, 93 700th anniversary of  33–4, 57, 83, 86 Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre  34–7, 83, 86 poetry competition  35, 86–8, 89–90, 92 rotunda  34–6, 86, 88 site  35–6, 71, 72, 88–9, 94 Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314– 2014  91, 93–4 Barbour, John  34, 93 Barczewski, Stephanie  103 Barnes, Julian  1 Barr, Helen  194 Barthes, Roland  98 The Bastard Executioner 53 Battle (East Sussex)  56, 152 Bayeux Tapestry  39–40, 109 Befreiungstradition, see under myth Berger, Stefan  33 Bergier Report  113 Bern  16, 161, 166–70, 183–7 Ancien Régime  162, 166–8, 170 Bernese Historical Museum  189 n.75 Berset, Alain  215 Bewes, Diccon  69

242

Index

Biel/Bienne  197, 200 Bildhauer, Bettina  3 n.6 Bill of Rights 1689  109 Billig, Michael  13, 27 Black Lives Matter  183 Blair, Tony  18, 204 Blind Hary  81 Blocher, Christoph  114–15, 123, 127, 129 Blum, Donat  130 Bondeli, Julie  166–7, 169–71 Boym, Svetlana  195 Braveheart  81–3, 90, 93, 94, 95, 210 break-up of Britain  18, 96 Brexit  xiii, 10, 18–19, 22, 25, 65, 78, 80, 92, 96–9, 104, 107–10, 116, 137, 209 and medievalism  22, 25, 56, 65, 96–111, 116, 137, 209, 214 Northern Ireland Protocol  18 rhetoric against ‘elites’, see populism British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  54, 58, 59, 68, 82, 162, 179 British Empire  7, 89, 90, 93, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 176 British Migration Museum  189 n.75 British monarchy  23, 57–9, 74, 100 see also monarchical medievalism under constitutional medievalism Brother Klaus, see Niklaus of Flüe Broun, Dauvit  85 Brownlie, Siobhan  57 n.92, 64 n.119 Bruce, Mark P.  85–6 Burgundian Wars  7, 127, 157 n.44 The Buried Giant  46–9, 209 Burns, Robert  34, 36, 93 Burnside, John  87 Bush, George W.  204–5 Butterfield, Herbert  23, 100 see also Whig interpretation of history under historiography ‘Bye-EU Tapestry’  109 Camelot 46 Cameron, David  97 Carpegna Falconieri, Tommaso di  4 n.14, 8, 9–10, 13, 78–9, 96 n.2, 107 n.36 Carroll, Shiloh  145 n.13, 150 cathedrals as national signifiers  11–12, 32, 57 Catholicism  10, 53, 64, 121 n.30, 159 Celticism  37, 45–6, 51, 81, 91, 201–6

Chandler, Alice  14 n.63 Chaucer, Geoffrey  38–9, 104–6, 192, 193–4, 196 as Father of English Poetry  39, 105–6, 194, 196 The Canterbury Tales 193–4 Il cielo di Marignano 126 Clare, Horatio  189, 190 clash of civilisations  192, 207 Clements, Pam  30–1 Cold War  6, 8, 12, 20, 113 Colley, Linda  15 Collin, David  132 colonialism  2, 60, 89, 102, 108, 127, 176, 186–8, 210 common law  21, 55, 59–61, 100, 101–2, 104, 128 see also judiciary medievalism under constitutional medievalism comparativism 14–15 Congress of Vienna  16, 123 Conservative Party  98, 99, 101, 108, 176 conspiracy theories  13, 122, 125, 215 great replacement conspiracy theory 122 constitutional medievalism  6, 21, 25, 33, 41–4, 55, 57–61, 74–5, 77, 79, 80, 83, 90, 96–7, 98–9, 100 n.12, 109, 110–11, 114, 122, 137, 145, 165–6, 209, 210, 211 direct democracy  20, 74, 127, 128 federalism, see under Swiss politics judiciary medievalism  55, 59–61, 74, 103–4, 116 monarchical medievalism  42–3, 53–5, 74, 104, 148, 165–6, 181 parliamentary medievalism  43–4, 54–5, 74–5, 103 continuity medievalism  4–6, 32, 62–3, 101, 124, 125, 130, 138, 193 see also continuity vs alterity under medievalism counter-medievalism  112, 130–6 COVID-19 pandemic  xiii, 213–16 Crawford, Robert  82–3, 89–90, 91–4 and bardic voice  91–4 Crécy, Battle of  109 The Crown 58 Culler, Jonathan  31 Culloden, Battle of  88

Index cultural memory  3, 6, 9, 11, 17, 20, 23, 26, 28–30, 32–4, 36, 47–8, 56, 68, 72, 74, 79, 81, 90, 100, 102–3, 110, 112–13, 115, 123, 126–7, 130, 131–2, 136, 141–2, 156, 164, 174, 176, 188, 208–9, 211 forgetting  47–8, 103, 208 late-20th-century surge in  17, 208, 211 memory politics  xiii, 9, 20, 26, 79, 113, 115, 127, 129, 130, 131–2, 136 2015 as super jubilee year  72–3, 79, 123–9, 156 mnemonic bridging  32–3, 34, 211 remediation  28–9, 164 repetition in memory culture  33, 34, 68 see also lieu de mémoire cultural memory studies  3, 28–9 Cultural Olympiad 2012  58, 182 cultural pluralism  15 culturalisation of politics  13, 20, 78, 138 see also politics of autochthony culture wars  139, 147 D’Arcens, Louise  3–4 Dafydd, Fflur  50 Daily Express crusader  97–8 dance of death  159, 160 n.50, 161 Bernese Dance of Death  159, 160 n.50 Dark Ages  4 Davis, Kathleen  3 n.9, 204 n.107 De Roulet, Daniel  130 Declaration of Arbroath  21, 33, 81, 83–6, 87–9, 90, 92 democracy  20–1, 74, 84–6, 87–8, 99, 104, 167, 170 see also direct democracy under constitutional medievalism Deonna, Laurence  132 devolution, see under UK politics discursive continuity  33, 39 Doshi, Tishani  51 Dunsinane 200–7 early medieval England  2 n.4, 21 n.76, 47, 99, 110, 153, 182 adventus saxonum  21 n.76, 47 origins of the English nation  2 n.4, 99, 182 Eco, Umberto  2 Edinburgh International Festival  42

243

Edith the Fair  151–2 Edith Walks 152 education  166, 167, 170 criticism of curriculum from the political right  99, 101, 128 edutainment  35, 56–7 Edwards, Huw  54 Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom  57 n.94, 58, 59 funeral ceremonies  57 n.94 Elizabeth: The Golden Age 58 Elizabeth Woodville  162–4 Elliott, Andrew B. R.  8, 13, 97–8 end of history  6–7 English Heritage  56 English imperialism and Scotland  85, 88, 90, 93 and Wales  25, 49, 203 English Revolt of 1381  195 Enlightenment  21, 23, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172–3 environmentalism  62, 121, 142, 189, 209 Erll, Astrid  28–9 ethnicity, see and race, ethnicity and immigration under national medievalism European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)  18, 115–16 European Economic Area (EEA)  19 European identity  8, 96, 170–1 European Union (EU)  xiii, 6, 8, 13, 18, 19, 68, 69, 80, 96, 97–9, 104, 107, 108, 109, 114, 118, 121, 122, 127, 128–9, 136 Euroscepticism  12–13, 62, 73, 77, 96–7, 104, 109, 115–16, 118, 127–9, 130, 134, 209 Evans, Michael  179–80 Fabian, Johannes  175–6 fantasy  3, 45, 51, 52, 144, 162, 175, 179, 204 n.104 Farage, Nigel  109 Federal Charter of 1291  20, 71–2, 115, 128 see also mythical founding of under Switzerland feudalism  22, 64, 100, 109–10 Fichenskandal 7 Fiedler, Heike  131–2

244

Index

Findlay, Alistair  38–9 Flodden, Battle of  92–3, 210 foreign invasion  22–3, 25, 40, 56, 61–3, 69, 74, 96–7, 105, 108, 110, 127, 151, 153, 154–5, 189–90, 192, 205, 209 foreign judges  74, 115–16, 118, 127 The Forestwife 150–1 Francis, Matthew  50–1 Frantzen, Allen J.  62 n.112 Fratelli d’Italia  104 Frauenstreik 146 freedom topos  19–20, 21, 84–5, 87, 88–90, 93, 99, 101, 103, 109–10, 112, 118, 124, 137, 166, 168–70, 189, 194, 199, 209, 214–16 see also sovereignty French invasion of Switzerland 1798  23, 61, 69, 74, 149 Frisch, Max  67, 177, 211 Front National, see Rassemblement National Frost, Emma  162, 163, 165 Fukuyama, Francis  6 Fulton, Helen  45 n.39 Game of Thrones  3, 24, 144, 145 Ganim, John M.  204 n.107 Gawain  47, 48 Geary, Patrick  8–9, 78, 106, 212 Geistige Landesverteidigung  20, 69, 112–15, 146 Geoffrey of Monmouth  45, 189 Gessler  67, 133 n.64, 112, 118, 168–9, 198, 215 Gillies, Valerie  90 Glättli, Balthasar  133 globalisation  1, 3, 7–8, 12, 64, 65, 92, 116, 122, 139 grand narrative, see conservative revisionism under historiography Great Recession of 2008  8 Great Tapestry of Scotland  39–41, 43, 54 Gregory, Philippa  162 Greig, David  80 n.3, 200–1, 203–6 Groebner, Valentin  4–5, 123 Guest, Lady Charlotte  49, 51 Gurnah, Abdulrazak  193 Habsburgs  66, 67, 71, 123, 127, 198 Halbbart 68 Haller, Albrecht von  167, 168 n.71, 170

Hannan, Daniel  98–107, 108, 110–11, 122, 124, 127, 128 How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters  98, 99–105, 106–7, 111 Harold Godwinson  151–2 Harry Potter 3 Hasler, Eveline  162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170 Hasler, Jela  133–4 Hastings, Battle of  71, 72, 151–2 950th anniversary of  56–7 re-enactment  56, 151–2 site 72 Haydock, Nickolas  4 n.14, 45, 150 n.33 Heine, Heinrich  151 n.38 Helvetic Republic  23, 69 Heng, Geraldine  172–3 Henry VII of England  52, 163 Henry VIII of England  107, 192 Henzi, Samuel  166, 167–70 Grisler ou l’ambition punie 168–9 Henzi Conspiracy  167–8 Hereward the Wake  20, 152 heritage  2, 30, 34–7, 49, 51, 56–8, 59, 99, 106, 183, 188, 197 tourism  8, 29, 35, 52, 56–7, 72 Hermann, Michael  7 Histoire Suisse 71 Historians’ Dispute, see Historikerstreit Historians for Britain  107–8 historical analogy  5, 14, 20, 33, 77, 84, 99, 101–2, 128–9, 191–2, 195, 210 Historikerstreit  123–4, 126 historiography  26, 33, 40, 99 conservative revisionism  99, 101, 102, 123, 127–8, 129, 144 dynastic history and national history  42, 66–7, 148, 164–6 elite history  61 ‘great men’ and ‘great events’  26, 41, 144–5, 165, 211 national history  26, 33, 40–1, 71, 144–5, 147 and gender  26, 40–1, 144–5, 147 popular history  106–8, 123 Whig interpretation of history  23, 25, 98, 100–1, 104–6, 108, 127, 209 Hobsbawm, Eric  67, 103 n.23 Hodler, Ferdinand  118, 133, 136 Holenstein, André  123, 158 n.45, 177

Index The Hollow Crown  58, 178–83, 187–8 Holocaust and Western memory culture  11, 9 n.40, 123, 141–2 Holsinger, Bruce  205 homophobia 81 Hourra, perdu!/Hurra, verloren! 130–2 Hsy, Jonathan  63, 142, 172 n.3 human rights  8, 142, 195–6 Human Rights Act  18 Hundred Years’ War  97 n.4, 109 Huntington, Samuel P.  192 Huonder, Vitus  129 Hywel Dda of Deheubarth  55 identity  28, 139, 200 and the Other  140, 197, 200–1 multiple identities  141, 200 identity politics  6, 77, 106 ideology  5, 6, 10, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29–30, 37, 62, 73, 89–90, 97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 108, 112–13, 114, 116, 121, 124, 130, 139 n.1, 143, 144 n.8, 145, 154, 155, 168, 180, 191, 208–11, 213 individualism  31, 91, 100, 141, 159–61, 164, 144 emergence of the individual  160 insularity  14, 22, 103, 209 and the image of Britain  22 and the image of Switzerland  21, 22–4 international medievalism  1, 3 in international relations theory  3 medievalism as cultural lingua franca  3 intersectionality  141, 159, 172 invention of tradition  67 Iraq War, see War on Terror Irwin, Robert  208 Ishiguro, Kazuo  46, 209 Italian Wars  126, 156 Ivanhoe  20, 105 Jacobites 88–9 James I of Scotland  42, 165 James II of Scotland  42 James III of Scotland  42, 43, 165 James IV of Scotland  42, 43, 92 The James Plays  42–4, 162, 164–5 Jamie, Kathleen  34–6, 86, 88, 90 Janjic, Daniela  143, 197 Joan Beaufort  165 Joan of Arc  9 n.40, 11, 150

245

John of England  59, 60, 109, 214–15 John of Fordun  38–9 Johnson, Boris  18, 96, 107 n.35, 109, 214 Jones, Chris  3 n.6, 63, 65 Jones, Lloyd  50 Jones, Moelwyn  52 Jura question  16 Kant, Immanuel  170 Kaufman, Amy  144 Kay, Jackie  193 Keller, Jörg  160 Keller, Peter  126–9, 147 King Arthur  20, 24, 44–9, 51, 52, 145, 150, 209 King Arthur (2004 film)  45, 150–1 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword  46, 179 The King’s Speech 58 Kingsnorth, Paul  61–2, 64–5, 153 Kipling, Rudyard  103–4 Knight, Stephen  150–1 Köppel, Roger  124, 127–8 Kosovo, Battle of  9 n.40 Krastev, Ivan  6, 8 Kreis, Georg  71, 115, 116, 123 Krygier, Martin  59 Kumar, Krishan  60, 103 Lady of the Forest 150 Landsgemeinde  20, 74–5 language English  61–2, 87, 102, 103, 104–5, 194, 195, 196 n.92, 201–2 language history  4, 33, 37, 62–3 Latin  87, 105 Scots  37–9, 42, 87, 165 Scottish Gaelic  37, 87, 201 language myths, see Celticism Swiss languages  16, 73, 125, 199–200 dialect vs Standard High German  68 Welsh 49–50 The Last Kingdom 151 Layamon 45 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, see Rassemblement National Le Pen, Marine, see Rassemblement National Leerssen, Joep  27, 94 Lega 104 Lenz, Pedro  131

246

Index

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  168 n.71 Levellers and Diggers  64 Lewinsky, Charles  68 LGBT rights  139 liberation tradition, see Befreiungstradition under myth libertarianism  98–9, 136 lieu de mémoire  29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 56, 57, 61, 72–3, 74, 77, 81, 83, 88, 91, 93, 125, 145, 152, 164, 194, 196, 210, 214 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd  20, 52 Lochhead, Liz  80 n.3, 93 London 7 London Olympics 2012  7, 58 The Lord of the Rings  3, 208 Lorenz, Chris  173 Lynch, Andrew  3–4 Mab Darogan  52, 191 The Mabinogi 50–1 The Mabinogion  49–51, 61, 189, 192 Macfadyen, Angus  94–5 MacNeacail, Aonghas  87 Macron, Emmanuel  11 Magna Carta  21, 59–61, 64, 100, 108, 151, 194, 196, 214–15 800th anniversary of  59–61 political use  59, 214–15 Maissen, Thomas  74 n.164, 123 Malečková, Jitka  144–5 Malory, Thomas 45 Manuel, Niklaus  159, 160, 161, 162 Marchal, Guy  21, 66–7, 118–21, 134–6 Margaret of Denmark  43–4, 165 Marignano, Battle of  20, 114–15, 123, 125–31 500th anniversary of  123, 130, 132 Marignano 1515–2015: Von der Schlacht zur Neutralität 125–6 Mattioli, Aram  134–6 Maurer, Ueli  73, 112 May, Theresa  92, 109 Mayer, Lauryn  139 n.1, 143–4 McCallum, Andrew  38 medieval defence  148–50, 183, 186–7, 210 medieval studies and politics  1, 5 n.21, 73, 175 n.16 medievalism and feminism  143–5, 151, 162, 165, 171

and Islamism  10, 13, 144, 191 continuity vs alterity  4, 32, 62–3, 134 women in  143–4, 163 see also and gender under national medievalism see also national medievalism Meibion Glyndŵr  56 n.90 memory site, see lieu de mémoire metamyth, see under myth Middle Ages as Other, see alterity medievalism migration  8, 78, 121, 176, 195, 198 British diasporas  88–9, 176 immigration backlash  121, 122, 139, 176–7, 198 immigration detention in the UK  193, 195, 196 post-war immigration  172, 176 to Britain  176 to Switzerland  176, 177, 188 Milošević, Slobodan  8–9 The Mists of Avalon 145 Moffat, Alistair  39, 40 Moore, Alan  152 Morgarten, Battle of  68, 71–3, 123, 127, 131, 147 700th anniversary of  72, 123 association with Swiss military  72, 73 site 72 Mörgeli, Christoph  147 Movimento Cinque Stelle  104 Müller, Johannes von  23 multiculturalism  6–7, 78, 88, 101, 104, 139, 176–7, 181, 183, 189, 190, 197 Munro, Rona  42–4, 54, 162, 164–5 Murten, Battle of  7, 127, 131 muscular medievalism, see toxic masculinity under national medievalism / and gender myth  2, 5, 9, 16–17, 20, 21 n.76, 25, 29–30, 31, 33, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46–7, 48–9, 51–3, 59–60, 62, 64, 66–8, 71, 72, 73, 78, 83, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 118, 121, 124–5, 126, 128–9, 130–1, 133 n.64, 134, 136, 145, 147, 155, 162, 167–8, 169, 170–1, 190, 197, 198–200, 209, 214, 215 and cultural memory  29, 103–4, 198, 209

Index Befreiungstradition  22 n.82, 24, 66–7, 68, 72, 73–4, 112, 113, 115, 118, 125, 128, 167 demythologisation  9, 101, 113, 128, 129 metamyth  29 n.117, 68, 124–5, 128, 129, 209 Norman Yoke  64, 65–6, 97, 105, 109–10 origin myths  25, 33, 41, 44, 47, 53, 62 n.112, 66–7, 68, 78 Napoleon I of France  40 n.28, 109 nation  2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15–16, 20, 22, 23, 26–8, 32–3, 34, 40, 69, 73, 77, 79, 85, 91, 94–5, 99, 103, 123, 138, 139–41, 164, 171, 172–4, 188–9, 197, 199–200, 208–9, 211, 215 idea of  2, 4, 5, 27–8, 73, 103, 171, 172–4, 188–9 origins of  2, 4, 5, 10, 23, 26–7, 84–5, 123, 164, 211 Willensnation  20, 69, 73, 191, 199–200 national exceptionalism, see exceptionalism under nationalism national identity  5, 6–7, 28, 31, 139–41, 200, 209 and continuity  2, 5, 32, 69, 99–104, 124, 128, 130, 138, 139, 193, 197 and place  21–2, 32–3, 36, 63–5, 71, 88, 90, 174, 194, 196, 206 as genealogy  4–5, 6, 8, 12, 32 Britishness  3, 15, 23, 46, 56–7, 85, 98, 178–9, 181–3, 191, 195 in the 1990s and 2000s  6–7 Englishness  3, 18, 23, 24–5, 38, 44, 56–8, 60, 61–5, 98–103, 104, 152, 178, 182, 192–3, 195–6, 201–6 as imperial  57, 60, 103 Englishness as Britishness  21, 23, 25, 48, 56, 57, 58, 61, 65, 97, 98, 108, 110, 178, 182, 195 in opposition to Frenchness  103, 105 national Others  2, 26, 65, 140–1, 172, 200, 204, 206 perceived threats to  65, 118, 139, 180 Scottishness  3, 21, 24, 35–9, 40–4, 80, 86, 200–7 Swissness  3, 7, 19–20, 21, 22 n.82, 66–8, 71, 73, 113–14, 118, 122, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 177, 198–200 in the 1990s and 2000s  7

247

regional identity  13, 17, 71, 72 Switzerland as a peasant nation  21–2, 112, 113–14, 127, 147 Welshness  3, 21, 24, 44, 51, 190–2, 203–4, 211 national medievalism  4, 32, 211 and class  35, 39, 64, 140, 144, 154, 165, 167, 168, 173 and gender  26, 90, 132, 138, 162, 164, 140–1, 143–71, 181–2, 201–4 chivalry 144 domesticity  145, 162–3, 164–6, 181 female agency  143, 145, 151–2, 153, 159, 161, 162–71 female mourners  151–2 female warrior figures  145, 150–51 feminism  143, 144, 145, 171 gendered nation  141, 154, 171, 202–4, 205 magic  152, 158–9, 163–4, 202–3, 205 marginalisation of women  141, 143, 144–5, 146–50, 159, 161 misogyny  144, 153, 154, 156, 158 motherhood  143, 144, 162–3 patriarchy  143–4, 149, 153, 158, 162, 171 sexual violence  144, 153, 154–5, 157, 158, 160 toxic masculinity  26, 144, 145, 153, 154–5, 157–8, 161 witch hunts  157, 158–9, 161 see also and gender under historiography / national history and politics  2, 8–9, 11, 14, 33, 66, 67, 72–3, 74, 75, 77–9, 112, 122–3, 132–8, 148 activism 192–96 from the far right  10–11, 13, 78, 81, 118, 121, 122, 174–5, 180, 210, 215 from the left  112, 113, 174, 192, 195, 196 political advertising  132–7 propaganda  79, 91, 93–4, 97–8, 211 and race, ethnicity and immigration  26, 78, 88, 121, 138, 140–1, 143, 172, 173–6, 178–207, 209 ‘colour-blindness’  178–82, 197 denial of coevalness  175–6, 205 discrimination  174, 175, 176, 188, 209, 211

248

Index

national medievalism: (continued) and race, ethnicity and immigration (continued) Middle Ages as fantasy of non-migration 174–5 Migration Period  8, 174, 199 purity  78, 172, 211 refugees  190, 192–6, 198 and war  33–4, 123, 137, 150, 152, 157, 189–91, 209, 210, 211 battlefields as memory sites  34–6, 56–7, 71–3, 83–4, 86, 89, 94, 151, 210 as local Middle Ages  4, 12, 139, 206 in Britain  2, 6, 15, 96–111, 209, 214–15 in Eastern Europe  9–10, 12 in England  15, 25, 56–66, 209, 211 in France  10–11 in Germany  11–12 in Ireland  16, 91 in Italy  12 n.58 in Northern Ireland  16 in Scotland  15, 25, 33–44, 80–95, 137, 210, 211 universal themes  36, 38, 87, 88 in Spain  10 in Switzerland  2, 5–6, 15, 25, 66–75, 112–38, 146–50, 209, 211, 215–16 Eidgenosse vs Swiss  173–4 in the 19th century  1, 2, 4, 5 in the 20th century  3 in the Balkans  5 n.20, 8 in Wales  15, 25, 44–56, 189–93, 211 as universal heritage  49–51 in Western Europe  9–10, 12 panoramic medievalism  33, 39, 54, 68–71 tapestries as shorthand for national history 39–40 resurgence in the 21st century  1, 2–3, 8–9, 208–9 vs universal classicism  4 national Others, see under national identity National Theatre  42 National Theatre of Scotland  42 national thought  27, 211 National Trust for Scotland (NTS)  34–5, 86 nationalism  5, 8, 84, 209, 213 and philology  5

British nationalism  45 cultivation of culture  94 downscaling in the 21st century  12–13, 77, 79 English nationalism  15, 18, 25, 46, 58, 61, 65, 97, 108, 110–11, 214 as driving force behind Brexit  25, 65, 97, 110–11 ethnic vs civic  27–8, 78, 173, 175, 200 exceptionalism  1–2, 14–15, 22, 23–4, 99, 101, 103–4, 106, 107–8, 139, 139, 192, 209, 211, 213–14 in the 19th century  1, 4, 5, 8, 12, 27, 34, 37, 45, 67 in the 20th century  6, 8, 15 origins of  27 Scottish nationalism  44, 81–3, 84, 87, 90 and internationalism  89–90, 92 Scottish cultural scene  25, 80–1, 83, 90, 94 Scottish independence movement  55, 89, 214 vs Scottish unionism  93 Swiss nationalism  73, 199–200, 210 Sonderfall  23, 112, 118, 129 Swiss independence  129 theory of  26–8 Welsh nationalism  18, 45, 50, 55–6 Welsh independence movement  55–6 NATO 122 Nazi Germany  11, 113 n.6 neoliberalism  99, 116 New Labour  6–7 New Stories from the Mabinogion (Seren novella series)  50–1, 189, 192 Niklaus of Flüe  20, 121–2, 129–30, 147, 158, 169 Niles, John D.  62 n.112 Nora, Pierre  29–30, 141–2 Norman Conquest  22–3, 25, 56–7, 61, 62–3, 97, 100, 105, 109–10, 151–4 Norman Yoke, see under myth nostalgia  11, 14, 26, 45, 48, 62, 64–5, 110, 142, 153, 161, 170, 176, 188, 195, 210 OECD 122 Of Arthour and of Merlin 105–6 Okonedo, Sophie  179, 180, 182

Index Old English  61–3 Old Swiss Confederacy, see Alte Eidgenossenschaft Operation Libero  134–6 organic imagery  5, 63, 71, 77, 88, 104, 128, 209, 212 Orientalism  184, 204–6 Orte, see cantons under Switzerland O’Toole, Fintan  18, 97 n.4, 110, 214 Outlaw King 53 n.80 over-foreignisation, see Überfremdung Owain Glyndŵr  20, 52–3, 182, 190 pacifism  129, 131–2 Pact of Brunnen  71–2 Parekh Report  177 Peasants’ Revolt, see English Revolt of 1381 Penman, Michael  83, 86 Pennal Letter  52–3 periodisation  3, 8, 56, 160, 171, 175 Pilet, Jacques  126 Pittman, L. Monique  7, 178, 179, 180, 181 place and national identity, see and place under national identity Plaid Cymru  54–5, 56 political correctness  26, 139, 179–80, 183, 186 politics of autochthony  13–14, 25, 77–9, 84, 104, 128, 138 populism  104, 107, 114, 128, 129, 215 post-colonialism  14–15, 176, 188 in Switzerland  176, 188 Powell, Enoch  102, 176–7 Price, Adam  55 primitivism  22, 62–3, 158 n.45 Prince of Wales (title)  54 The Prince’s Pen  189–92, 193, 196 The Princess of Thieves 151 Pro Tell  136–7 Protest: Stories of Resistance 195 Purtschert, Patricia  176 The Queen (2006 film)  58 race and racism  21 n.76, 62, 65, 78, 103, 110, 122, 139, 141–2, 174–6, 186, 210, 213 and medievalism  1, 2, 137, 173, 178, 181, 210

249

see also and race, ethnicity and immigration under national medievalism Antisemitism  118 n.24, 141–2, 175 see also Holocaust and Western memory culture definition (vs ethnicity)  172–4 great replacement conspiracy theory, see under conspiracy theories Islamophobia  122, 191–2, 205 premodernity as ‘pre-racial’ time  172–3, 178, 187 Rambaran-Olm, Mary  21 n.76, 108 Der Ranft-Ruf 129 Rassemblement National  8–9, 10–11 re-enactment  56–7, 121 n.26, 136, 151–2, 155, 190 Rees-Mogg, Jacob  107 n.35, 108, 109 Reform Act 1832  109 Reformation  64, 121 n.30, 160 n.50 English Reformation  64, 192 see also Anglicanism Refugee Tales  192–6, 215 regionalism  12–13, 17 in Switzerland, see under national identity / Swissness Renaissance  74 n.162, 160 Renan, Ernest  73, 103, 204 n.104 revolution American Revolution  101 Ancien Régime  23, 69 French Revolution  167, 168–9, 171 in Britain  22–3, 101 in continental Europe  22–3, 60 revolutions of 1989  6 Richard III of England  57–9, 163 reinterment 57–9 Rieff, David  82, 208–9, 210, 211 Righetti, Ruth  148 right-wing terrorism  175 Rigney, Ann  29 Robert the Bruce  20, 34, 53 n.80, 85, 87–8, 94 Robert the Bruce  53 n.80, 94 Robertson, James  80, 172 Robertson, Robin  88–9 Robin Hood  20, 24, 60–1, 150–1 Robin Hood (2010 film)  60–1, 150–1 Robin Hood (2018 film)  179 Robinson, Emily  103, 106, 195

250

Index

Romandie  71, 73, 125–6 Romanticism  4, 5 n.21, 9, 116 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  166, 167 rule of law  20–1, 59–60, 99, 100, 194 Russia  xiii, 12 Rütli Oath  16–17, 20, 66, 69, 118–19, 125, 130, 131, 132, 134, 198, 199 Schwurhand  121, 134 site 127 Ryser, Werner  153, 156 n.42, 157, 161 Salmond, Alexander  82, 83–6, 94–5, 106 Sasse, Sylvia  78 Schär, Bernhard C.  184–5 Schiller, Friedrich  67, 68, 121, 132, 136, 143 n.1, 147, 197, 198 Schwarzenbach, James  177 Die Schweizer/Gli Svizzeri/Les Suisses/Ils Svizzers  68–9, 146–8 ‘Die Schweizer Schlachten’ (Weltwoche special issue)  126–9 Scott, Walter  20, 41 Scottish independence movement, see under nationalism Scottish Independence Referendum  18, 25, 33, 40, 42, 43, 78, 80, 86, 91, 97, 106 and medievalism  80–1, 83–95, 97 Scottish National Party (SNP)  18, 25, 34, 80, 81, 82–3, 90, 94 Scottish Parliament, see under UK politics Sechseläuten  148, 149 controversy  148–50, 183 defence against criticism, see medieval defence Sempach, Battle of  71 n.147, 127 Senedd Cymru, see under UK politics Shakespeare, William  42, 43, 53, 89, 164, 178, 181, 182–3, 200, 202 history plays  42, 43, 58–9, 164, 178, 181, 182 King Henry IV: Part 1 53 King Henry IV: Part 2 58 King Henry V  58, 179 Macbeth  200–1, 202, 204 Simon de Montfort’s Parliament  21, 100 Sinclair, Iain  152 slavery  102, 176, 185, 186, 205 Smith, Ali  193 Smith, Anthony D.  5, 26

Smith, Donald  88 social media  13, 96 n. 2, 97, 134, 146, 179–80 socialism  6, 87, 101, 113 Somm, Markus  124 Son of Prophecy trilogy 52 Sonderbundskrieg  5–6, 23, 67 sovereignty  21, 79, 83, 85–6, 88, 109–10, 116, 134, 209 see also freedom topos The Spanish Princess 162 Spiritual Defence of the Homeland, see Geistige Landesverteidigung St David  191 St George  98 St Maurice  186–7 Stauffacher, Werner  147, 199 Stauffacherin 147 The Story of Wales  54, 68 Sturgeon, Nicola  80, 94, 95 Superwilli 132–3 Swabian War  127, 129 Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRG)  126, 146–7 Swiss civil war, see Sonderbundskrieg Swiss guilds  210 Basel 149 Guild of the Moor, Bern  183–8 defence against criticism, see medieval defence Halua Pinto de Magalhães and Fuat Köçer postulate  183, 185, 186, 188 racism controversy  183–6 Zurich, see controversy under Sechseläuten guild history  149 Swiss mercenary trade  156–8, 160 n.50 Swiss national-conservatives  xiii, 17, 19, 20, 25–6, 68, 72–3, 75, 78, 101, 104, 112–16, 121–34, 136–8, 147, 210 and medievalism  25–6, 68, 112, 123–34, 136–8, 147 Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (AUNS)  114, 116, 118, 121 Swiss People’s Party (SVP)  19, 73, 112–14, 115–16, 118, 121, 122–3, 126–7, 132–4, 136, 177, 215 Swiss national exhibitions  7

Index Swiss People’s Party (SVP), see under Swiss national-conservatives Swiss politics federalism  16, 17, 19, 20, 74, 75 neutrality  19, 20, 112, 114–15, 116, 124, 126–8, 129 criticism of  130, 132 referenda and popular initiatives Against Mass Immigration  19, 133 Ecopop 121 EEA membership referendum  19, 114–15, 134–6 Enforcement Initiative  133 Initiative for the Deportation of Criminal Foreigners  116 n.19, 133 Referendum on EU firearms directive 136 Schengen referendum  19, 121 Schwarzenbach Initiative  177 Self-Determination Initiative/ Swiss Law Instead of Foreign Judges  115–16, 134 United Nations (UN) referendum  19, 121, 122 Swiss Parliament  74, 114 Swiss Secret Files Scandal, see Fichenskandal Swiss Women’s Strike, see Frauenstreik Switzerland cantons  16, 17, 66, 72, 74–5 founding of nation-state 1848  23–4, 67, 69, 74, 113 mythical founding of  7, 71–2, 123, 128 700th anniversary of  7, 136 relationship to Nazi Germany, see Bergier Report Waldstätte 72 teleology  35, 40, 84, 100–1, 106, 166 Tell (2008 film)  67 Tell (2018 play)  143, 197–200 Tell: Mann. Held. Legende 68 Tells Tochter  162, 166–71 Tellspiele (Interlaken)  68, 197 Testament 91–3 Thatcher, Margaret  99, 107 n.40, 165 Thierry, Augustin  105–6 Thomas, Penny  51 Thomasson, Sarah  43, 165 Thompson, Ayanna  197 Ticino  73, 126

251

Tolkien, J. R. R.  208 Tories, see Conservative Party tradition  13, 14–15, 27, 30, 34, 51, 64, 67, 78, 79, 101 n.17, 103, 113–14, 169, 183, 187, 191–2, 195–6, 197, 203, 209–10 see also myth Trafalgar, Battle of  109 translatio imperii 46 translation  38, 49, 51, 86, 205 ‘Treason? The Trial of the Magna Carta Barons’  59–60, 61 Trigg, Stephanie  31 n.125 Trump, Donald  104, 213 Tschudi, Aegidius  67 Tudors  54, 163 tyranny, see freedom topos Überfremdung  116–18, 121, 177 UK politics devolution  16, 17–19, 33, 34, 38, 40–1, 54, 55, 81, 86, 90, 214 Houses of Parliament  59, 60 Scottish Parliament  18, 40–1, 43–4, 54, 80, 81, 82, 94–5 Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament  18, 25, 52, 54–5 UK Supreme Court  18, 55 UKIP  109, 180 Union of the Crowns  42 unique continuity  20, 22–5, 56–7, 60, 67, 98–9, 101–3, 108, 112, 125, 139, 191, 209, 211 Unite the Right rally, Charlottesville  175 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 193 Urban, Misty  163, 164 utopia  6, 196 Utz, Richard  11, 22–3 Valais  156, 159 Van Ginderachter, Maarten  27–8 Vaucher, Thomas  68 Vikings 151 Vishnuvajjala, Usha  143 n.3 Von Matt, Peter  7, 79, 116, 134, 198 n.95 The Wake  61–6, 153–6, 159 Wallace, William  20, 34, 37–9, 51, 81–3, 88 The Wallace Muse  37–9, 88

252

Index

Walliser Totentanz  153, 156–61 Waltham Chronicle 151 n.38 War in Afghanistan, see War on Terror War in Ukraine  xiii, 12 War on Terror  18–19, 204, 206 Wars of Scottish Independence  21, 25, 33, 37, 40, 81, 86, 88, 90 Wars of the Roses  162, 164 Waterloo, Battle of  109 Watts, Carol  194 Weck, Roger de  146 Das Weisse Buch von Sarnen 66 Welsh resistance  52, 190–91 Weltwoche  126–7, 129 Westminster Abbey  57 Westminster Hall  60, 61 Westminster Palace, see Houses of Parliament under UK politics Whig interpretation of history, see under historiography The White Princess  162, 164, 165–6 The White Queen  148, 162–6, 202 white supremacy, see race and racism

Wilhelm Tell  16–17, 20, 66, 71, 112, 118, 121, 125, 130, 132–4, 162, 166–71, 197–8, 215–16 Wilhelm Tell (Schiller play)  67, 68, 121, 132, 136, 143 n.1, 147, 197, 198 Willensnation, see under nation William the Conqueror  65 n.125, 156 Winkelried, Arnold  20, 71, 121 n.30, 127 witenagemot  20, 100 Wodianka, Stephanie  29–30 woke, see political correctness Wollenberg, Daniel  13 n.62, 78, 101 n.16 and 17 World War I  6, 23, 34, 121 n.30 World War II  4, 6, 23, 98, 113, 121 n.30, 123, 127, 141–2, 211 Young, Helen  175 Zaugg, Thomas  114 n.8, 131 Zerubavel, Eviatar  32–3, 34, 39 Zurich  7, 114, 148–9, 183 Zwingli, Huldrych  126

Medievalism I Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins II Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Alicia C. Montoya III Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest Siobhan Brownlie IV Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages Louise D’Arcens V Medievalism: Key Critical Terms edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz VI Medievalism: A Critical History David Matthews VII Chivalry and the Medieval Past edited by Katie Stevenson and Barbara Gribling VIII Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 Peter N. Lindfield IX Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation Jennifer Rushworth X Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Andrew B. R. Elliott XI Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation edited by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons XII Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones Shiloh Carroll

XIII William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas Ian Felce XIV Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern Robert Mills XV François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence Claire Pascolini-Campbell XVI Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones KellyAnn Fitzpatrick XVII Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood edited by M. J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus XVIII Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain Dustin M. Frazier Wood XIX Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain edited by David Matthews and Michael Sanders XX Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year Clare A. Simmons XXI Old English Medievalism: Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries edited by Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel XXII International Medievalisms: From Nationalism to Activism edited by Mary Boyle XXIII Old English Scholarship in the Seventeenth Century: Medievalism and National Crisis Rebecca Brackmann XXIV Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Belgium: The 1848 Monument to Godfrey of Bouillon Simon John