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Michigan Police Officer Is Terminated After K.K.K. Application Was Found in His Home - The New York Times

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Michigan Police Officer Is Terminated After K.K.K. Application Was Found in His Home - The New York Times

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A prospective homebuyer found Confederate flags and a framed Ku Klux Klan application in the officer's house in Holton, Mich.

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Officer Charles Anderson of the Muskegon Police Department in Michigan was terminated on Thursday. Credit Credit Kayla Renie/Muskegon Chronicle, via Associated Press

A police officer in Michigan was terminated on Thursday after a prospective homebuyer who had been touring the officer's house posted a picture on social media of a framed Ku Klux Klan application he had seen there, spurring an internal investigation.

Frank Peterson, the city manager of Muskegon, confirmed on Friday that the officer, Charles Anderson, had been terminated, but said a report on the inquiry conducted by the Muskegon Police Department would not be released until next week.

The city announced on Aug. 8 that Officer Anderson, who is white and had been with the department for more than two decades, had been placed on administrative leave after he was found "in possession of certain items associated with a white supremacist group." That announcement came one day after Rob Mathis, the prospective homebuyer, posted on Facebook the photo of the application, which is blank.

Although details of the investigation have not been released, Jeffrey Lewis, chief of the Police Department and Muskegon's director of public safety, told the city's commissioners on Aug. 27, "What you saw on social media is pretty much the way it is."

"Nothing was revealed to us that shocked us," Chief Lewis said of the investigation.

The Muskegon Police Department, Officer Anderson and the Police Officers Association of Michigan did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment on Friday.

Officer Anderson's wife, Rachael Anderson, told WOOD-TV, a local television station, that her husband was not a Klan member. "He can't say anything right now," Ms. Anderson said. "I wish we could because it would probably set a lot of things straight."

MLive, a media company based in Grand Rapids, reported that the Police Department's policy manual does not specifically ban private displays of prejudice, but says officers should "perform all duties impartially, without favor or affection or ill will and without regard to status, sex, religion, political belief or aspiration."

Mr. Mathis, 52, an Army veteran who is black, said that the picture he had posted on Facebook of the K.K.K. application had drawn hundreds of messages, some supporting what he had done and others condemning or threatening him. He also said that the police had warned him about a death threat.

Referring to Officer Anderson, Mr. Mathis said: "It's unfortunate that he's in our community, because he might have put people in jail on false charges, especially minorities. Because he was a police officer, it was my moral obligation to say something about it."

He said that he and his wife, brother and son had toured the officer's house in early August with a realtor.

"The first thing I noticed walking through the dining room was a Confederate flag placemat on the table," Mr. Mathis said.

As the family walked around, he said, his wife noticed a police officer's coat, and he saw two more Confederate flags in the garage. And when he went upstairs, he saw the framed K.K.K. application hanging on the wall.

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Rob Mathis posted this photo of a framed Ku Klux Klan application, which he said he had seen hanging in the house of Officer Charles Anderson, on Facebook last month. Credit Rob Mathis

He said his wife was upset, and he told her, "We're getting out of here." The realtor was very apologetic, he added.

After he posted the picture of the application and the messages poured in, he said, he was "trying to explain all of this to my 12-year-old daughter."

"It's a bad apple, not all law enforcement," Mr. Mathis said. "I wanted to shield her from this."

Mr. Mathis said he reached out to Officer Anderson and Chief Lewis but never heard from them.

"I walked into the most racist home I've ever been in in my life," Mr. Mathis said. "I was disgusted even being in that house."

Ten years ago, Officer Anderson shot and killed Julius Johnson, an unarmed black man, during a foot chase. The authorities said that Mr. Johnson had repeatedly hit the officer in the head with a blunt object. The county prosecutor at the time determined that Mr. Anderson had shot in self-defense and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

D.J. Hilson, Muskegon's current county prosecutor, told The Muskegon Chronicle that he might re-evaluate the 2009 shooting, depending on the results of the Police Department's internal investigation.

Ebony Davis, a social justice advocate working with the Mathis family to push for law enforcement transparency, said: "We want to bridge the gap between the community and the police, because the next generation has to live in this community, a community that's pretty diverse."

Mariel Padilla is a reporter covering national breaking news for the Express desk, based in New York. @marielpadilla_

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Police Officer Is Fired After K.K.K. Application Is Found in His House. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Michigan Police Officer Is Terminated After K.K.K. Application Was Found in His Home

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A prospective homebuyer found Confederate flags and a framed Ku Klux Klan application in the officer's house in Holton, Mich. A police officer in Michigan was terminated on Thursday after a prospective homebuyer who had been touring the officer's house posted a picture on social media of a framed Ku Klux Klan application he had seen there, spurring an internal investigation.

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In the Middle: White Supremacists love the Middle Ages

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In the Middle: White Supremacists love the Middle Ages

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by HELEN YOUNG

White supremacists love the Middle Ages. Sure #notallwhitesupremacists, and, try not to @ me (or anyone else), #notallmedievalists, but white supremacists love medieval history, and they love medievalist popular culture too.

And the refereed publications, like in from @drdarkage.

But the protestations about #notallmedievalists and #notallwhitesupremacists and the defensive, posturing and arguments from academics on social media in the past few months show that this still isn't enough to convince some people.

So here are some statistics from a pilot study analysis of the website Stormfront ( click here for more information from the SPLC) that I ran in mid-2016. There were more than 4.5 million posts in about 372,000 threads; about 1.2% of those threads contained the word 'medieval'. Many of these uses are in the negative adjectival way that's probably fairly familiar. This is from a thread on the "Stormfront Ladies Only" forum:

Feminism to me is simply making up for the horrible way that women have been treated in the past (and trust me, we would be back to being Medieval property if some people had their way)"

There are also posts like this, from a thread helpfully titled "Praise of Medieval England - A Golden Age Revisited:"

" The belief that everyone was a slave during the Middle Ages is a liberal lie. Serfs were serfs, and happy that way. Lords were happy as Lords, and Kings likewise. Society was nearly flawless and prosperous in Europe and Asia under a Feudal economy and government."

But this kind of quote isn't what I mean when I say that white supremacists love the Middle Ages. It's easy to dismiss that sort of statement as historically ridiculous and in any case, it's just another individual.

Rather than relying on quotes like this, I used a program called which "estimates the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts" to analyse how much affect was generated in Stormfront posts. SentiStrength gives a score out of 5 for positive and -5 for negative, based on the greatest strength of what are termed "emotion bearing words" used in each piece of text (this is the short, blog version, more details available on request, as they say in the classics).

I analysed: a control group of randomly selected threads; threads about the Middle Ages generally or specific medieval events from the 'History and Revisionism' forum; and threads on medievalist topics, mainly from the 'Music and Entertainment' forum. In each thread SentiStrength gave a figure for each comment/post, which I then averaged.

The threads from the control group came out with scores between 0 and -1.4, with 7% at a neutral 0 and 93% below. This means that the background noise on Stormfront has negative affect. Perhaps not surprising given that it's a hate forum, but since the tag-line is "White Pride, World Wide,' you'd think they'd be happier and prouder. And they are, when they are talking about medieval history and medievalist pop culture.

The threads that at least began with a post about medieval history range from 1 to -1, with 13% positive, 20% neutral and 67% negative. Talking about medieval history made these white supremacists happier than talking about most things (from feminism to plumbing tips and recommendations for local businesses).

The threads about medievalist topics (video games, movies etc) averaged between 1 and -0.5, with 13% neutral, 47% positive, while the 40% below were less strongly negative than the equivalents in the other groups. Seeing an all-white medieval 'past' on a screen makes white supremacists even happier than medieval history.

White supremacists love the Middle Ages because for centuries (literally) medieval history and language and literature was taught as though Europe was a 'whites only' space. Which it wasn't. And, for centuries, European nations and settler colonies have been built on the idea that medieval Europe was a wellspring of ethno-national identity. The Middle Ages are the period of history that global whiteness has laid claim to and loved since the eighteenth century . They're not going to stop unless we make them.
Helen Young is an honorary research associate of La Trobe University and the University of Sydney. Her research interests include medievalism, critical race studies, and popular culture. Her most recent monograph is Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (Routledge, 2016).

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by HELEN YOUNG White supremacists love the Middle Ages. Sure #notallwhitesupremacists, and, try not to @ me (or anyone else), #notallmedievalists, but white supremacists love medieval history, and they love medievalist popular culture too. And the refereed publications, like in from @drdarkage.

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Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville | New Republic

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Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville | New Republic

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Annie Abrams is an American Literature scholar with a special focus on medievalism in the conversation around race in nineteenth-century America. I asked her about the particular valence of "medieval" iconography in white supremacy today, in light of its history in America. "White Americans have long imagined themselves the heirs to some long medieval political tradition of freedom and superiority," Abrams told me. She pointed me to an extraordinary piece of writing by John L. O'Sullivan, who coined the term Manifest Destiny, in support of the racist Mexican War in 1845:

In the case of California [resistance] is now impossible. The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses. A population will soon be in actual occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion.

Abrams explained that, "Despite O'Sullivan's own Irish ancestry and the nation's complex demographics, he imagined American forces as united in a lineage beginning in Anglo-Saxon England, which ceased to exist during the Norman Conquest in 1066, and stretching west and into the Californian future." If this rhetoric reminds you of anybody, don't be surprised, says Abrams. Medievalism's "elastic sense of historical narrative" allowed O'Sullivan, just like Trump, to allude "to some imaginary Edenic past to which we might return under an otherwise-controversial political agenda." Abrams calls this kind of sloganeering "convenience over accuracy."

So, the imbrication of American whiteness with an "imaginary Edenic past" associated with medieval Europe has a long, long tradition. "American whiteness is real and hard and institutionalized," Abrams says, but "at the same time, medievalism reveals how it's built on imaginary genealogy." Medievalism, says Abrams, is "one attempt to try and unify an amorphous population by fixing it to a common historical record" amid the "illusory and difficult to parse" state of American whiteness. It leads Americans and their leaders into contradictions, as when Thomas Jefferson wanted to put the early medieval heroes Hengist and Horsa on the currency, and insisted on Anglo-Saxon being taught at UVA despite his own Welsh heritage.

If violent extremists can be relied upon for one thing, it is their ability to make hyper-visible the latent prejudices and assumptions taken for granted by the "moderate" general public. When Annie Abrams and I were in graduate school, the idea that medievalism and American whiteness would come to the attention of the mainstream press seemed like a very remote possibility indeed. But what once felt like a fringe research topic has become a site of violent, ugly conflict in America's public forum, brought out from the cultural subconscious by an administration which has legitimized hate speech.

In countries where the Nazis set foot, laws concerning incitement to racial hatred govern public speech. But this is America, where the ACLU defends the rights of the KKK to express itself. Historians of medieval Europe and historians of America alike have a duty under these circumstances to intervene and to condemn, where misunderstood pasts are lending intolerable fringe groups a pseudo-genealogy. The past is always imagined; it is a country to which we cannot go. But we do not have to cede that territory to white supremacists.

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Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville

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Annie Abrams is an American Literature scholar with a special focus on medievalism in the conversation around race in nineteenth-century America. I asked her about the particular valence of "medieval" iconography in white supremacy today, in light of its history in America.

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Why Some Conservative Thinkers Seriously Want the Return of the Middle Ages | Big Think

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Why Some Conservative Thinkers Seriously Want the Return of the Middle Ages | Big Think

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Of all the political and intellectual surprises that come at us every day now, one of the more unusual is the strange resurgence of the Middle Ages as an influence on our times. A number of conservative thinkers have proposed that as modernity and liberalism led humanity to a dead end, we should look to the medieval period for inspiration on how to remake our world. This idea has been expressed through memes and writings of the alt-right and has found its way all the way up to Presidential advisors.

One reason for the appeal of the Middle Ages can be seen in popular memes spread through alt-right online forums. They feature the Crusader battle call "Deus vult!" which basically translates to "God wills it". It is used as a Christian version of "Allahu akbar" - a call to action for the Western civilization in its supposed war against Islam.

Another way that the Middle Ages fascinate people has been proposed by a number of conservative blogs and thinkers - they are newly seen as a time of traditional values that celebrated god, masculinity, homogeneity instead of diversity, and traditional gender roles.

The "Middle Ages" is generally considered to be the period of history that goes from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 CE to the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, when Constantinople was sacked. Another way to mark the end of the medieval period is the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.
A Deus Vult meme image.
It's common to regard the Middle Ages as a dark period in human history, without many accomplishments. The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," called the period full of "barbarism and religion". This historical time is also associated with the terrible epidemic of " Black Death" - the bubonic plague that killed 20 million people in Europe, 30% of its population at the time, in the middle of the 14th century.

This negative point of view on the Middle Ages has been challenged of late, with new scholarship pointing out that the era had some achievements, like the majestic Romanesque and Gothic Cathedrals that sprang all over Europe, leading to architectural and artistic innovation. The period also saw the eventual transformation of feudalism due to factors such as agricultural inventions, leading to increased population in city centers.

People praying for relief from the bubonic plague, circa 1350. Original Artwork: Designed by E Corbould, lithograph by F Howard. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The Middle Ages were also a period of great growth of Islamic power. Muslim armies conquered the Middle East, with the Islamic world becoming three times as big as the Christian one during the height of its influence. The intellectual life that was missing from Europe was thriving in cities like Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus.

The spread of Islamic control resulted in the Catholic Church launching a series of Crusades - military expeditions to rescue the Holy Land from "infidels". The Crusades were first began in 1095 AD, with Pope Urban II issuing the infamous "Deus Vult!" battle cry for Christians to raise an army and fight Muslims.

The "Deus Vult!" memes that spread through alt-right communities on 4chan, reddit and other social media harken back to the Crusader story. They are essentially calling for a modern-day Crusade against Islam.

The allure of the Crusader narrative is not only demonstrated by the alt-right Crusader memes, but is echoed in conservative intellectual circles.
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Having embraced the alt-right while at Breitbart, President Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon has at times expressed apocalyptic rhetoric that seems to be anticipating a coming religious and class war. It is hard to really know all the nuances of what Mr. Bannon thinks as this somewhat reclusive figure rarely weighs in on events and issues publicly. But considering the access and intellectual heft Mr. Bannon is said to bring to the ear of the President, discerning his views is a very telling endeavor.

To that end, Mr. Bannon has spoken of the current period of time as a point of crisis, with capitalism and Judeo-Christian values under attack, especially from radical Islamists.
Trump Crusader meme.
Bannon's seemingly strong feelings on this subject were on display during his 2014 talk at the Vatican.

"And we're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if ... the people in the Church do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church Militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years," said Bannon.

This certainly sounds like Crusader talk. He suggests that the Judeo-Christian idea is facing a grave enemy that can only be fought by armed Christians. Interestingly, in the same speech, he also paints the current age as the Dark Ages, another way the Middle Ages are described.

Bannon also spoke about the appeal of Putin, linking it to the Russian leader's support of "traditionalist" values, especially as he's advised by Alexander Dugin, a philosopher who follows the work of the controversial Italian thinker Julius Evola. Bannon's remarks seemed to indicate that while he does not support Putin's kind of government, there was some merit in his approach.

"We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he's [Putin] talking about as far as traditionalism goes - particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism - and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing," said Bannon .

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon participates in a conversation during the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center February 23, 2017 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Julius Evola was considered a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a philosophy that sees the idea of equality-oriented liberalism and "progress" as mistaken, advocates traditional gender roles and seeks a return of hierarchical social structures like castes. Evola saw European feudalism during the Middle Ages as a great example of such a society.

Anti-Semitic and sexist Evola is known for inspiring Italian fascists, including Benito Mussolini himself, modern neo-Nazi and nationalist parties in Europe, as well as the far right movements in the United States.

"Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century," said the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer .

Mr. Spencer also found it very significant that Mr. Bannon knew who Evola was.

"Even if he hasn't fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them," he said. "He at least recognizes that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them," said Spencer.

If you think knowing about Evola is not the same as supporting his ideas, an article by Breitbart from when it was run by Bannon listed Evola as one of the foundational thinkers of the alt-right movement. It was co-written by another alt-right standard bearer - Milo Yiannopoulos.

Alexander Dugin, another philosopher mentioned by Bannon at the Vatican, is called by some "Putin's Brain." He is a Russian thinker known for his close associations with the Kremlin. Dugin espouses an Evola-influenced philosophy that also ties into Traditionalist values, seeing the Renaissance and everything that followed, including technological progress, as a debasement of human nature. His goal would be to return to the values of the Middle Ages and restore a Eurasian empire on the basis of the former Soviet Union, with Russia at the head.

" Returning to the Middle Ages or turning to them to look for inspiration, and I am not speaking of merely reproducing - that's impossible to do. But we have stood on the path of modernity. We've stood on the path of modern totalitarianism regardless of whether of the first, second, or third theory. We've exhausted all of their possibilities, built all three models. We've built liberal civilization, communist civilization as part of such an experiment, and we've even built fascism. We can now compare everything before us. And if all of this does not satisfy us, this means that the most important mistake was made not in the 20th century and not even in 1991," said Dugin in an interview.

While history is always important to study, what does one make of this unexpected brew of racist and sexist ideologies inspired by fascist and radical Russian thinkers combined with American Christian white nationalism? Sounds like an explosive cocktail.

If you don't have enough Crusader spirit, here's a video that can get you into just such a state:
Cover image: Circa 1250, A crusader is shot by a Muslim warrior during the Crusades. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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Why Some Conservative Thinkers Seriously Want the Return of the Middle Ages

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Of all the political and intellectual surprises that come at us every day now, one of the more unusual is the strange resurgence of the Middle Ages as an influence on our times. A number of conservative thinkers have proposed that as modernity and liberalism led humanity to a dead end, we should look to the medieval period for inspiration on how to remake our world.

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Significance of Studying the Middle Ages

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Significance of Studying the Middle Ages

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Significance of Studying the Middle Ages

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This group is a repository of thoughts from academics, instructors, students, and others concerning why studying the Middle Ages is significant and important. Mull, share group with others, post, question, reply, discuss, provide relevant links...

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Old English Has a Serious Image Problem | JSTOR Daily

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Old English Has a Serious Image Problem | JSTOR Daily

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"Old English," also termed "Anglo-Saxon," was and is simply the form of the English language that predates the Norman Conquest of 1066. The first line of the earliest poem in Old English, a prayer called "Cædmon's Hymn," largely unfamiliar to modern English speakers, offers a taste of this forgotten language: Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard ("Now we must praise the guardian of the heaven-kingdom").

Scattered American antiquarians and scholars, including Thomas Jefferson, investigated Anglo-Saxon in the early years of the American republic. The study of the language became more widespread in the decades following the Civil War, when many of the growing numbers of American universities and colleges added it to their curricula. As with any endeavor in nineteenth-century higher education, many more men than women took part.

The American neo-Nazi movement that calls itself the "alt-right" is resurrecting medievally tinged celebrations of "European heritage" as part of its racist agenda.

The first generations of female students, however, took advantage of the academic respectability provided by Anglo-Saxon, with some leveraging the knowledge to enter the academic profession as faculty. Between the Civil War and World War I, Anglo-Saxon provided upper-middle-class white women with entry into the tiny ranks of female professors-and the much larger corps of female K-12 classroom teachers.

At the same time, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon played a part in the more general cultural belief-prevalent at the time-in the superiority of northern European or "Anglo-Saxon" whiteness. In 2017, as the American neo-Nazi movement that calls itself the "alt-right" is resurrecting medievally tinged celebrations of "European heritage" as part of its racist agenda, twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonists need to confront the racism inherent in the history of the discipline. The challenge is to communicate Anglo-Saxon history as part of a multicultural and inclusive public discourse.

The Gendered History of Learning Old English

The male professors who led the field of Anglo-Saxon studies in the late nineteenth century emphatically defined English Philology-the study of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English-as a scientific, empirical subject that was also (appropriately) masculine. The study of Anglo-Saxon thus allowed nineteenth-century women to engage in quasi-objective processes of grammatical description and translation, as opposed to more belletristic appreciation of literary texts, a potentially emotional and "feminine" activity considered better suited to the parlor than the library or classroom.

In an 1884 essay in the journal of the newly formed Modern Language Association, H.C.G. Brandt, professor of French and German at Hamilton College, differentiated between "scientific" and "natural" methods of language study, explicitly equating "natural" instruction with "the mother" and "the nursery." Brandt insisted that he and his colleagues were "modern-language-men" whose scientific methods allowed "our profession [to] gain dignity and weight." Once they were able to access instruction in these scientific methods, women students of philology entered into and benefitted from this patriarchal culture.

Women's colleges that sought to prove their academic rigor thus offered Anglo-Saxon. Girls' academies and seminaries that sought to become full-fledged colleges added Anglo-Saxon to their catalogs. Some of these women's colleges did "feminize" the Anglo-Saxon class: They included the Anglo-Saxon "women's poems"- Judith, Juliana, and Elene -in their curricula. (Those texts were not part of the syllabus at the equivalent men's schools.) Before World War I, at least 32 women's colleges throughout the United States offered Anglo-Saxon; these range from Smith College in Massachusetts to the Florida State College for Women (now the coeducational Florida State University) to Mills College in California. Many graduates of these colleges became classroom teachers in K-12 schools, providing staffing for the growing numbers of public schools throughout the U.S.

Female college graduates and advanced-degree holders who had expertise in Anglo-Saxon were able to enter the female professoriate as English professors, though they were employed almost exclusively at women's colleges. The growing number of coeducational colleges and universities at the end of the nineteenth century actually worked against the development of women faculty, since women were only very rarely hired to teach men, while men were routinely hired to teach women. Women faculty hired by coeducational universities in the U.S. were confined to teaching in the "ladies" or "domestic science" departments; women who wished to teach natural sciences, history, mathematics, or Anglo-Saxon had to do so at colleges exclusively for women.

One caveat: In the late nineteenth century, there was no concept of a woman "having it all" or "achieving work-life balance." Female college professors were unmarried, a testimony to the era's unwavering cultural position that a marriage and a profession were incompatible for women. Despite their advanced degrees, these professors were referred to as "miss" rather than "doctor" or "professor," so that both their gender and marital status would remain clear at all times. Anglo-Saxon, then, provided much-needed academic respectability and professional access to a segment of first-wave feminists in the U.S.

Troubling Racial Connotations

Outside the university, however, the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" did not refer to early medieval English. Instead, it was racial and racist, freighted with assumptions of privilege and superiority. The cultural rhetoric of Manifest Destiny specifically defined "Anglo-Saxons" as superior to enslaved and free Africans, Native American Indians, Mexicans, and numerous other groups defined as non-white, including Irish and Italian immigrants. The titles of college courses in Anglo-Saxon also carried these racial connotations and cultural associations.

Before the war, Southerners tended to identify with the Normans and their feudalism in a historically inaccurate way that seemed to justify slavery.

These racist associations stemmed from the medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism bred by nineteenth-century racial and political theorists, who used supposedly scientific and religious proposals to argue for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. Those theories buttressed discourse around the Norman Conquest in the Confederacy before and after the Civil War.

Before the war, Southerners tended to identify with the Normans and their feudalism in a historically inaccurate way that seemed to justify slavery and celebrate an idealized, implicitly white Southern womanhood, defining a distinctly Southern form of "chivalry." After the war, Southerners switched their Norman Conquest allegiance to the Anglo-Saxons, the losers, the invaded, who still managed to hold onto their core identities and customs in the face of occupation. One odd effect of this Southern Anglo-Saxonism is the use of Anglo-Saxon names in the Deep South; as one example, the 1880s Mississippi congressman Ethelbert Barksdale was named after the first Anglo-Saxon Christian king of Kent, who ruled from 589 to 616 C.E.

By 1900, most Anglo-Saxon professors probably would not have agreed with or even contemplated the idea that their discipline contributed to a racist worldview. Consider, however, 1916 remarks by M. Carey Thomas, Anglo-Saxon professor, dean, and later president of the all-women's Bryn Mawr College. In an address to the college, later printed in its newsletter, she said:

If the present intellectual supremacy of the White races is maintained, as I hope that it will be for centuries to come, I believe it will be because they are the only races that have seriously begun to educate their women... almost all of our student body are early time Americans... Our Bryn Mawr College students therefore as a whole seem to belong by heredity to the dominant races.

In 1903, Thomas raised money for a scholarship to send the valedictorian of Philadelphia High School for Girls to Cornell. It was a tradition that the high school's valedictorian attend Bryn Mawr on scholarship, but the valedictorian that year, Jessie Fauset, was African-American. Thomas rigorously enforced Bryn Mawr's unwritten policy that the college was open only to white students.

The study of Anglo-Saxon at Bryn Mawr illustrates the overt and implicit racism at the turn to the twentieth century that prioritized "Anglo-Saxon" whiteness over all other racial categories. Within the university-and within the English department-that racism, if not necessarily enthusiastically embraced, was at least tolerated and certainly not contradicted.

The positioning of Anglo-Saxon as the core of the collegiate English curriculum thus silently perpetuated racist mythologies about Manifest Destiny and the superiority of Northern European ancestry. The transition of the course title from "Anglo-Saxon" to "Old English" (largely complete by the 1920s), however, helped to move the subject away from those associations.

The Teaching of Old English Today

Through the twentieth century, English departments across the U.S. moved away from requiring Old English. Most students and faculty now know Old English literature only in translation, if at all.

The discipline of medieval studies had been working toward the establishment of a "multicultural Middle Ages."

A number of contemporary medieval scholars have called attention to the ways that earlier nineteenth-century medievalism and racism are being rejuvenated by the American neo-Nazis, who claim to glorify the "greatness" of their "European heritage." Crucial to the academic argument against this movement is vociferous insistence that the Middle Ages were never a celebration of white male aristocratic heroism, despite American popular perception of white knights in shining armor riding their warhorses through England and France.

Long before the Black Lives Matter movement on campuses across the country called for a more inclusive, more diverse curriculum, the discipline of medieval studies had been working toward the establishment of a "multicultural Middle Ages," a way out from under the field's reputation as thoroughly dead, white, and male. Since the 1980s, women authors, audiences, and subjects have been more frequently included in the field -part of the influence of second-wave feminism. Work on the Islamic Middle Ages has made its way from specialized journals into undergraduate textbooks. And the study of medieval Africa and the medieval Far East is on a similar, though slower, trajectory into recognition.

A recent historical novel for young adults, Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale, features a diverse trio of teenagers: William is the mixed-race son of a French knight and a North African woman; Jacob is Jewish; and Jeanne is a peasant. It won a Newbery honor in 2017, suggesting that the multicultural Middle Ages have reached the mainstream. When Gidwitz's vision of the Middle Ages becomes broadly accepted-in movies about King Arthur and on TV shows like Game of Thrones -then the attempted neo-Nazi coup will have failed, despite the implicit assistance it received from the study of Old English more than a hundred years ago.

JSTOR Citations

By: Stanley R. Hauer

PMLA, Vol. 98, No. 5 (Oct., 1983), pp. 879-898

Modern Language Association

By: H. C. G. Brandt

Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 1 (1884 - 1885), pp. 57-63

Modern Language Association

By: Mary Dockray-Miller

Modern Language Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1997), pp. 139-157

Modern Language Studies

By: Linda M. Perkins

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 19 (Spring, 1998), pp. 104-108

The JBHE Foundation, Inc

By: María José Mora and María José Gómez-Calderón

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 322-336

University of Illinois Press

By: Miri Rubin

History Workshop Journal, No. 46 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 213-239

Oxford University Press

Comments are closed.

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Old English Has a Serious Image Problem | JSTOR Daily

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"Old English," also termed "Anglo-Saxon," was and is simply the form of the English language that predates the Norman Conquest of 1066. The first line of the earliest poem in Old English, a prayer called "Cædmon's Hymn," largely unfamiliar to modern English speakers, offers a taste of this forgotten language: Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard ("Now we must praise the guardian of the heaven-kingdom").

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A Kerfuffle About Diversity in the Roman Empire - The Atlantic

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A Kerfuffle About Diversity in the Roman Empire - The Atlantic

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To start, much of the research into genetic variation (including much of what powers commercial DNA tests) is based on where people live now. One might consider a certain genetic signature typical of Italians based on who lives in Italy today. But how common a gene is in modern Italians may not reflect how common that gene was among Romans who invaded Britain 2,000 years ago. Over millennia, populations frequently moved and sometimes completely replaced the existing population in a given area.

Past migrations and invasions aren't always evident in the DNA of modern people. In fact, the modern British population shows little genetic evidence of Roman, Viking, and Norman invasions -but this one data point is hardly enough to overturn the preponderance of historical evidence that shows these invasions did happen.

Related Story

Will the Alt-Right Promote a New Kind of Racist Genetics?
In recent years, researchers have turned to ancient DNA from burial sites to better understand ancient populations. Last year, a study of nine ancient Roman skeletons in Britain found a lot of similarity with British Celtic populations. One skeleton, though, showed much more affinity with modern Middle East populations.

This is a more direct picture of the past but it's still an incomplete one. First, the number of bodies available to sample is often small. Second, the number of samples that yield DNA after hundreds or thousands of years are even smaller. And lastly, the amount of DNA you can get is usually a tiny portion of the genome. "You have to be very careful about what assumptions you bring into your study," says Jennifer Raff, an anthropologist who studies ancient DNA at the University of Kansas. For example, a recent intriguing study of 90 Egyptian mummies showed they were more genetically similar to modern Middle Easterners than central Africans. But of course only the wealthy were mummified, so it's not a complete picture of ancient Egypt.

Geary, the historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, is studying ancient DNA from cemeteries around present-day Lombardy in Italy. He is very careful about how he presents his work and avoids speculation in his talks. While his research has turned up two distinct groups of people, he told me he resists giving them names that identify one or the other as the "real Lombards":

I was talking to one of our board of trustees at the Institute-a billionaire who has an interest in what we're doing-and I said, "Well, we have this central northern population and this southern." He said, "No, no, you can't call them that. You've got to give them names. That's how you're going to get attention and funding." But of course that's exactly what we mustn't do because then one falls into this ethnic discourse that we are trying to avoid.

Applying these labels-and maybe even the act of resisting labels-is a matter of historical interpretation. Genetic data is subject to interpretation like any kind of data. When something as trivial as a five-minute children's video can inflame the culture wars, so will any genetics study that even touches on notions of race and ethnicity.

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A Kerfuffle About Diversity in the Roman Empire

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To start, much of the research into genetic variation (including much of what powers commercial DNA tests) is based on where people live now. One might consider a certain genetic signature typical of Italians based on who lives in Italy today.

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Dialogue: Exposing the Rhetoric of Exclusion through Medieval Manuscripts | The Getty Iris

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Dialogue: Exposing the Rhetoric of Exclusion through Medieval Manuscripts | The Getty Iris

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We invite your thoughts on an exhibition-in-progress at the Getty that addresses the persistence of prejudice as seen through lingering stereotypes from the Middle Ages.

As curators in the Getty Museum's department of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, we are interested in how books, and museum collections more broadly, can spark dialogues about inclusivity and diversity. Our manuscripts collection at the Getty consists primarily of objects from Western Europe, which can present challenges when trying to connect with a multicultural and increasingly international audience. We are striving to make connections between the Middle Ages and the contemporary world-connections that may not be immediately evident, but are powerful nonetheless. Museums are inherently political organizations, in terms of the ways that collections are assembled, displayed, and interpreted. This year's meeting of the Association of Art Museum Curators addressed how institutional narratives and implicit bias can skew ideas of history and culture in ways that exclude minorities and gloss over the shameful aspects of our past. Groups such as the Medievalists of Color, the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, among others, are applying similar lines of inquiry, seeking to decolonize and diversify the field of medieval studies. We stand with these groups.

We were also inspired by Holland Cotter 's call to arms, as he exhorted museums to tell the truth about art, "about who made objects, and how they work in the world, and how they got to the museum, and what they mean, what values they advertise, good and bad. Go for truth (which, like the telling of history, is always changing), and connect art to life."

Here is our description of the exhibition, still in draft form:

Medieval manuscripts preserve stories of romance, faith, and knowledge, but their luxurious illuminations can reveal more sinister narratives as well. Typically created for the privileged classes, such books nevertheless provide glimpses of the marginalized and powerless and reflect their tenuous places in society. Attitudes toward Jews and Muslims, the poor, those perceived as sexual or gender deviants, and the foreign peoples beyond European borders can be discerned through caricature and polemical imagery, as well as through marks of erasure and censorship.

As repositories of history and memory, museums reveal much about our shared past, but all too often the stories told from luxury art objects focus on the elite. Through case studies of objects in the Getty's collection, this exhibition examines the "out groups" living within western Europe. Medieval society was far more diverse than is commonly understood, but diversity did not necessarily engender tolerance. Life contained significant obstacles for those who were not fully abled, wealthy, Caucasian, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered males. For today's viewer, the vivid images and pervasive narratives in illuminated manuscripts can serve as a stark reminder of the power of rhetoric and the danger of prejudice.

We begin the exhibition with a masterpiece of Romanesque painting, shown above. This manuscript, with its gilded pages and geometric symmetry, reveals the institutionalized antisemitism that formed the basis of Christian rhetoric about the triumph of the Church.

Ecclesia, the personification of the Christian Church, is seen above and to Christ's right, while the Jewish Synagoga appears on Christ's left. Often represented as a blindfolded figure, here Synagoga (in red robes) points at Christ, glaring. She holds a banderole representing Old Testament law that proclaims "cursed be he who hangs on the tree." Below, two additional personifications echo and intensify the antithetical positions of these two figures. In a roundel below Ecclesia, the fair-skinned figure of Life (at far left) gazes calmly across the composition at Death, whose dark complexion and hook nose are seen in caricatures of Jews in other twelfth-century images.

We'd Like Your Comments

We are in the early stages of writing this exhibition, which is scheduled to be presented in the Getty's manuscripts gallery in January 2018. As we create both the thematic content and the individual object texts-which we will be posting periodically on the Getty Tumblr-we are curious to receive community input. Specifically, we are curious to know any or all of the following:

Your level of interest in an exhibition of medieval and Renaissance art exploring these themes

Comments on the wording of the exhibition description we've shared above (as a whole or in any part)

Suggestions for perspectives and points of view we should consider in developing the exhibition

Any and all other suggestions or criticisms

Please leave a (public) comment below, or contact us by email at manuscripts@getty.edu.

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Dialogue: Exposing the Rhetoric of Exclusion through Medieval Manuscripts

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We invite your thoughts on an exhibition-in-progress at the Getty that addresses the persistence of prejudice as seen through lingering stereotypes from the Middle Ages. As curators in the Getty Museum's department of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, we are interested in how books, and museum collections more broadly, can spark dialogues about inclusivity and diversity.

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Over the past several years, I've become increasingly involved in the long-standing project known as the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (SASLC). First, I joined the project as a contributor, working on a series of entries (Pseudo-Bede) that seemed, at the time, untouchable. In 2014, I took on a role to help the project increase its online presence and move toward digital publication, and, in 2016, I joined the Editorial Board .

More recently, I've been considering the SASLC project within the larger scope of medieval studies and the ongoing conversations about diversity (or problems with diversity) in the field. (Among the links provided below, see especially resources at the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship website; and this crowd-sourced Race and Medieval Studies Bibliography , maintained by Julie Orlemanski and Jonathan Hsy.) [1]

In this post, I want to consider this ongoing conversation, speak from my position of privilege, and listen to the voices who are calling for change. I also want to reflect on several questions about seeking equity and creating equality that guide my thoughts in this post (more on these below). While my perspective is largely focused on SASLC, I hope that much of this can be similarly extended to other institutions and organizations in the field.

At the start, I want to offer several caveats. First, I write this as a member of the Editorial Board of SASLC, and one who is interested in seeing the project flourish into the future. I care deeply about this project, believe that it is an important one for the field, and believe in taking stock of criticisms to make the field better. But, second, I write this from my own personal perspective, not on behalf of SASLC, nor under its auspices, nor with any kind of authority from the project's other leaders. Finally, I write this as a cis, white, able-bodied man with a tenure-track job, and I must acknowledge my privilege in that position, socially and academically.
An Image Problem
As medievalists know, and as recent conversations have highlighted, the field known as "Anglo-Saxon studies" faces many reasons for reflection and change.

For example, a recent post by Elaine Treharne has raised the issue (and caused much discussion; link will only work for members of the Anglo-Saxon Studies group) about how our common terminology matters both within and outside of academia. Titles like "Anglo-Saxonist" and related terms are fraught with background. It is a striking and distressing fact that the second definition of "Anglo-Saxonist" in the Oxford English Dictionary indicates "A person who believes in the importance or superiority of Anglo-Saxon language, people, or culture (past or present)." This is a racist perspective that easily foments white supremacy. Historiographic, nationalistic, racist, colonialist ideologies have been projected onto the past by appropriating such terms, and the damages are still very much with us.

Beyond terminology, however, there are other considerations. It is likely not a surprise to anybody that the reputation of traditional Anglo-Saxon studies is also problematic within academia. Foremost is the reputation for being the purview of white men. The Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon Studies has been held only by white men. Similarly, the major journals in the field, Anglo-Saxon England and the Old English Newsletter , have been predominantly overseen by white, male editors. The Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture was founded and, until recently, primarily directed by white men (see more on this below).

Raising these criticisms is not meant to direct specific judgment, but to point out an unfortunate aspect of our field: as with all parts of society affected by structural sexism and racism, Anglo-Saxon studies has marginalized those who are not white men.

Over the past few years, medieval studies generally and Anglo-Saxon studies specifically have had to face intersecting issues. Early 2016 brought a prominent outcry for examining structural sexism in the field. This was largely sparked because of controversy around Allen Frantzen's personal anti-feminist website. Furthermore, close connections exist between the intersectional issues of sexism and racism, especially in alt-right (white supremacist) ideologies.

In 2017, there has been both an appeal to examine whiteness in medieval studies by Medievalists of Color and conversations about diversity coming out of events at the annual International Medieval Congress . More specifically, Adam Miyashiro has raised criticisms in response to the 2017 ISAS meeting in Honolulu. All of this has been precipitated especially by a rising awareness of white supremacists appropriating medieval studies (particularly Anglo-Saxon studies) for their causes.

One reaction to facing criticisms would be to react defensively. We might cry out, "Not all Anglo-Saxonists!" or-in the case of my own situation-"Not all contributors to SASLC!" We could point out the many women who have joined SASLC and contributed to it over the years. (And I've just done this, haven't I?) But good intentions need to be paired with actions that bring about structural change. Nor is inclusion the only issue at stake.
The Theory of SASLC
A brief history of the SASLC project is useful. It was founded by James Cross, Tom Hill, and Paul Szarmach-all three respected men in the field-who wanted to gather a team of scholars interested in extending the work of in his Books Known to the English, 597-1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). SASLC's self-stated goal is (as it always has been) "to map the sources that influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England." At the same time, the complementary project, Fontes Anglo-Saxonici (Fontes), was also begun in England. SASLC has continued, in various ways, publishing a number of volumes , with that same goal in mind, up to the present.

At its heart, as its name suggests, SASLC is a project rooted in source study. It is, in its most basic pursuit, a bibliographic undertaking, which seeks to provide encyclopedic knowledge about what has been said about the use of sources in Latin and Old English literature. As I've already stated, I believe that this work remains valuable to the field. SASLC provides an account of basic knowledge that allows for future studies.

There are, of course, relevant criticisms to the text-critical and philological underpinnings of source study. Certainly pretenses to "scientific" inquiry have lead to problematic, empiricist notions of positivism. Indeed, source study rests on its own methodological assumptions and, like all methodologies, is not immune to necessary reflections on its weaknesses as well as its benefits. Even J. R. R. Tolkien (a traditional philologist if there ever was one) criticized source study in his famous 1936 .

What I mean to highlight with these reflections is an important point: this work is theoretically grounded. The methodological assumptions of source study rely on the foundational theories of textual critics (from the nineteenth century up to the present). Amid the many critical theories that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, it can be easy to lose sight of this fact when considering traditional approaches.

All scholarship is underpinned by theoretical foundations.

There are also associations, actual and perceived, between traditional modes of scholarship like source study and academic attitudes about them. Again, I might turn to assumptions that philological inquiry (and its outgrowths, such as source study) has remained the realm of white men, whereas inquiry with "critical theory" has emerged as the realm of those who identify as feminists, people of color, lgbtq+, etc.

Framing the conversation in these terms also establishes a binary that is harmful for all scholarship. In many ways, such a divided view of scholarship reifies the assumption that approaches must remain divided. (Beware tautology.) It creates the sense that some scholars must only be allowed to work in traditional methodologies while other scholars must only be allowed to incorporate critical theory. At root, such divides marginalize: distinctions marginalize those who are attracted to critical theory as well as those who find themselves benefiting from the whole range of methodologies.

Establishing binaries between methodologies ("traditional" and "theoretical") also creates an erroneous picture of work of the field. Many scholars-contributors to Fontes and SASLC as well as many others-have found useful ways to bring together both source study and critical theory. In an important essay for the field of source study (originally given as the T. Northcote Toller Memorial Lecture at the University of Manchester in 1993), Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe [2] amply demonstrates how critical theory helps to address source study in new ways. She also points out that such questions were already present at the start of Fontes and SASLC, as Colin Chase considered them at the event that sparked both projects, the 1983 Symposium on the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture ( proceedings published in 1986).

In all of this, SASLC is both a major contributor to source study and the basis of work that rests on its production of knowledge. But source study is not an end in itself. It also remains a valuable basis for work that embraces diverse voices and approaches both within the project and in the wider field. As such, it is a project that (like the rest of the field) needs to reflect on its methodologies at the same time that it invites new voices.

At the end of her essay, O'Brien O'Keeffe levels an argument that Anglo-Saxon studies is still attempting to come to terms with: "that these two sorts of discourses (the 'documentary' heuristic of source work and 'post-modern' critical analysis) are incommensurable, that they proceed from complementary presuppositions, but that they are both necessary for the development of the field when they are understood to work in conjunction." This conjunction is the work that SASLC can enable, foster, and help to expand.

These same notions also point to the need for scholars of traditional approaches to lean into this conjunction. In other words, scholars who prefer traditional methodologies need to read and reflect on critical theories of gender and race, even if those theories do not directly inform their scholarship.
Source Representation Matters
There is also potential for emphasizing the global Middle Ages by way of considering representation in the realm of source study. After all, not all sources used in Anglo-Saxon England came from Western Europe. Many came from North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Similarly, the authors of these texts were not Western Europeans.

Apocrypha (one of my personal areas to study) provide abundant examples. Anglo-Saxon literature share parallels with extra-biblical texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, and Ethiopic. What are the global connections that precipitated these parallels? What do these connections reveal about the diversity of the medieval world, and Anglo-Saxon England within that larger context? We shouldn't forget that even the Bible (both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament) was written by Middle Eastern authors under colonial rule, not the European Christians who later used it for their own imperialist aims. Here postcolonial theory could prove useful for examining sources as well as their long histories of transmission and reception. Exploring these subjects is certainly one way that the findings of SASLC can open new ways of considering "Global Perspectives."

For more specific cases, we might consider three examples: Augustine of Hippo, Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, and Anglo-Saxon women in legal records.

As a patristic author (note the androcentrism even in that term), Augustine of Hippo (354-430) tends to be lumped into the category of old, white, male authorities (for more, see ). And, given his legacy, this is fair. Certainly this is the way his legacy has been used by other white male authorities. Yet it is also easy to lose sight of the fact that Augustine was from North Africa, born in the Roman-Berber city of Thagaste, in present-day Algeria. His father was a Roman, and his mother was, most likely , a . He likely grew up in an environment where he learned both his father's and mother's native languages, Latin and Berber. By the time of his birth, North African Berbers were already a multi-ethnic people group influenced by the diversity of the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean. This seems to have influenced his thinking later in life, as he identifies as North African, as he writes of "us Africans" and calls other North African figures "ours" as countrymen. Augustine's identity was certainly multifaceted.

Theodore of Tarsus (602-90) was born in a region of present-day Turkey (for more, see ). Incidentally, the year of his birth also brought about a twenty-six-year war between the Byzantine and Persian Sassanian empires in his own homeland. His childhood was filled with multi-ethnic encounters. He saw Greek and Persian cultures first-hand in Tarsus; he gained his education in Antioch and later in Constantinople; he learned Syrian culture, language, and literature; he saw the emerging culture and religion of Islam expand toward his home-possibly encountering Muslims in person; and he learned about Roman and Christian Latin literature while living in Rome. In 669, Theodore took this multiculturalism with him when he moved to England and became the archbishop of Canterbury. With him went his friend (d.710), a North African (probably a Berber) who became abbot of St. Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury.

Considering these brief biographies, it is significant that Augustine, Theodore, and Hadrian were multi-ethnic, multilingual, and arguably multiracial. Of course, we need to acknowledge that modern social constructs of race are not wholly applicable in these cases, but the ethnic diversity of such figures and the implications for global medieval studies matter. And yet, unfortunately, these points about Augustine and Theodore remain factual points in their biographies, not fully interrogated in larger contexts. Why have these details gone unexplored?

We can also consider the influences of Anglo-Saxon women on legal practices (following, for example, recent work by Andrew Rabin ). We have little surviving literature penned by known or named Anglo-Saxon women-a product of a textual record dominated by men, which normalizes ideas of textual production by men. Yet SASLC's stated goal of tracing "the sources that influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England" might also extend to considering how advocates like Queen Ælfthryth affected legal texts; or it might encompass how charters represent women like the "Peterborough Witch" or the noblewoman Wynflæd acting as litigants in legal cases. Scholars could pay more attention to Anglo-Saxon women who might be otherwise marginalized make their voices known through legal documents.

SASLC (and Anglo-Saxon studies more widely) needs studies of people of color, women, and gender issues in Anglo-Saxon England; at the same time, it also needs scholars of color, feminist scholars, and lgbtq+ scholars working on the sources of Anglo-Saxon England. Beyond the specific goals of SASLC as a project, the larger field also needs studies that use bibliographical data about sources to create new narratives and theoretical examinations of the historical issues at stake.
Ways Forward
As we consider the future of our shifting field, we also need to reconsider the shifting roles of our established institutions and organizations. How we approach equity and equality is central to how we forge a new future for our field.

One way in which SASLC has already attempted to reconsider its shifting role in academia is its publishing model. Indeed, one of the main goals over the past few years has been to embrace a publication plan that includes open access. Issues of open access and equity go hand in hand (also see this post, especially the latter part). This point is especially apparent in an age of predatory publishing, for-profit companies taking advantage of scholars, and shady online repositories. But this is only one starting place.

Highlighting diversity within Anglo-Saxon culture is one way forward, but we also need to highlight diverse voices within Anglo-Saxon scholarship. As we put out a new call for members of the project, we invite the work of diverse scholars in contributing to the future of SASLC.

[1] I am happy to acknowledge two friends who have especially helped me by discussing and providing feedback on this post. With their perspectives as a queer woman and a queer trans man, both have provided significant criticisms, comments, and suggestions. While they wish to remain anonymous, I owe them immense gratitude. You know who you are, so thank you.

[2] I want to digress to note a fact related to the issues I'm discussing: I was rather disturbed to see on the Wikipedia page about the T. Northcote Toller Memorial Lecture that six "notable lecturers" are listed, but only one of them is a woman: Barbara Yorke. This case thus represents another problem of representation for Anglo-Saxon studies. Whereas a Wikipedia page like the one for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon Studies contains a list of every man who has held the position, the page for the Toller Memorial Lecture includes only a selection, which excludes all but one of the women who have had this distinction. Other women who have given the lecture include: Janet Bately, Roberta Frank, Joyce Hill, Audrey Meaney, and Joana Proud (whose lectures are published in this volume), as well as Leslie Webster (according to this site) and, most recently, Clare Lees. I have been unable to find a full list online of those who have delivered the lecture to date (the common link cited loads only an error page), even by searching the University of Manchester website.

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Over the past several years, I've become increasingly involved in the long-standing project known as the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (SASLC). First, I joined the project as a contributor, working on a series of entries (Pseudo-Bede) that seemed, at the time, untouchable. In 2014, I took on a role to help the project increase...

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Could Neo Nazis Stop Using Our Sacred Cultural Symbols, Please? - The Reykjavik Grapevine

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Could Neo Nazis Stop Using Our Sacred Cultural Symbols, Please? - The Reykjavik Grapevine

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There are few people easier to despise than Neo-Nazis. They are the actual worst. The hateful, rabid, spitting pond scum of humanity and before any Alt Right (read: Neo-Nazi) trolls start accusing me of intolerance, I remind you that you cannot be intolerant of intolerance. That makes no sense. Not that anyone has ever accused Neo-Nazis of logical thinking.

Here's the thing. Every time I'm exposed to Neo-Nazis, either in films or TV or on the news, there's always a thuggish gang of bald white supremacists. You notice this? And inevitably they're covered in tattoos of swastikas, Celtic crosses, runes and Thor's hammer. Why? Why! Why must they use the sacred symbols of my culture and heritage to announce to everyone their horrifying bigotry? Was Thor strong? Yes. Clever? Not really. An advocate of racial purity? Hell fucking no! I'm sure the Irish aren't excited about the Celtic crosses either-any more than Indians have enjoyed seeing their sacred symbol for prosperity used as a logo for modern genocidal movements.

Vikings, our Nordic ancestors who worked as seafaring tradesmen during the late 8 th to the late 11 th centuries, are traditionally associated with runic symbols.

"Is there not a single racist graphic designer among them that could be tasked with this?"

The Vikings traveled up and down Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, working with and for people of many backgrounds and ethnicities. While generally portrayed in modern media as drunken savages, the Vikings actually embraced globalisation (it was profitable, after all), adopting and evolving their culture as they were exposed to new ways of life. If the Neo-Nazis are trying to associate themselves with some kind of discriminatory ideal, then the Nordics are really not the right group to latch onto.

Even during WWII, the Norwegians fought a guerrilla war against the invading Nazi forces. Sweden, while officially neutral, was an underground safe harbour for Jewish refugees. Danes, I admit, surrendered pretty quickly (a few hours) but they nurtured a healthy resistance movement and saved almost all the Danish Jews by smuggling them to Sweden at great risk. Icelanders were terrible anti-Semites in the first half of the century. I don't think there's any point hiding from that. They forced assimilation, demanding Jewish Icelanders take "Icelandic-sounding" names. But suffice to say that Vikings weren't waging a race war, and neither are modern Icelanders, so why can't Neo-Nazis just make up their own symbol and leave us, the Irish and Indians the hell out of it? Is there not a single racist graphic designer that could be tasked with this brief?

"Vikings weren't waging a race war and neither are modern Icelanders."

There are real problems in this world, I know that. You may wonder why I even bother to complain about this. But symbols matter, images matter, narrative matters-and having Norse mythology and our old alphabet used as a branding tool by literally the worst incarnations of humankind is depressing. Culture is fluid and borderless, I know. I'm not feeling sorry for myself here. Icelanders fortunately do not need to contend with the constant cultural fetishization and capitalistic exploitation that most minority cultures are forced to endure, that they fight against daily.

But the Neo-Nazis? Nobody deserves to be associated with them.

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Could Neo Nazis Stop Using Our Sacred Cultural Symbols, Please? - The Reykjavik Grapevine

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There are few people easier to despise than Neo-Nazis. They are the actual worst. The hateful, rabid, spitting pond scum of humanity and before any Alt Right (read: Neo-Nazi) trolls start accusing me of intolerance, I remind you that you cannot be intolerant of intolerance. That makes no sense.

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Classicist Receives Death Threats from Alt-Right over Art Historical Essay - artforum.com / news

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Classicist Receives Death Threats from Alt-Right over Art Historical Essay - artforum.com / news

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POSTED June 15, 2017

Sarah E. Bond, a scholar who specializes in Roman history and works as an assistant professor in the classics department at the University of Iowa, has received death threats and is being targeted by the alt-right for publishing an article on polychromy in the ancient world. "They viewed the piece as 'liberal professor says that all white statues are racist,'" Bond told Lauren Cavalli of artforum.com. "And that is clearly not what the piece is about."

Titled " Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color," the piece discusses race and whiteness as social constructs. According to Bond, the Greeks and Romans of antiquity did not classify people as "white," and many of the classical marble sculptures, sarcophagi, and stelae from the Mediterranean were originally painted-frequently in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown. As the pigments deteriorated over time, art historians, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann-an eighteenth-century scholar considered by many to be the father of the art historical discipline-perpetuated the idea that the white marble statues of ancient peoples represent an ideal beauty, a notion that still fuels white supremacists today.

Bond argues that we need to start seeing the ancient world in color. If Identity Europa, a nationalist and fascist group that uses images of classical statuary to advance their agenda, knew that the statues they are associating their brand with were most likely painted to represent a variety of skin tones, then its members might stop disseminating flawed art historical ideas. She also says that acknowledging the multiracial citizenry of the Greek and Roman empires could lead to greater diversity in the field of classics.

August 1, 2017

Harold M. Williams, the founding president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, one of the world's largest cultural and philanthropic institutions, died on July 30. Under his leadership, the trust became a multidimensional organization that focused on the study and presentation of visual art through the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Research Institute. Williams served the foundation from 1981 to 1998. He retired in 1997, but maintained an office at the Getty Center for the remainder of his life, attending meetings and events. In 2013, he and his wife, Nancy-the director of program planning and analysis for the Getty-were the first to receive J. Paul Getty Medals from the organization's trustees.

"Harold envisioned and then built the Getty Center as a museum, library, laboratories, and public spaces for the greater appreciation, understanding, and conservation of the world's artistic legacy. We are all deeply in his debt," said James Cuno, the Getty's current CEO and president.

A memorial service for Williams is planned for the fall.

August 1, 2017

Bill Sherman, the director of research and collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has now been appointed the director of the Warburg Institute at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, writes Gareth Harris of the Art Newspaper. The institute developed out of German art historian Aby Warburg's private library. Warburg's massive collection of publications on art history, history, and science-60,000 items strong-was shipped to London in 1933 to protect it from the Nazis.

"My vision for the Warburg is to consolidate its reputation for innovative research and teaching (in its heyday it was the place to be trained) and recover its founding role as a haven for displaced scholars and endangered knowledge. At the same time, it badly needs some profile-raising and has limitless potential for engagement with new audiences and new partners. It sits, after all, in what may be the world's greatest concentration of books and data, and we ought to be joining forces to address the role of libraries in preserving and shaping our access to knowledge," said Sherman.

August 1, 2017

Musa Kart, a Turkish cartoonist who worked for the country's oldest newspaper, Cumhuriyet (Republic)-a publication critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was nearly ousted by a bloody coup d'état last year-was arrested in November 2016, along with a number of the paper's journalists, for their alleged involvement with the upheaval. If Kart is found guilty, he could face nearly thirty years in jail, writes Jude Terror of Bleeding Cool.

The artist's trial began yesterday. His opening statement, provided by the Cartoonists Rights Network International, an organization that has been monitoring Kart's situation since his arrest, can be read in full below.

August 1, 2017

A sixty-seven-year-old woman was arrested in Mallorca last week for stealing a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Untitled, 1982, from a collector who lives in the town of Alcúdia, reports Victor Forés Palma of the paper Diario de Mallorca. The woman, who worked for the owner of the Basquiat, was going to hold the work ransom for about $35,000-an amount the woman claims the collector owes her. The collector picked the work up from the police station, packed away in its original crate and undamaged. Apparently, the work was acquired directly from the artist's father, and has never appeared on the market.

Some art experts, however, are claiming that the piece is a forgery. Miquel Font, an art collector, believes it's a fake because the piece is overrun with the artist's motifs: "Basquiat used words in his painting, but there are too many here, he didn't use that many," he said. The dealer Frederic Pinya, director of Galeria Pelaires, said the work should be properly authenticated. But the authentication committee for the Basquiat estate dissolved in 2012, and the estate has yet to comment on the situation.

August 1, 2017

Catherine Hickley of the Art Newspaper writes that a work by Japanese artist Koki Tanaka, Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown, as part of the exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, was damaged by thieves when they broke into a local university building to steal tech equipment that was a part of the piece. This year's exhibition, held every ten years, has been plagued by a number of incidents: A figure from Nicole Eisenman's Sketch for a Fountain sculpture was beheaded, and parts of Ei Arakawa's Harsh Citation, Harsh Pastoral, Harsh Münster, situated in a meadow in front of Haus Kump, were vandalized and stolen.

"We have to assume that art in a public space is at risk," a spokeswoman from Skulptur Projekt Münster said. "We don't have a night guard because that would go against the concept. We have to live with it. Similar things happened in the last Skulptur Projektes."

Exhibition administrators are doing what they can to restore Tanaka's piece quickly. The incident is being investigated as a typical burglary.

August 1, 2017

In an issue of the Journal of Art Crime in 2014, a forensic archaeologist, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, who had been tracking stolen antiquities for more than a decade, published an article about a Greco-Roman terracotta vase from 360 BCE in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection that he surmised was looted (the piece was purchased legally by the museum from a Sotheby's auction in 1989 for $90,000). The work-a bell krater by the Greek artist Python, considered to be one of the best vase painters of his time-was seized this year on July 24 and now rests in the evidence room of the New York district attorney's office, writes Tom Mashberg of the New York Times. It appears the vase was indeed pilfered by tomb raiders sometime during the 1970s, and will likely be returned to Italy. Tsirogiannis based his conclusions on inventory Polaroids that belonged to Giacomo Medici, an art dealer who was arrested twenty years ago, then convicted in 2004, of conspiracy to traffic in antiquities (Tsirogiannis had access to the photos via the Greek and Italian governments). In 2008, another ancient vessel, the Euphronios Krater, was taken from the Met because it had been lifted from an ancient Italian burial ground. Police and Met officials believe that both vessels went through Medici's hands.

Tsirogiannis claims the Met never responded when he reached out to the institution about the Python krater. Frustrated, he sent his evidence to Matthew Bogdanos, an art crime specialist, last spring. "When I sent American police the information, they immediately told me that this was 'a great case.' It was abundantly clear that this rare object had been stolen," said Tsirogiannis. The Met says it never ignored the doctor's warnings about the vase-museum officials were concerned to see Medici's name associated with the work, so a message was informally sent to Italian law enforcement, but a response was never received. So then the museum got in touch with the Italian Culture Ministry to resolve the matter. According to the Met, it was waiting to hear from the ministry before Manhattan prosecutors contacted the museum about the vessel.

Medici, who is now seventy-nine years old, says he has no recollection of ever encountering the Python krater. He was let out of house arrest in 2016 after serving four years of an eight-year sentence that was reduced for good behavior, along with a two-year amnesty provision given to all Italian prisoners. "I am a free man. I went on trial, it lasted years, I was convicted for some of the objects" Italian investigators believed were ransacked, "and now I have nothing more to do with the justice system. The story is finished," he said.

July 31, 2017

Henri Neuendorf of Artnet reports that Birkenstock CEO Oliver Reichert has lost the lawsuit he brought against the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad over an image featuring his six-year-old daughter, which the artist appropriated for one of her works. Last Thursday, a Hamburg court lifted an injunction forbidding the museum from showing the piece. The exhibition that included the artwork in question has ended, but the ruling means that Ekblad and the institution may show the work in the future.

In March, the Reichert family obtained a court order forcing the museum to take down the artwork that incorporated the image of the girl, which the artist sourced from an ad for the German sandal manufacturer. Ekblad says she used the picture because it reminded her of how she looked as a child. The girl's parents said they feared that they would lose control over their daughter's image rights. After the injunction was filed, the Kunsthaus Hamburg was forced to close for two days while the artist replaced the image of Reichert's daughter with a childhood representation of herself.

In the ruling, the judge explained that the Reicherts' concerns over their daughter's privacy and personal rights were unfounded, as they had "been willing to present [their daughter] to a very large audience" already via her inclusion in two Birkenstock ads. In a separate copyright lawsuit brought against Ekblad by the photographer who took the original image, Anders Overgaard, the Hamburg higher regional court ruled on July 4 that the artist's use of the ad doesn't infringe his copyrights or moral rights and is permissible under the constitutional right of artistic freedom. The executive director of the Kunsthaus Hamburg told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the rulings are "a positive signal for artistic freedom."

July 31, 2017

Sopan Deb reports in the New York Times that the playwright and actor Sam Shepard at his home in Kentucky at the age of seventy-three. A spokesman for his family said the cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. He is best known for writing plays such as Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child-which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979 and was part of his "Family Trilogy"-and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Shepard was also was nominated for two Pulitzers with True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), which both received Broadway productions. He received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for his plays in 2009.

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in 1943 in Illinois, he began acting and writing poetry as well as working as a stable hand at a ranch in Chino when he was a teenager. After graduating from Duarte High School in Los Angeles County in 1961, he briefly studied agriculture at nearby Mt. San Antonio College but soon dropped out to join a touring repertory group called the Bishop's Company. He adopted the professional name "Sam Shepard" after he moved to New York and became involved in the Off-Off-Broadway theater scene. Winning six Obie Awards between 1966 and 1978, Shepard wrote the 1971 play Cowboy Mouth-a collaboration with his then-lover Patti Smith-in 1971, which was staged at the American Place Theater in April of that year. In 1975, he was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater, where he created many of his most notable works, including his "Family Trilogy." Shepard also toured with Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour that same year, serving as the ostensible screenwriter of Dylan's foray into film Renaldo and Clara (1978), though much of the film was improvised. His book Rolling Thunder Logbook, a diary of the tour, was published by Penguin Books in 1978. A decade later, Dylan and Shepard cowrote the song "Brownsville Girl," which was included on the album Knocked Out Loaded (1986).

Shepard was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role in Philip Kaufman's 1983 film The Right Stuff, which in 2013 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. His most recent work as an actor was in the Netflix show Bloodline (2015-). Shepard's papers are archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

July 31, 2017

Brett Sokol reports in the New York Times that Dennis Scholl, previously vice president for arts at the Knight Foundation in Miami, will become the president and chief executive of the nonprofit ArtCenter/South Florida this September. While at the foundation, Scholl expanded its philanthropy into the national arts arena, overseeing nearly $200 million in grants during his tenure from 2009 to 2015.

Kim Kovel, ArtCenter's board chair, called the hiring of Scholl, one of Miami's best known contemporary art collectors, a "gamechanger." Scholl has served on the boards of several museums, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where he donated nearly 300 works in 2013 and remains a trustee.

The ArtCenter's 2014 sale of one of its landmark buildings for $88 million, which was purchased for $684,000 in 1988, left the institution with an endowment of $94 million, the largest of any visual arts organization in South Florida. Kovel also credits the institution's prudent investing as well as a booming stock market for its strong financial footing, which will allow it to expand its program.

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Classicist Receives Death Threats from Alt-Right over Art Historical Essay

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POSTED June 15, 2017 Sarah E. Bond, a scholar who specializes in Roman history and works as an assistant professor in the classics department at the University of Iowa, has received death threats and is being targeted by the alt-right for publishing an article on polychromy in the ancient world.

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Matthew Gabriele on Twitter: "No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46"

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Matthew Gabriele on Twitter: "No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46"

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46

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isn't this just called feudalism https://t.co/tGddVdkpZY

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No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46
— Matt Gabriele (@prof_gabriele) July 9, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
isn't this just called feudalism https://t.co/tGddVdkpZY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
No, it's not. It's 19th century capitalism. The Middle Ages isn't your repository of horrors. Modernity did bad stuff too. #twitterstorians https://t.co/eRUo7ZVR46

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
isn't this just called feudalism https://t.co/tGddVdkpZY

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Medievalists, Recoiling From White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Medievalists, Recoiling From White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei arrived on time for the 9 a.m. keynote lecture at the annual International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, in England. Titled "The Mediterranean Other and the Other Mediterranean: Perspective of Alterity in the Middle Ages," the lecture kicked off one of the largest annual medieval conferences in the world, which this month featured the theme of "otherness."

The room wasn't crowded; most attendees - more than 2,400 of them, from 56 countries - were still arriving or recovering from jet lag, so Mr. van Gerven Oei took a seat near the front row. But as soon as the introductions began, he noticed something odd: All of the speakers discussing "otherness" were white, European men.

"Well, that's awkward," he recalls thinking. "I wonder whether anyone is going to say something about this."

But in introducing the keynote speech, the moderator made a joke about otherness: If audience members thought he was just another old, white man, they should just wait until after his holiday at the beach.

"Whether or not he intended it as a joke, it obviously ridicules the entire importance of race in this debate, as if it was merely a matter of lying in the sun," Mr. van Gerven Oei says. "I was thinking I could do two things: Either I can just get up and leave, and it will be very awkward, or I can tweet about this."

He chose the latter, tweeting about the joke's tone-deafness from the account of the publishing company that he works for. And he wouldn't be the only scholar to tweet about the conference that week: In the following days, as a roundtable discussion on medieval otherness featured only white panelists, and a discussion on "decolonizing" medieval studies faced criticism, nonwhite medievalists took to social media to criticize the conference's lack of diversity.

"The IMC simply chose to ignore the expertise of people of color and 'others' whose knowledge on issues of race and otherness has informed decades of scholarship," Jonathan Hsy, an associate professor of English at George Washington University, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. "If the thread organizers had listened to critiques voiced about the thread's problematic framing and exclusions at any point during the planning process or indeed during the conference itself, this entire conversation could have been inclusive and innovative."

The criticisms of the conference's diversity stem from problems in medieval studies for decades - that it is still too Eurocentric, male-dominated, and resistant to change. But as the medieval era has become increasingly prevalent in rhetoric used by white supremacists to advocate for a return to racial, ethnic, and religious purity, many nonwhite medievalists are feeling a new urgency to combat the stereotypes that accompany the field.

Alt-right online forums have co-opted themes from the Middle Ages and created memes that feature a battle cry from the Crusades, " Deus vult," or "God wills it," to advocate for violence against nonwhite people. A man charged with killing two men in Portland, Ore., in May posted on his Facebook page "Hail Vinland!!! Hail Victory!!!," referring to the 11th-century Norse colonization of North America.

"It should be a really, really important time for the field to reflect on why are these things going on and what can we do to combat that," says Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of English at Vassar. "The worry I would have is that, is the field going to be forever linked to white supremacy?"

The alt-right's "fantasy" of the medieval past couldn't be further from the truth, says Suzanne Akbari, director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies. "The medieval past is actually highly integrated, highly diverse, with a tremendous amount of cultural interchange. Reconstructing those histories of exchange, both cultural and economic, is a very vital area of our field."

Medievalists from underrepresented groups say they see this as a watershed moment for them to speak up and change the status quo.

"We have to talk about this within our community, and by extension, we need to adjust our theoretical frameworks," Mr. van Gerven Oei says. "It is all very painful, but it is the real world knocking at our door."

'A Safe Place to Be Elitist'

Although conversations about increasing the diversity and inclusivity of scholarship are hardly unique to medieval studies, scholars in the field say that it has been slow to change, and that it still struggles to confront xenophobia, racism, sexism, and ableism within its scholarly community.

The medievalist Eileen A. Joy believes the problems stem from a combination of factors: The subject matter itself can be Eurocentric, the institutions that have served as the centers of medieval scholarship are places where avant-garde research is often not welcome, and some scholars may be attracted to medievalism because of its focus on whiteness and Christianity.

"The field has been rather proud of its resistance to critical theory, which then just attracts even more people to the field who themselves want to be resistant to theory and see medieval studies as a safe place - a safe place to be elitist, a safe place to be white, a safe place to be Christian, Eurocentric, misogynist, etc.," Ms. Joy says.

A growing number of nonwhite medievalists are entering the field, however, and with them a mounting effort to create more conferences, journals, books, and scholarly groups for minority medievalists or for those who focus on nontraditional research.

"It just takes a long time and a lot of emotional labor to push back against those tropes and those stereotypes. Sometimes, I think, for the people who are really engaged in that emotional labor, it really feels like you're just howling into the wind."

It was this approach that attracted Ms. Joy, who was becoming frustrated with the discipline's homogeneity. She left her job as an associate professor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville to help start an independent, open-access publishing house, Punctum Books, and a scholarly working group dedicated to advancing nontraditional scholarship.

"I realized the only way the field will change or be more welcoming or more inclusive is if some of us actually devote all of our time and energy to creating new spaces, new presses, new journals, new conferences where this kind of work can be developed," Ms. Joy says.

But for the most part, scholars who don't fit the mold of the stereotypical medievalist - "a cis, heterosexual white guy in tweed, possibly with a little gray hair, maybe with a beard," Ms. Kim says - face obstacles to changing the field from within.

"It just takes a long time and a lot of emotional labor to push back against those tropes and those stereotypes," says Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. "Sometimes, I think, for the people who are really engaged in that emotional labor, it really feels like you're just howling into the wind, and then no one is listening."

'A Lot of Work to Do'

Still, medievalists say the fact that the International Medieval Congress chose the theme of "otherness" this year is a step toward encouraging wider scholarship. The debate has also encouraged scholars to start rethinking how they view diversity - both in academic work and among academics - in medieval studies.

Such was the case for Rachel Stone, a visiting research fellow at King's College London and a librarian at the University of Bedfordshire. She was one of the panelists in the roundtable discussion about medieval concepts of otherness. A blog post she published in which she tried to respond to criticism of the panel was criticized by some nonwhite medievalists as dismissive of their concerns.

Since then, Ms. Stone says, responses to her post have helped her "think more carefully and explicitly about [her] own assumptions and prejudices" and have given her a different perspective when it comes to diversity and inclusion in medieval studies.

Axel E.W. Müller, director of the International Medieval Congress, says that as organizers continue to receive feedback from the latest conference - which itself has grown increasingly more international - it will work to make improvements for future conferences.

Apart from meetings, though, medievalists say they must also encourage younger, underrepresented scholars with new perspectives to become interested in the discipline. They must produce interesting, inclusive scholarship that demonstrates the field's relevance to the modern world, says Mr. van Gerven Oei, who studies the Old Nubian language.

"I feel every day how it is relevant for a rather large group of people who are oppressed, who see in the research in the medieval Sudan a way of retrieving part of their identity and part of their cultural heritage," he says, "and I feel immensely honored to be part of their struggle and be part of the way in which they recover their past."

It comes down to an issue of critical mass, he says. "There are so many regions that are just begging for at least one scholar to once, in the eternity of humanity, to look at it. There's a lot of work to do."

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Medievalists, Recoiling From White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field

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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei arrived on time for the 9 a.m. keynote lecture at the annual International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, in England. Titled "The Mediterranean Other and the Other Mediterranean: Perspective of Alterity in the Middle Ages," the lecture kicked off one of the largest annual medieval conferences in the world, which this month featured the theme of "otherness."

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Islamic State and the appropriation of the Crusades – a medieval historian's take

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Islamic State and the appropriation of the Crusades – a medieval historian's take

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A Crusader Castle decoration stone at the Arabic Fortress Citadel in Kerak, Jordan, built in 1142. Bill Perry/Shutterstock

So-called Islamic State (IS) continues to use its online propaganda magazine to appropriate the Crusades of the central middle ages. By blurring time periods and disparate historical phenomena, IS presents its readers with a narrative of continuous Western "crusader" aggression as a rallying cry for support and a justification for its actions. This "crusader" narrative has little basis in historical fact - but it does make for powerful propaganda.

It is hardly the first group to adopt and develop ideas on the many Latin Christian expeditions to the Middle East between the end of the 11th and 13th centuries. But the relentless frequency and nature of the group's appropriation of the crusades, found among the pages of its Rumiyah and before that Dabiq magazines, are unprecedented, surprising and require a great deal of unpacking to understand its significance.

The obvious place to see this phenomenon is in the English language issue of Dabiq (4), entitled "The Failed Crusade". The issue used a dramatic photoshopped image of IS's black flag flying in front of St Peter's basilica in the Vatican City on its front cover.

Author provided (No reuse)

Agents of 'divine will'

The issue contains a lengthy feature on the 7th-century prophecy on the Islamic conquest of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and Rome (Rumiyah) following the destruction of the "Roman Crusaders" at Dabiq in northern Syria.

The prophecy is alluded to on the front or first page of every edition of the magazines and - along with many other of the group's Salafi-jihadist readings of Qur'anic verses - is referenced many times thereafter. This element of the IS message is consistent and unmistakable: the group is the prophesised agent of divine will. IS will destroy the "crusaders" at Dabiq before moving on to conquer Constantinople and Rome and bring forth the end of time.

The group confers the most recent authority on its readings of Islamic scripture through the proclamations of its senior leaders. The discussion on the prophecy in this particular feature concludes with the supposed words of Taha Subhi Falaha - also known as Abu Muhammad al-Adnani al-Shami - an IS spokesman and its second-most senior leader who was killed by a US airstrike in August 2016. He is quoted as saying:

And so we promise you (crusaders) by Allah's permission that this campaign will be your final campaign. It will be broken and defeated, just as all your previous campaigns were broken and defeated.

Romans and other 'crusaders'

The 7th-century "Romans" are obviously not the only "crusaders" to be found in the pages of these magazines. There are in fact many others. The Latin Christian military leaders of expeditions to the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th and 13th centuries, the Europeans involved with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the World War I, and those who helped to create the state of Israel in 1948, for example, are all termed crusaders.

The recent growth of violent Islamism in the region and elsewhere in the world is widely understood as a response to Western forms of modern imperialism. But IS has also proclaimed that, "the enmity of the kafir (unbeliever) is never based in an economic or political motive. It is only a matter of religion". One issue even maintains that "the old colonialism was but a front for the crusaders, just as it is today a front for the Jews and Christians. Indeed, the 'Caesar of Rome' Bush has declared multiple times that, 'It is a Crusade!' So why do people lie and deny this?"

A 'crusader' narrative

Given the range of people termed crusaders in the magazines, who are these particular "crusaders"? Are they 7th-century Romans/Byzantines, Latin Christians of the central middle ages, Europeans of the colonial era and those somehow involved in the creation of the state of Israel, or any person of any nation involved directly or indirectly in fighting IS? What is the nature of this supposed crusade?

The blurring of such unrelated phenomena is, of course, intentional. It presents its readers with an abridged, vague and yet apparently familiar narrative of "crusader" (read Western imperialist and anti-Islamic) aggression in the region since the 7th-century. Indeed, IS maintain that the struggle against the modern "crusaders" has not stopped since "Allah's messenger and his noble companions commenced it". The group proclaims merely to represent Islam "today in these current rounds of ... war" against its various enemies - "at the head of which are the crusader nations of the West". The notion that a defensive jihad against the "crusader" aggressor has been fought since the 7th-century is said to oblige IS supporters to make "preparations for the current battle against the crusader" enemies while being assured that the group will go on to conquer Istanbul and Rome.

AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed

This narrative of continuous "crusader" aggression in the region has little basis in historical fact but remains central to the group's message and deserves to be better understood. In the UK alone, IS and its supporters recently called for and celebrated the killing of "crusaders" and "Crusading Brits" twice in as many weeks. The group recognises that people respond to the notion of Western powers engaging again in the "crusades". And with its caliphate now crumbling at the hands of its enemies, the group will mutate and its appropriation of the crusades will only increase as it seeks support for its actions in the UK and elsewhere.

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Islamic State and the appropriation of the Crusades - a medieval historian's take

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So-called Islamic State (IS) continues to use its online propaganda magazine to appropriate the Crusades of the central middle ages. By blurring time periods and disparate historical phenomena, IS presents its readers with a narrative of continuous Western "crusader" aggression as a rallying cry for support and a justification for its actions.

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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Modern Knights Templar Prepare for Race War in Europe

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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Modern Knights Templar Prepare for Race War in Europe

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There's an ongoing debate about the extent to which medieval scholars need to be concerned about explicitly fighting racism as medieval scholars. I haven't quite figured out how to write about the issues coherently. But the stakes, to me, are clear.

Meet the Knights Templar International. Their FAQ wants you to know that they aren't racists.

But there's a coming civil war, says the "Hidden Templar" in the black hoodie.

Other stories include Islamic attacks on Children, the need to defend Syria's Christians. Other details:

Western civilisation is entering a period of existential crisis. A convergence of external and internal catastrophes is leading inexorably to a time when the survival of Christendom will only be secured by dedicated militancy in the teeth of demonic evil.

Demonic evil.

Accordingly, while we are not a 'secret' organisation, our collective leadership is discrete and so safeguarded as far as is possible from the hostile attention of the atheist, globalist and Islamist enemies of our sacred Cause.

Globalists means "Jews."

Other pages talk about the threat to white families in Europe.

I learned about them because I was reading the Twitter of a Holocaust denier, and came across this tweet talking about efforts from Italian fascists and others to arm militias against refugees (he's working to make sure boats don't save refugees off Sicily).

Paul Golding of Britain First & Nick Griffin of BNP (formerly against each other) have now united with Knights Templar International. pic.twitter.com/eH16UbvVZ6

- PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) November 26, 2016

At any rate, we have a lot of work to do as medievalists. We have to go into our classrooms knowing this discourse is out there, and at least some people signing up will be partaking of it.

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Modern Knights Templar Prepare for Race War in Europe

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There's an ongoing debate about the extent to which medieval scholars need to be concerned about explicitly fighting racism as medieval scholars. I haven't quite figured out how to write about the issues coherently. But the stakes, to me, are clear. Meet the Knights Templar International.

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Eric Weiskott on Twitter: "Heads up #medievaltwitter: Their symbol is the runic letter H ("hail"). More white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. https://t.co/ObzjRMQsqZ"

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Eric Weiskott on Twitter: "Heads up #medievaltwitter: Their symbol is the runic letter H ("hail"). More white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. https://t.co/ObzjRMQsqZ"

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"Celebrity" tweets about historical inaccuracy, turns out he was the one being historically inaccurate - Album on Imgur

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"Celebrity" tweets about historical inaccuracy, turns out he was the one being historically inaccurate - Album on Imgur

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"Celebrity" tweets about historical inaccuracy, turns out he was the one being historically inaccurate

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Post with 182 votes and 117134 views. Shared by crazymar1000. "Celebrity" tweets about historical inaccuracy, turns out he was the one being historically inaccurate

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TPM Special Series: Race, Racism and the Middle Ages | The Public Medievalist

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TPM Special Series: Race, Racism and the Middle Ages | The Public Medievalist

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In February, 2017, The Public Medievalist inaugurated a new special series of essays on one of the thorniest issues surrounding the Middle Ages today: Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages. Issues of race lie at the heart of our understanding of the medieval world; racists-even within the ranks of the academic medievalist community-have, for far too long, warped our understanding of the past. And considering the recent uptick of overt prejudice, hate crimes, and politically sanctioned racism in the US and Europe, this series seems particularly timely and necessary.

The series is currently ongoing.

The goal of this series is the same as the overarching goal of The Public Medievalist: present cutting-edge scholarship that explores these issues with depth, nuance, and complexity, and do it in as accessible a manner as possible. We hope that you find these essays thought-provoking, enjoyable, and useful.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

Introducing a new Public Medievalist series: taking on the white-supremacist ideas of the medieval past, and exploring the stories of people of color in the Middle Ages.

by Dr. Dark Age

White supremacists promote a bizarre theory: that the Enlightenment was the real "Dark Ages".

by Andrew B. R. Elliott

Right wing nationalists since Hitler have had a love affair with the Middle Ages. Why is their twisted version of the past on the rise again?

by James M. Harland

Hitler had a crack archaeology unit. Racist nationalists have used medieval archaeology to prop up their worldview-but modern scholars are knocking out their supports.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

Spoiler Alert: no. Everything you've been taught about "race" is is completely made up. Here's how we know...

by Dr. Dark Age

How "civilizational conservatives" want Trump and Putin to start a new Crusade.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

Were medieval people racist? You might think the answer is a simple "yes!", but it's far more complicated than that...

by Marianne O'Doherty

A whites-only view of the Middle Ages needs a Europe-only Middle Ages to exist. Let's pull that apart, shall we?

by Paul B. Sturtevant

The greatest map possibly ever created was made by an Arab Muslim refugee working for a French-Norse king of Sicily on a giant silver disc in the twelfth century. It is one of the multicultural wonders of the world.

by Clare Vernon

When Christians and Muslims often lived side-by-side, their cultures and religions sometimes blended into one another, even in their houses of worship.

by Luca Asmonti

Ibn Hamdis was one of the great poets of the Mediterranean: a Arab-Sicilian whose haunting, enchanting verses show the interconnectedness of the human experience.

by Helen Young

We have explored the vile effects of the "whites-only" Middle Ages, but how did the Middle Ages get linked with racism?

by Dr. Dark Age

Monsters with no heads, grey aliens, and morphing babies can tell us a lot about medieval racism.

by Eric Weiskott

What does "British" mean? Who gets to call themselves "British"? This conflict has roots leading back to King Arthur, Merlin, and some of the earliest inhabitants of this sceptered isle.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

During the Middle Ages, Africa wasn't in a "dark age"; it was linked to an emerging global world. Special interview with African Anthropologist Chapurukha Kusimba, part I.

by Richard Utz

In Atlanta, you can get married in a beautiful, fairytale castle: Rhodes Hall. But the backdrop of all those wedding photos holds a complex, racist history.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

Racist colonialists needed African civilizations not to have been built by Africans to justify their plunder of the continent. Continuing our special interview with Professor Chapurukha Kusimba.

by Adam Simmons

No Africans in medieval Europe? Tell that to the King of Nubia, who at the beginning of the 13th century took the most epic pilgrimage possible.

by Sihong Lin

How common was it for Africans to live in medieval Europe? Apparently, very!

by Michael Barbezat

The "Pizzagate" conspiracy wasn't a flash in the pan. It is part of a tradition of "nocturnal ritual fantasies" that seek to create a fundamentally persecuting society, a tradition that had origins in the medieval persecutions of heretics, Jews and Templars.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

How can we learn more about the long, long history of Africa? And what might it have to teach us? The final part of our interview with Professor Chapurukha Kusimba.

by Paul B. Sturtevant

Introducing a topical thread in our series on all aspects of medieval anti-Jewish prejudice and violence.

by Dr. Dark Age

Anti-Jewish hate didn't begin with the Nazis, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or even the Middle Ages. Its roots are nearly 2000 years old.

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TPM Special Series: Race, Racism and the Middle Ages

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n February, 2017, The Public Medievalist inaugurated a new special series of essays on one of the thorniest issues surrounding the Middle Ages today: Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages. Issues of race lie at the heart of our understanding of the medieval world; racists-even within the ranks of the academic medievalist community-have, for far too long, warped [...]

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The Massachusetts Medievalist Visits City Life: The Quest for Progressive Medievalist Imagery – The Massachusetts Medievalist

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The Massachusetts Medievalist Visits City Life: The Quest for Progressive Medievalist Imagery – The Massachusetts Medievalist

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This past Tuesday I had the good fortune to attend the weekly meeting of City Life/Vida Urbana , a Boston community organization that advocates for residents on a variety of issues, primarily around housing. Check out this video by Twice Thou that raps City Life's mission and history.

There are a lot of good reasons to be interested in CL/VU's activities, but as the Massachusetts Medievalist I wanted to see how they use a sword and shield in the part of their meeting where they welcome new people into their organization. The media has been full recently of medievalist imagery appropriated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists; for a contextual overview, see this part of The Public Medievalist's great series on "Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages."

I've been searching for a contradictory kind of imagery, an appropriation of the medieval for contemporary progressive causes, perhaps in ways analogous to the early-twentieth-century U.S. suffrage movement's use of Joan of Arc imagery in their parades (see my 22 May 2017 entry for details on that quest). A Lesley colleague's involvement with CL/VU tipped me off to their sword and shield.

CL/VU uses a theater-prop plastic sword and a large homemade shield at all of their meetings and many of their protests and rallies around the city. Rather than ancestral heraldry, the shield proclaims that "NO ONE LEAVES" around a simple image of a house.

The sword represents the fight that CL/VU brings to banks and courts and corporations while the shield represents the legal aid they provide to protect their communities from foreclosure and eviction (for more detail, see this news item written at the height of the mortgage crises).

At each weekly meeting, people new to CL/VU come to the front of the room for a ritual that echoes a medieval knighthood ceremony. Tenants and owners in danger of eviction or foreclosure stand close together and all grasp the hilt of the sword. The meeting leader holds the shield; last Tuesday, Twice Thou, whose non-rap name is Antonio Ennis, took this role. He asked them, "Are you willing to fight for your home?" After an initial, somewhat hesitant response, he turned slowly in a circle, showing the shield to all sides of the room. Then he yelled, "Are you willing to fight for your home?" Those gathered in the front of room shouted, "Yes!" and he and all the seated attendants yelled back, "Then we'll fight with you!" It was exhilarating.

The meeting continued with updates on CL/VU rallies and activities in its networks. A nascent tenants' association held a separate meeting in the hallway. A staff member handed out slices of pizza to late arrivals. Members met individually in a side room with pro bono attorneys. I hope they get the help they need. My much less necessary quest has been fulfilled - I found a multicultural, multiracial group of working-class Americans consistently using medievalist imagery for their own politically progressive practice, creating solidarity and purpose with the symbolic meanings of sword and shield.

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The Massachusetts Medievalist Visits City Life: The Quest for Progressive Medievalist Imagery

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This past Tuesday I had the good fortune to attend the weekly meeting of City Life/Vida Urbana , a Boston community organization that advocates for residents on a variety of issues, primarily around housing. Check out this video by Twice Thou that raps City Life's mission and history.

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Islamophobes want to recreate the Crusades. But they don’t understand them at all. - The Washington Post

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Islamophobes want to recreate the Crusades. But they don’t understand them at all. - The Washington Post

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Recent terrorist attacks in London have sparked a new wave of "clash of civilizations" rhetoric - that brand of political language that characterizes events like those in London as the West vs. the East, Christianity vs. Islam. To defeat the terrorists, this logic holds, we must " obliterate these savages from the face of the earth." In the wake of the attacks in London, some openly wished for an end to Islam altogether, posting under the #NoMoreRamadans hashtag.

Frequently these kinds of statements refer back - longingly - to the Crusades. Shortly after news of the attack in London spread, a writer at the white nationalist website Breitbart tweeted that " the crusades need to come back." He quickly deleted the tweet, but a TownHall columnist shared that he, too, thought that " Christians were the unequivocal good guys in the Crusades" and that he "supported" the Crusades. Then, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) wrote on Facebook that "all of Christendom ... is at war with Islamic horror" and that the only solution is to "kill them all." This wasn't the first time. Last year, during his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama mentioned the fact that all religious groups have perpetrated violent acts throughout history, citing the Crusades as evidence. That remark sparked a vigorous response from the right, focusing primarily around a defense of the medieval Crusades. Before that, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a group of schoolchildren that "the left" only criticizes the Crusades because "they hate Christendom." Santorum, too, held that the Crusades were purely a defensive war against Islamic aggression. And there's plenty more where that came from.

Exploiting a simplified, misleading story of the Crusades (namely, that they were primarily a Western, Christian, defensive response to Middle Eastern incursion on Christian lands) isn't a strictly contemporary phenomenon. In fact, it came into fashion during the age of colonialism and was reborn again in the early 20th century. In both of those cases - and in our own current climate - the imaginary parallel between the Crusades and our own conflicts does much more to advance our own political causes than to accurately represent the Crusades.

As scholars of the Crusades have shown for several generations now, there was no necessary evolutionary movement toward the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century was long forgotten by that time, and Latin Europe felt very little (if any) pressure from the highly divided Seljuk Turks, who were quite busy fighting one another as well as the Fatimids in Egypt. Even during their march toward Jerusalem, the crusaders themselves showed absolute willingness to ally with some Muslim leaders against other Muslims (or even fellow Christians). Things only got more complicated once the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established in the 12th century, when the Emperor Frederick II was criticized by contemporaries for his supposed friendliness with Muslims, even after he recovered Jerusalem for the Christians in 1229. In other words, the story is not nearly so simple as Christians vs. Muslims locked in a black-and-white battle for contested lands.

The popular conception of the Crusades comes not from their historical reality, but from two related places: First, from 19th and early 20th century scholars of the Crusades, such as French historian Joseph-Francois Michaud or the German Heinrich von Sybel or the American George Lincoln Burr, who saw their research linked to contemporary nationalistic colonial projects in Africa and the Middle East; and second, from the resurrection of those ideas by 21st century conservatives, such as cold warrior Robert Spencer, Santorum and many surrounding the presidency of George W. Bush.

Indeed, the term "crusade" as it's used these days is anachronistic, more an artifact of our own politics than those of the medievals. The word "crusade" in Latin ( crucesignatus - "one marked by the cross") didn't make its first appearance until about 1200, more than 100 years after the phenomenon supposedly began. In English, the gap is even longer, since the words "crusade" and "crusader" don't really appear until around 1700. Even then, the word's introduction was meant to resolve a contemporary - not historical - problem: To simultaneously describe wars fought during the Middle Ages and to characterize any struggle against "evil" or "error." In other words, to link past and present in the era of discovery and colonial expansion. Modern historians have since put the term to political use over and over again: For example, Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem from the Ottomans in 1917 was linked to Richard the Lionheart's failure in 1189, while René Grousset concluded his history of the crusades by writing: "The Templars only held until 1303 the islet of Ruad, south of Tortosa, from where one day - in 1914 - the 'Franks' would again set foot in Syria."

Although scholarship on the Crusades may have moved on, these colonialist ideas persist. Together with colleagues Susanna Throop and David Perry, we've begun to trace the resurgence of these ideas with the rise (and normalization) of the alt-right. There's a long history of white nationalists and white supremacists using the Middle Ages (badly) to justify their ideas, and the Crusades are no exception. Most recently, the so-called crying templar meme gained popularity in summer 2016 as a xenophobic response to Syrian refugees entering Europe, while at the same time some protesters showed up in full medieval Templar costume to anti-immigrant rallies, and "Deus Vult" (the supposed war cry of the First Crusaders) became a rallying cry for white nationalists in both Europe and the United States.

But all blame can't be laid at the feet of the alt-right. At least since Bush used " crusade" to describe the American response to al-Qaeda, many conservatives have been comfortable with positioning the U.S. as the new Latin medieval Europe imposing order on an unruly Middle East as a "defensive" response to aggression. We saw this in Donald H. Rumsfeld's PowerPoints on Iraq, Erik Prince's Blackwater, and in the response to Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. Even if mistaken nostalgia for the Middle Ages is most prominent among the fringes of the right, it's a feature of the mainstream right as well, and the response to the London attacks suggests it isn't going anywhere soon.

Debating the meaning of the Crusades is debating what it means to be modern: If the conservatives are correct, the world has always been quasi-apocalyptic and won't ever change; if the historians are correct, different epochs have markedly different characters, and we're not doomed to repeat our historical mistakes forever. "Crusade" has always said, will always say, more about how we see the world than about the Middle Ages. It's a modern word imposed on a medieval world, an attempt at a rainbow connection. And a rainbow, after all, dissipates into air when you change your perspective.

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Perspective | Islamophobes want to recreate the Crusades. But they don't understand them at all.

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Recent terrorist attacks in London have sparked a new wave of "clash of civilizations" rhetoric - that brand of political language that characterizes events like those in London as the West vs. the East, Christianity vs. Islam. To defeat the terrorists, this logic holds, we must " obliterate these savages from the face of the earth."

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An ancient Nordic religion is inspiring white supremacist terror | Reveal

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An ancient Nordic religion is inspiring white supremacist terror | Reveal

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They planned to rob a jewelry store and use the money to stockpile guns, ammo and explosives. Then they would charge into churches and synagogues, slaughtering as many people as possible in the name of their religion.

The man in Kansas wanted to kill as many Jewish people as possible. So he drove to two Jewish centers, where he shot and killed three people, all of them Christians. He told the court that sentenced him to death that he had mistaken his victims for Jews.

"I wanted to kill Jews, not people," he said.

Across the country in Spokane, Washington, another man plotted to kill President Barack Obama. Prosecutors say he planned a "final solution," a battle that would ultimately be won by stealing nuclear material for dirty bombs or flying hijacked airplanes into buildings.

These men, and possibly thousands more like them across the United States, share a common religious ideology.

They're white supremacists who have turned to an ancient heathen religion known most commonly as Odinism. In at least six cases since 2001, professed racist Odinists have been convicted of plotting - or pulling off - domestic terrorism attacks, according to a review of terrorism cases by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

And across the Atlantic, the man who carried out the 2011 mass murders at a summer camp in Oslo, Norway, Anders Breivik, has attracted new attention after telling a court he long has identified as an Odinist.

Odinism is a perfect fit for a strain of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who think Christianity, like so many other institutions, has been corrupted by outsiders and weakened by passivity.

Today's racist Odinists say it is the only pure religion for white people, one not "mongrelized" by the Jewish prophet Jesus. They see themselves as warriors, ready to reclaim America for the white race and fight against a white genocide, driven by Jews, that has left the greatest country on Earth in tatters.

"Odinism is undergoing a renaissance," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. "Now is a great time for Odinism because it fits into this historical narrative about European cultural greatness and a connection between whiteness and nationality."

Odinists worship ancient Norse gods such as Thor and Odin. They typically wear pendants of Thor's hammer around their necks and meet for rituals in the woods, where they drink mead from a communal horn, read ancient poetry and occasionally slaughter animals in sacrifice to the gods.

For many white supremacists, Odinism's motifs of revenge and action resonate far more than the values of Christianity, which was once their religion of choice. They believe they are fighting a battle against white genocide, and "love thy neighbor" just seems weak next to a religion that rewards warriors for fighting and dying for their noble cause.

"Turning the other cheek and it's all going to be OK, that isn't the answer a lot of people who are turning to Odinism are looking for," said Daniel Burnside, a white supremacist Odinist from Potter County, Pennsylvania, who is raising his seven children in the religion. "They're looking for the idea of, do you want to be the nail, or do you want to be the hammer?"

Odinism was spread in the U.S. throughout the '70s and '80s by devotees, including Else Christensen, a Danish immigrant who traveled America setting up Odinist groups in prisons. She preached that America will never become strong again until it regains its national and racial pride, and that the only cure for America's "spiritual sickness" is Odinism.

Just as the vast majority of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims or 2.2 billion Christians reject hate, only a tiny sliver of adherents to heathen religions such as Odinism subscribe to a white supremacist worldview. Nonetheless, racist, far-right domestic terrorists have accounted for a significant portion of the terrorist attacks across America in the last few decades, and experts warn that these groups are flourishing in 2017's divided America.

'You don't see an Odinist church - but it's really prevalent'

Downtown Centralia, Illinois, a once-thriving coal mining town, lies all but abandoned. Rain pelts against the windows of shuttered discount stores and soaks a mural of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe on the wall of the long-closed J.D.'s Music Emporium.

In the dimly lit den of a ramshackle, half-painted house in town, Brandon Lashbrook raises the drinking horn toward the large banners stretched across the walls. One bears the logo of the Nazi party, black and red in the gloom. The other is a huge portrait of Adolf Hitler.

"I raise this horn to Wotan, for wisdom," he says, using an alternate Germanic name for the god Odin. "Hailsa."

"Hailsa," repeats the small group of worshippers.

Lashbrook takes a swig from the horn.

He is just one of at least hundreds of Odinists across America who participate in these regular rituals, known as "blots." The 34-year-old primarily uses Facebook to bring together the like-minded at blots like this one at his house in late April.

Lashbrook, who first attended a Ku Klux Klan rally at the age of 8, says Odinism really clicked for him after he came to believe that the Holocaust was a lie. A religion of and for the white race was what he had been desperately searching for for years, he said.

"Races just don't really mix well, especially if whites are the minority among other racial groups - if we're under attack or we're threatened. It just doesn't ever work in our favor," he said.

Lashbrook has watched his town crumble around him. He scrapes together a living selling Odinist pendants and "occult goods" like satanic bibles through a website and on Facebook. And he's heavily involved with the white supremacist political party the National Socialist Movement.

Lashbrook says he has found true meaning and belonging in this ancient Nordic religion. After toying with occultism and satanism, he landed on Odinism, which offers heavenly rewards for action over passivity.

"We have to be prepared to fight. We need to study martial arts, weight train. We need to be prepared and unified, and ready to defend ourselves, and continue to tell society the truth, and help more souls find their way out of hell and back to Midgard," Lashbrook said, using an ancient term for Earth. "That way they'll unite and understand the threat that we face. It will always be honorable to die in battle."

Despite the amount of media coverage they get, terrorist attacks in America are actually pretty rare. New America, a nonpartisan think tank, lists a total of 154 people killed by terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11, an average of about 10 a year.

A 2015 poll of law enforcement officers from across the country found that U.S. agencies " consider anti-government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of political violence that they face."

Any belief system that drives people to consider killing innocent civilians should be high on the minds of law enforcement, said Lowell Smith, a former probation officer who spent 15 years working with white supremacists across America.

Just because that religion isn't mainstream doesn't mean that the next terrorist isn't out there plotting an attack in the name of an obscure god.

"It only takes one of these guys," Smith said. "It only takes one."

'Praise Odin, pass the ammunition'

Frazier Glenn Miller needed a new way to connect with other white men.

He had tried launching white supremacist magazines, but they soon flopped. The local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan he had founded had fallen apart. And he'd been ostracized from the movement for ratting out some fellow white supremacists to get himself an easy prison sentence.

Frustrated and in need of venting, Miller wrote a rambling autobiography called "A White Man Speaks Out." In it, he tested a fresh appeal to the community that had shunned him. He pledged his hatred to a new god: Odin, the ancient Norse god of war and death.

"Odin! Odin! Odin! Was the battle cry of our ancestors; their light eyes ablaze with the glare of the predator," Miller writes in his screed. "And Valhalla does not accept Negroes. There's a sign over the pearly gates there which reads, 'Whites only.' Oh, Glory day!"

Not many people bought or read Miller's book when it was self-published in 1999. But his writings took on new meaning on April 13, 2014.

On that day, Miller packed two shotguns, a rifle, a pistol and a bottle of whisky in a paper bag, with a note saying: "do not drink til mission accomplished." Then he drove to two suburban Kansas Jewish centers, where he shot and killed three people, including a 14-year-old boy.

Just as terrorists who kill in the name of Allah often haven't visited a mosque in years, there's little evidence Miller was a practicing Odinist. He didn't have much contact with anybody for months before his rampage, and at his 11-day trial he ranted about everything from Christianity to Hitler, without zeroing in on Odinism as his inspiration.

"He was all over the place," his defense lawyer said.

But the numerous, overt references to Odinism in Miller's autobiography speak to his attraction to this ancient religion. And Miller's own words, years before his deadly attack, offer a chilling look at the toxic brew of influences building inside him.

"Praise Odin, pass the ammunition, Seig (sic) Heil, and Heil Hitler!" Miller writes in the very last line of his book.

President Donald Trump has had no qualms linking terrorism to religion - but so far he has focused on only one.

Trump has broken with his predecessor by explicitly calling some terrorist acts "radical Islamic extremism." And he has set his sights squarely on eradicating radical Islamism, whether at home or abroad.

Targeting and investigating just one religion - Islam - at the expense of others that are inspiring hate in America would be a grave mistake, several terrorism experts said. Just as a tiny faction of extremists has twisted Islam to inspire terrorists to go out and kill people, strains of Odinism are driving American terrorists to wage their own form of jihad.

"What this stuff does is it puts those people on steroids," said Stuart Wexler, an expert on the religious roots of domestic terrorism. "Maybe they'd be willing to put a swastika on a synagogue, but the religion puts them in a place where they'd be willing to blow the synagogue up."

And it's not just America.

Norway's worst-ever mass shooting, the 2011 slaughter of 77 young men and women by Anders Breivik, was pledged to the Nordic gods.

In his trial, Breivik told the court that he named his rifle "Gungnir" after Odin's magical spear. His handgun was named "Mjolnir," for Thor's hammer, and his car was named "Schleipnid" after Odin's eight-legged horse.

"I'm an Odinist, I believe in the only god, Odin," Breivik said during a recent trial related to his treatment in prison.

Breivik said he had been an Odinist for years and had never truly believed in Christianity, a theme he expanded on in a letter to a Norwegian newspaper: "There are few things in the world more pathetic than the Jesus figure and his message, and I have always despised the weakness and the internationalism that the church represents."

'A living expression of our true gods'

Leo Felton wasn't your average white supremacist.

For starters, he's biracial, the son of a white mother and a black father.

Imprisoned at 20 for almost killing a Cuban-American taxi driver in an assault in New York City, Felton was a confused and violent young man. That violence only crystallized in prison. His three-year sentence became 11 years after he stabbed two inmates, almost killing one.

Within prison walls, Felton's high intellect (he claims to have an IQ of over 130 and to have been a member of Mensa) drove him to books. He had gone to prison a Catholic, but on the inside, he hooked up with fellow white supremacists and met dozens of Odinists. In phone interviews from federal prison, he said he found some of the Odinists he met smart, engaging and, above all, committed, ready to die for their cause.

They told him who to study and what to read.

He dug into the ancient Nordic poetic texts known as the "Eddas," and found them thrilling and inspiring. He read and re-read "Imperium," the 1940s screed by the anti-Semitic philosopher Francis Parker Yockey that has inspired legions of white supremacists. He subscribed to Odinist magazines and joined a loose-knit group of Odinists who called themselves the "White Order of Thule."

"There are very nationalistic things that inhere in the religion: ideas of land, of homeland, obviously of race and the political implications of race," Felton said. "It's tailor-made for radicalization."

Stripped by the prison system of any sense of worth or ability to contribute meaningfully to society, Felton said he, like so many prisoners before and after him, found new purpose in the cocktail of religious and philosophical hatred he was greedily drinking down.

Gradually, the Christian Gospels began to grow cold for Felton. But the poetic writings of Odinism vibrated within him, eventually catching fire.

Here was a religion that rewarded action over passivity. Here was a philosophy that understood that the world was being manipulated by Jews and overrun by amoral mixed-blood people with no self-control and no shame. This was a vision he could fight for and die for, to be rewarded in the great beer hall of Valhalla.

"I had come to prison as aimless as a leaf in the wind, but after ten years in, my reason for living had been chipped, filed and chiseled into razor-sharp relief," he writes in his 2014 autobiography, "Beige: An Unlikely Trip Through America's Racial Obsession."

Felton began planning to unleash chaos upon his release.

It would be a short, triumphant taste of freedom, capped with an explosion of hatred and retribution. He planned to kill as many people as possible, with a final suicide mission at a high-profile Jewish organization.

"I would become a living expression of our true Gods, transmitting Their blessed rage into the mortal world, like an overcurrent that flows through a fuse, causing it to burn brighter than it ever has and at the same time, destroying it," he wrote.

Released in 2001, Felton put his plans straight into action.

Needing cash, he printed rudimentary bills at home and traded them for real bills at convenience stores and dimly lit bars. With the help of a former prison buddy, he robbed a bank in Boston, using some of his proceeds to buy the first makings of a bomb - a 50-pound bag of ammonium nitrate and a coffee machine, whose entrails he gutted for a makeshift time-delayed fuse.

But Felton never had a chance to release his "blessed rage."

A $20 bill he had faked was spotted by an off-duty police officer in a Boston Dunkin' Donuts, and he and an accomplice were arrested. The feds charged him with the bank robbery and also with conspiracy, claiming he planned to bomb the Holocaust memorials in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He was sent down for 21 years and 10 months and is currently incarcerated in a high-security prison in Philadelphia.

While only a small minority end up manifesting their hatred as violence like Felton did, the threat of homegrown Odinist terrorists is more real than ever in today's America, said Daryl Johnson, who spent six years as the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security.

"It's a jihadist view," he said. "Extremists tend to hijack these religions and these beliefs and adopt them into their worldview and use them for justification for carrying out violent attacks."

For Felton, however, that jihad is a thing of the past. He became a white supremacist as a young man in prison, driven partly by anger and confusion about his own lineage and partly by the inherent segregation of the prison system. But a few years ago, after sending off for a DNA test and discovering that he was descended from the Yoruba, an ethnic group living in what is now southwestern Nigeria, he embraced his African lineage.

He now goes by Leo Olamidu.

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An ancient Nordic religion is inspiring white supremacist terror

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They planned to rob a jewelry store and use the money to stockpile guns, ammo and explosives. Then they would charge into churches and synagogues, slaughtering as many people as possible in the name of their religion. The man in Kansas wanted to kill as many Jewish people as possible.

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Inventing (the) English: Racism, Multilingualism and Medieval Studies – Rachel E. Moss

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Inventing (the) English: Racism, Multilingualism and Medieval Studies – Rachel E. Moss

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On Friday I noticed a tweet from the Leave.EU official twitter account that was criticising Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for accepting that Britain is multilingual. I retweeted it with the additional comment that the British Isles have always been multilingual. As I don't tend to tweet much at the weekend (I prefer to use that twitter account in relation to my work, and so give it, as well as my research, a bit of a break!) and so was rather startled to see it get 682 retweets and 1,500 likes. I had just been making what seemed to me a rather obvious point, and not in a particularly innovative way.

Nonetheless it seemed to strike a chord, perhaps because we have within the medieval twitterverse been having a lot of conversations about the misappropriation of our medieval past by racists intent on perceiving British history as white and monolingual, and because the recent terror attacks on my beloved Manchester and London have given fertile ground for racist nostalgia about that imagined past.

See for instance this tweet by the white supremacist Richard Spencer:

It is not entirely clear which invasion of the British Isles represents a victory in Spencer's mind, though I assume he is thinking about Viking or Anglo-Saxon settlement within England. Vikings are the particular favourite of the neo-Nazi crowd, who would be disappointed if confronted with the reality of a Viking culture that, yes, did its share of raping and pillaging but that also engaged in economic exchange, trade, intermarriage and political affiliation with people across Europe and Africa.

Medievalists can too easily dismiss the views of the world's Richard Spencers, seeing them as crackpots, imagining them as disaffected teenagers hunched over their laptops reading Reddit and masturbating over fantasies of a white Europe - ignoring the reality of the real thirtysomething Richard Spencer with 62.5k twitter followers and given a "dapper" profile by a fascinated media, or the terrorist Jeremy Christian who gushed "Hail Vinland!!!" days before murdering two men on Portland public transport. The medieval past is being weaponised by a group of people who would be disgusted by the reality of the racial past they so fondly imagine. As David Perry points out:

The Vikings, or rather the conglomeration of Scandinavian peoples we've come to call Vikings, conquered and colonized where they found weak powers in the disorganized west of Europe. To the east, they also tapped into rich multicultural trading networks - fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.

But let's return to the idea of multilingualism. Many of the replies to my tweet were people proudly asserting the use of their non-English indigenous language - we would all think of Welsh, I hope, but perhaps less obvious homegrown languages include British Sign Language, which has 125,000 speakers today. I got a couple of sneering comments that surely I couldn't know the British Isles had ALWAYS been multilingual, but I am entirely confident in asserting that for all the history for which we have written sources these islands were home to multiple languages, and pretty confident that this was the case before that, too, given archaeological evidence for the migration of people across Europe, including into and out of the British Isles, during the Iron Age.

None of these fascinating areas form my area of expertise, but I thought a useful way I might address the vexed question of multilingualism (which in racist discourse always becomes tied to multiculturalism, which racists fear means the dilution of whiteness) is to point out the ways in which English is not one language but many. " World Englishes" is a potentially useful term for understanding localised or indigenized forms of the English language, which pushes back against the idea that there is a World English, i.e. a single lingua franca that is now the world's dominant tongue. As a medievalist, my contribution to this discussion can be pointing out that the English language - in the fondly imagined white medieval past - developed, many scholars now argue, as a language with multiple forms, or even as multiple languages.

Theo Venneman argues that the transition from Old English to Middle English is marked by an assimilation of Celtic languages that went alongside Anglo-Saxon settlement of these islands: they colonised the land, but their language was rapidly colonised by native tongues:

Written Old English is a pure West Germanic language... it was nearly identical to Continental Old Saxon... Modern English deviates in significant ways... the ways in which it deviates make it, generally speaking, more similar to Insular Celtic, the historical celtic languages, past and present, of the British Isles.

"On the Rise of 'Celtic' Syntax in Middle English", Theo Vennemann, in Middle English From Tongue to Text, ed. Peter J. Lucas, Angela M. Lucas (Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002), pp. 203-34.

As Angus MacIntosh points out, it can be dangerous to seek out a "perfect form" of a language, to work out where (Middle) English begins - because we are talking not about a language that exists in some hermetically sealed box of the past, but was a real, lived form of communication between multiple kinds of people in contact with one another:

This clinging to the notion of a language, this tendency that we always seem to have to try, by fostering it, to make things neat and tidy, this runs relentlessly through many deliberations about the interaction of codes and cultures... Fundamentally, what we mean by "languages in contact" is "users of language in contact" and to insist upon this is much more than a mere terminological quibble and has far from trivial consequences.

"Codes and Cultures", Angus McIntosh, in Speaking in Our Tongues: Medieval Dialectology and Related Disciplines, ed. Margaret Laing & Kenneth Williamson (D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 135-147.

By the mid-thirteenth century, meanwhile, the English language(s) spoken here were palpably different from that used at the point of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. But the impact of the Conquest was not just the laying of a "Gallic veneer on an Anglo-Saxon base", as Seth Lerer put it in 2007 ( Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language). It involved social and political relationships between speakers of English, French and Latin. By this point England's linguistic face was what Luis Iglesias-Rabade somewhat intimidatingly termed "social subordinate bilingualism of a diglossic character" (Handbook of Middle English: Grammar and Texts, 2003), but which means that English and French, as everyday languages, were social in that they were widely used by the population, not by elites, that one or other language would probably be subordinate in each speaker's speech profile because not many people would speak both languages with equal fluency, and diglossic meaning that speakers would switch between languages based on the situation in which they found themselves.

For most of its history, English was primarily a local language or languages, with sometimes extreme dialectical variants between regions. As Jeremy Smith writes ruefully, in a sense, every Middle English text has its own grammar ( Essentials of Early English, 1999). Meanwhile, John Trevisa noted grumpily in his 1387 translation of the Polychronicon:

Hyt semeþ a gret wondur hou3 Englysch, þat is þe burþ-tongue of Englyschmen and here oune longage and tonge, ys so dyvers of soun in þis ylond ... Al the longage of the Norþhumbres, and specialych at 3ork, ys so scharp, slyttyng and frotyng, and unschape, þat we Southeron men may þat longage unneþe undurstonde. Y trowe þat þat ys bycause þat a buþ ny3 to strange men and aliens þat spekeþ strangelych, and also bycause þat þe kynges of Engelond woneþ alwey fer fram þat countray.

At least one thing never changes in the history of English speaking: Southerners claiming they can't understand the undisciplined language of Northern folk.

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Inventing (the) English: Racism, Multilingualism and Medieval Studies

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On Friday I noticed a tweet from the Leave.EU official twitter account that was criticising Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for accepting that Britain is multilingual. I retweeted it with the additional comment that the British Isles have always been multilingual. As I don't tend to tweet much at the weekend (I prefer to use that...

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Race & medieval studies: a partial bibliography - Google Docs

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Race & medieval studies: a partial bibliography - Google Docs

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Race & medieval studies: a partial bibliography

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White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong. - The Washington Post

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White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong. - The Washington Post

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In early May, the white supremacist Jeremy Christian - who is accused of killing two men in Portland, Ore., on Friday - posted on Facebook, " Hail Vinland!!! Hail Victory!!!" "Victory" makes sense. Bigots feel empowered these days. But why "Vinland?" Why was this accused attacker talking about the short-lived Viking settlement in North America?

It turns out that white supremacy has gone fully medieval.

As the current contests over Confederate monuments exemplifies, Americans are accustomed to contested narratives about race and history fixating on the American South. Some of the most dangerous terrorists in the U.S., though, are looking much, much, farther north. Vinland was the name that a group of 10th-century Vikings, led by Leif Erikson, gave to a grapevine-rich island off what we believe is the coast of North America. For white supremacists, the concept of Vinland asserts a historical claim over North America, stretching especially from the Northeast coast to the Pacific Northwest. They use the myth of Vinland to position themselves as righteous defenders in the wars of race and religion they believe are coming.

The colonization of Vinland was pretty much a disaster, but it did happen. There's archaeological evidence for a Viking presence in North America. Two surviving sagas recount the voyages. The sagas don't always agree when it comes to laying blame - was it internecine violence or fighting with the indigenous people? Who started the fighting? The general details, however, are known. Erikson found an island, named it Vinland and went home with timber. Later expeditions failed, though a few survivors made it home to tell the tale. Voyages west from Greenland soon ceased, as the risk/reward calculus didn't seem favorable. So much for Vinland.

Stories of the Vikings, both in Scandinavia and in North America, have long contained the potential to feed inventions of an imaginary racist past. European racists have long wanted to believe in a pure-white, hermetically sealed Middle Ages. Today, anti-refugee protesters in Europe dress up as Vikings and Crusaders. North American hate groups invoke the Norse god Odin and Vinland. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the rise of Odinism in 2009, including the founding of the Vinland Folk Resistance. In the Pacific Northwest, the Wolves of Vinland and the allegedly affiliated Operation Werewolf present white supremacists with a combination biker gang, weightlifting club and militia. One individual who routinely shares Operation Werewolf social media posts, responded in 2012 to an article about the (untrue) legend of Viking colonization of Minnesota and southern Canada by writing on Facebook, "Our History is not a hoax. Hail Vinland!!!"

[Attacks like Portland's will keep happening unless we all fight white supremacy]

But even the Vikings of Europe did not exist in pure white racial isolation. The Vikings, or rather the conglomeration of Scandinavian peoples we've come to call Vikings, conquered and colonized where they found weak powers in the disorganized west of Europe. To the east, they also tapped into rich multicultural trading networks - fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.

In fact, the whole notion of a pure white medieval Europe, so important to white supremacists today, is false. The fixation on skin color is largely a modern phenomenon, alien to a Europe dependent on a Mediterranean world composed of people with varying shades of brown skin. It's not that medievals lacked prejudice or hate, but our hang-ups and divisions were not theirs. Medieval Europe was not isolated from the broader world, but rather participated in a "Global Middle Ages" that linked great Eurasian and African cultures through the movement of things and people (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not). One of the vectors of those connections was, of course, the very same Vikings now serving as fodder for American hate.

Vinland wasn't the only medieval presence at the Portland murders. Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche died fighting to protect the vulnerable people targeted by hate. Myrddin is the Welsh name for Merlin, the great wizard in the court of King Arthur. Taliesin was a 6th century Welsh poet who was later folded into the Arthurian legends. Their namesake died defending the vulnerable. His last words were, like a chivalric hero, to tell the people on the train that he loved them all.

History has never just been "the past." As a historian, I study the way that groups have always tried to assert control over their story, seeking to mold legend, myth and reality into a useful narrative about identity and destiny. Stories like this have power, and we'd be foolish to ignore the threat.

As we mourn the martyrs in Portland, care for the wounded and support the women who were initially targeted, we shouldn't ignore the danger that racist appropriation of the medieval past presents. American white supremacists want to make Vinland great again, laying out an imagined past in which Vikings are the rightful conquerors of North America, locked in eternal battle with the Skraelings, the Viking slur for indigenous people. We must inoculate ourselves against this hate by telling a better story, one that recognizes the many errors of our past, but also lays out a vision for a more inclusive future.
Read more: The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won't fight them at all This is how you become a white supremacist It's time to stop talking about race with white people

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Perspective | White supremacists love Vikings. But they've got history all wrong.

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In early May, the white supremacist Jeremy Christian - who is accused of killing two men in Portland, Ore., on Friday - posted on Facebook, " Hail Vinland!!! Hail Victory!!!" "Victory" makes sense. Bigots feel empowered these days. But why "Vinland?" Why was this accused attacker talking about the short-lived Viking settlement in North America?

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A Brief History of a Terrible Idea: The “Dark Enlightenment” | The Public Medievalist

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A Brief History of a Terrible Idea: The “Dark Enlightenment” | The Public Medievalist

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This is Part I of The Public Medievalist's continuing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, written by one of our newest contributors, Dr. Dark Age. Dr. Dark Age is a medieval studies professor and a scholar of the many disturbing abuses of the Middle Ages.
Read the Introduction to Our Series on Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages Here.
As a medieval studies professor, I try to free my students from the myth of "the Dark Ages." Popular histories would have you believe that once the Renaissance came along- to steal a line from historian Judith Bennett- humanity "woke up, bathed, and stopped grievously oppressing women." I remind students about the Renaissance witch trials, bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants, and the international slave trade. I point out that many things we consider barbaric, racist, and sexist sprang into being long after we left the so-called Dark Ages and saw the light.

But now that I know about the "Dark Enlightenment," a sociopolitical theory that's all the rage in white supremacist circles, I might hold back a little.

Anyone trawling the Internet to try to shed more light on the Dark Ages might stumble onto some disconcerting defenses of medieval times. You might, for instance, find yourself on the neo-Nazi Stormfront message board, where user "Fading Light" writes:

The "Dark Ages" is one of my pet peeves..."

- Hey, mine too, Fading Light!

"...brought up constantly by anti-Whites to bash our race..."

Fading Light goes on to brag, "I collect European achievements from that period as a hobby just to point out to people who believe in 'Dark Ages' how stupid they are."

This is sort of like a medievalist's wet dream turned into a nightmare: it turns out the same sites that promote links to " Top 10 reasons the Dark Ages were not dark" also post links to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and flattering Hitler fan art. And one of their favorite things to link to, these days, is the Dark Enlightenment manifesto.

The Other Red Pill

"Dark Enlightenment" (DE) is a theory dreamed up by self-styled Internet philosophers who claim to trace modern-day problems to the end of the Middle Ages. According to DE proponents, the Enlightenment's humanism, democracy, and quest for equality are responsible for the decay of Western civilization. DE gurus write long, self-aggrandizing online screeds that dabble in just enough science, philosophy, and political philosophy to be dangerous. They promise to "cure your brain" of Orwellian leftist propaganda by giving you a "golfball-sized red pill" that will " sear your throat like a live coal" (!)

Swallowing that massive rhetorical pill is supposed to urge the reader toward the following conclusions:

Democracy leads to the zombie apocalypse.

DE manifestos sometimes use zombies as a metaphor for mediocrity, or sometimes for devouring each other in the name of capitalist self-advancement. And, once in a while, they actually seem to be talking about real zombies. What the West needs to save itself is a return to good, old-fashioned monarchy.

Political correctness-by which DE means indulging in any pretense of human equality-is killing Western civilization.

As an 'antidote' to the poisonous infection of equality, DE manifestos posit an alternate theory they call "Human Biodiversity" (HBD). But while "Human Biodiversity" sounds like some kind of lovely futuristic plan for a colony in outer space, exploring the Dark Enlightenment subreddit will wipe that pleasant illusion away:

"Individual humans and human groups," their page explains, "differ in ability, psychological disposition, intelligence, and other traits for genetic reasons. Genetics can explain 50% or more of the differences in lifetime outcomes within and between human groups. Other factors are minor by comparison."

This, DE proponents argue, is not racism, but what they call "racial realism": the idea is that biology and genetics endow us with different behavioral traits, and therefore we should all play different roles in the world.

"Racial realism" is, of course, a fantasy that has been thoroughly debunked by geneticists. If that 50% figure they quote sounds made up, that's because it is. But interestingly, the attempt to separate 'racialism'-attributing behavioral traits to different races based on biology, genealogy, geography, or environmental influences-from racism actually echoes a debate among medievalists held at the beginning of this century. Scholars asked: can we really talk about "racism" in a time before modern concepts of race existed? Some medieval white people believed that sin was associated with darker skin, but is that the same as "racism," or was that technically religious discrimination? What about medieval adaptations of classical geographical theories, which posited that different climates invested the races with different strengths and weaknesses? Germans, according to Caesar, were tall and strong because they wore little clothing in cold environments and bathed in cold rivers; unsurprisingly, Caesar believes Romans like himself sprang from a climate perfectly conducive to martial and intellectual excellence.

Most medievalists have long since moved past the debate over terminology, which seems like rather dubious hair-splitting when even seemingly "neutral" racialisms impose hierarchies, usually with whiteness at the top. And white supremacy is the same conclusion Dark Enlightenment 'thinkers' draw when they use the Middle Ages to make their case.

The Usual Suspects

If you read posts by DE leaders like "Mencius Moldbug" or Nick Land, you would be forgiven for thinking that a Victorian social Darwinist has time-traveled into Silicon Valley. Like the Victorians before them, DEers fetishize the medieval West as the height of white greatness, a time when every race was in its proper geographical place, allowing white civilization to thrive in isolation. And like social Darwinists, they twist science, philosophy, and logic to rationalize what is, at its core, an emotional response: the fear of lost power and privilege in a globalizing, equalizing world.

Unsurprisingly, DE proponents also believe in biologically inevitable gender roles. As the DE subreddit claims:

"Recognition of HBD necessitates the rejection of the core progressive dogma of egalitarianism. Race and gender are not social constructs and everyone personally experiences that not all men or women are created equal. It is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism."

They share the "red pill" metaphor with the so-called Men's Right's movements as often as they share links to each other's websites, and the Middle Ages do the heavy lifting for many of their gender theories. For instance Andrew Aglin, editor of the neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer, made this statement on gender equality in 2015:

"My position on women, very explicitly, is that they should in the modern world remain in the exact same role they were in during the medieval period and I am unwilling to dance around or negotiate on that issue. Women should be honored, cherished and cared for, but they should not possess 'rights.'"

'Conventional' white supremacists like Aglin butt heads with the Dark Enlightenment movement, and with the "alt right" in general. DE proponents did not begin as Nazis or fascists, and many still don't want to be associated with them. DEers tend to be educated, well-off, technologically savvy atheists. They reject the Christian supremacy and Norse paganism typical in neo-Nazi circles.

Likewise, white supremacist groups often reject DE leaders even as they embrace their theories. Aglin, for instance, rejects DE as a movement because he claims white supremacists invented those ideas first-and, not incidentally, because one of DE's founders is half-Jewish. ( Side note: one of the really amusing things about all this infighting is the way that alt-righters and old school neo-Nazis accuse each other of being a Jewish conspiracy to make white supremacy look bad.) But none of these relatively minor disagreements change the fact that the "Dark Enlightenment" ideology is really just white supremacy dressed up in trendy glasses and a hoodie.

The Real History

DE's grasp of medieval history is about as thin as its understanding of biology and geography. There was no such thing as the homogenous, insular medieval Europe they hope to resurrect. Al-Andalus, aka Muslim Spain, was right next to France. Parts of France were also England, and vice versa. The Vikings landed in all those places. Western European culture relied heavily on philosophical, literary, commercial, and scientific exchanges with people who were not white. And medieval women were scholars, religious authorities, healers, queens, merchants, and even military leaders and brewers.

But when a movement has so much online traction, especially among educated and highly-paid people, its "alternate facts" about the Middle Ages can't be dismissed as sheer ignorance. Myths about the Middle Ages have a long history of being used to strip people of their rights: in the slaveholding American south, in 1930s Germany, and even now, under the neomedieval Islamic State. And this latest iteration of dangerous revisionist medievalism isn't just popular in Silicon Valley: it may even have wormed its way into the White House.

No matter how rich, diverse, or interesting medievalists think the Middle Ages may have been, nobody wants our future to look like our past-especially if it's the past that lives in the Dark Enlightenment imagination.
Continue to Part II: A Vile Love Affair: Right Wing Nationalism and the Middle Ages The Public Medievalist does not pay to promote these articles, so we would love it if you shared this with your history-loving friends! Click to share with your friends on Facebook, or Twitter.

&copy Copyright 2017 Dr. Dark Age, All rights Reserved. Written For: The Public Medievalist

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A Brief History of a Terrible Idea: The "Dark Enlightenment"

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This is Part I of The Public Medievalist's continuing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, written by one of our newest contributors, Dr. Dark Age. Dr. Dark Age is a medieval studies professor and a scholar of the many disturbing abuses of the Middle Ages.

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A Vile Love Affair: Right Wing Nationalism and the Middle Ages | The Public Medievalist

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A Vile Love Affair: Right Wing Nationalism and the Middle Ages | The Public Medievalist

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This is Part II of The Public Medievalist's continuing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, written by Dr. Andrew Elliott. His next book, Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Read the Introduction to the our series here, and Part I, here. is available for pre-order now.
The Middle Ages have long served as a convenient treasure trove for right-wing nationalism and racism.

Let's start by looking only at the 20 th century. The rise and proliferation of fascism throughout Europe in the 1930s was underpinned by a surprisingly persistent use and appropriation of medieval history and imagery-what scholars call " medievalism." In her PhD thesis, Flora Ward has described how Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975, relied on the memory of Spain's medieval past in order to underpin, and legitimise, his rule. Similarly, in a recent volume of Studies in Medievalism Pedro Martins has recently shown how Portugal's António Sardinha relied on medievalist fantasies of honour and nobility as a way of bypassing Enlightenment ideals of reason and Republicanism.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of France's far-right National Front party, made a series of claims indicating that 'real' French identity was only valid if it could trace its roots back to the 5 th century king of the Franks, Clovis. His daughter, Marine Le Pen, continues his legacy by marching annually to the statue of Joan of Arc to honour 'proper' French identity (by which she means white, European and Christian). In what is becoming a family tradition, her niece, Marion, has also been compared to the saint, in an attempt to lay claim to medieval history as the unique property of the far right.

But by far, the most infamous example is, of course, Hitler's use of the medieval past to promote a nostalgic historical nationalism. Allegedly, according to Uli Linke (p. 198), Hitler even attempted to trace his own genealogy back through Norse mythology to Germanic warriors, and even to Odin himself.

Of course, it is not only the right wing who use the past in this way. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, in his excellent book Medioevo Militante [ Militant Middle Ages], outlines how the Middle Ages came to be resurrected in support of a surprising range of political stances. However, it is the Far Right who often find it most fitting, as a way of hiding pseudo-scientific race theories under the disguise of ostensible historical legitimacy.

The real trick, for both Hitler and his successors, was to employ the Middle Ages as a seemingly benign mode of nostalgia. In a tense climate of economic depression, widespread misinformation, wounded national pride, and knee-jerk racism, each successive movement promoted a return to the past. The past they invoked was a putatively shared national identity-shared by those whom they considered racially 'pure'-that allowed for a nostalgic use of the past. Such ideas are designed to make extremist ideologies more palatable, more mainstream, and more inclusive. They don't reject other races, they say, they celebrate their own heritage (in reality by rejecting the non-White 'Other').

Such appropriations of the Middle Ages have been massively successful. They were so successful, in fact, that the shadow of National Socialism would cast a pall over similar political medievalisms (at least in mainstream politics) for much of the remainder of the twentieth century. Even so, Louise D'Arcens and Clare Monagle have recently identified a 'comeback' of medievalism in modern politics. They have pinpointed the ways in which the medieval past has returned to seemingly mainstream discourse. It is present in the mouths of John Howard in Australia, Stephen Harper in Canada, David Cameron in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump in the US.

Why Is It Back, and Why Now?

In his book Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror Bruce Holsinger offers one part of the answer. Holsinger describes how the logic of the war on terror has reintroduced a series of medievalisms to post-9/11 discourse. Following this logic, it is easy to see how accusations that al Qaeda (and later IS) are 'medieval' introduce a stark division between the 'modern', 'evolved' West and the 'primitive', 'barbaric' East. This infuses the Bush doctrine ("you are either with us or against us") with imperialist and orientalist overtones (as John Ganim has persuasively argued in his book Medievalism and Orientalism).

Seeing world leaders standing on the floor of the UN and calling entire cultures (and, by extension, Islam) "medieval" is shocking. This is only somewhat softened by the extent to which insulting something by calling it "medieval" has been normalised by its repetition in political discussion. In my upcoming book, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media, I describe this phenomenon as 'banal medievalism.' The term describes the repetitive use of medievalisms without any real intentions of indicating the actual past, but which nevertheless draw their power from their recognisability and repetition.

A second reason for the return of the Middle Ages in political discourse can be found in the rise of blogging and social media. This has seen proliferation of user-generated content and allows a staggering number of people to join in political discussions online. The lowered barriers of entry are, in themselves, laudable (they are the means by which I am able to write and publish this article). But one of the fringe consequences of the so-called 'Web 2.0' is that the use of the Middle Ages no longer needs to be footnoted. We can talk of 'crusades' as though there was only one. We can claim to be, or find, King Arthur. We can talk of Robin Hood or Joan of Arc by simply pointing to their Wikipedia pages, which are curated by the crowd, for the crowd. In a post-Truth era, the challenge to authority allows us to make the past mean whatever we want it to mean. Statements are fact-checked afterwards, rather than researched beforehand.

In this climate, the Middle Ages have become particularly fertile ground for the kinds of pseudo-scientific race theories espoused by white supremacist blogs and far-right nationalist groups. In the USA, for example, Neo-nazi website Stormfront [ Editor's note: It is our policy never to link to sites like Stormfront. They don't deserve the traffic.] illustrate the ways in which a pseudo-historical medieval past can be reworked into a racist fantasy of blood purity and exclusive nationalism. Their propaganda includes a shocking "book" called "A History of the White Race". It is in fact not a book, but a downloadable PDF, akin to Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik 's "book" in both quality and content. Its most salient feature, however, is that it rates as perhaps the most egregious misuse of history by the far-right today. In their 'history', Stormfront literally rewrite the entire history of humankind to suggest a genetically-predetermined supremacy of the supposedly pure white race. They begin by dismissing both evolution and creationism as equally implausible "theories", then turn to "archaeological evidence" (no evidence at all is actually offered) which "proves" that Homo sapiens (who, they claim without evidence, are solely the ancestors of white Northern Europeans) miraculously survived an ice age. Their fantasy Homo sapiens then "appeared out of the north and swept down through Europe, physically destroying Neanderthal man". They then go on to rewrite the Middle Ages. In their fantasy Middle Ages, the resistance of Islamic expansion by white European armies was brought about simply because of the natural supremacy of the white race.

It cannot be overstated: this 'history' is not only scientifically illogical and completely unsubstantiated; it is historically ludicrous. However, no matter how absurd, claims like these fit perfectly within the right wing's distortion of history in general, and the Middle Ages in particular. Furthermore, they draw their power not from their factual basis but from their similarities with other neo-Nazi or right-wing sources.

This illustrates a lesson for supposedly 'post-Truth' world. That lesson does not come from history, media theory, or journalism. It comes from advertising: truth comes from recognition, repetition, and non-contradiction. The far-right isn't exploring the truth, they are building a brand.

The Middle Ages in the Far Right-Wing Bubble

So why are the Middle Ages in particular so susceptible to this sort of misuse? One response may be difficult for some scholars to accept, since it means that we have to shoulder some of the responsibility. Scholars design curricula that unduly privilege the written record, and material remains of the European Middle Ages. At the risk of oversimplifying, the abundance of material and cultural remains from a largely white European Middle Ages leads to a disproportionate focus on white, European medieval history. This leads to the (often unwitting) perception that, simply, white history is all the history there ever was.

The extent to which this overprivileging of white Christians dominates the memory of the past can even be found in a throwaway joke in Mel Brooks' 1993 film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In one scene, Robin (Cary Elwes) recruits Ahchoo (Dave Chappelle) as the only black member of his band of Merry Men. On hearing his name, Robin's servant Blinkin replies: "A Jew? Here?"

The joke only works if you believe that somehow Jews didn't exist in the European Middle Ages. Obviously this is demonstrably untrue, but gains credence nonetheless given the predominance of white writers in medieval history curricula across the world.

Another part of the response, equally simplistically, is that the medieval past offers particularly useful ideas precisely because of how often the Middle Ages are invoked outside of historical enquiry. Blogs about the Vikings (such as that of Norwegian metal singer Varg Vikernes, with his pompous "Ancestral Cult" blog) groan with references to suppo

sedly pure bloodlines reaching back to the Norsemen and Vikings. They are both genealogically and genetically meaningless, and bear alarming parallels with Hitler's attempted genealogy back to Odin. Other blogs, such as that of the 'Traditional Britain Group', the 'English Defence League', or 'Boudica BPI' in the UK use common tropes of medievalism to construct a heritage for themselves within an imaginary, exclusionist white history. The far-right British National Party (BNP) run a regular summer camp called "Camp Excalibur," which celebrates Britain's white heritage.

The multiple blogs on these topics, exist within a 'counterjihad filter bubble' of their own creation. In this bubble, extreme-right figures like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Fjordman, Bat Ye'or, Geert Wilders and Anders Breivik all use medievalism to support their theories of racial identity without encountering opposing voices or contradiction. No footnotes are required: they need only link back to other bloggers in their community. By joining together an imagined community of like-minded followers, the closed circuit of these networks reinforces their paranoia and shuts out any opposing views. Once a person connects to these groups online, the self-referential circularity of those networks offers what appears to be a genuine and powerful alternative to the mainstream media, or mainstream scholarship. Such circularity leads far-right groups to boycott the mainstream media, calling it biased, or lately "fake news," and has turned them towards attacking the "liberal academy." They thus over-privilege stories posted by members of their own communities, and mute any inconvenient truths. Recognition, repetition, and non-contradiction.

At the same time, precisely when we need solid journalism and media literacy, news consumption in general has seen a shift towards online sources instead of newspapers, radio or television. A startling report from the Pew Research Center estimated that in 2014, 30% of US adults got their news wholly or mostly from Facebook. The problem comes with the internet's self-referentiality which ultimately serves to demolish traditionally impartial guarantors of authority and reliability. As Upworthy CEO Eli Pariser argues in his book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You, "for most of us now, the difference in authority between a blog post and an article in the New Yorker is much smaller than one would think".

Owning the Past

In the context of these self-referential filter bubbles, the Middle Ages of the Far Right seems to be rooted in an inclusive celebration of the past, joining a nation together in celebration of heritage. But instead, looking beneath the surface, the misuse of the past forms a powerful strategy rooted in a dangerously exclusive rejection of anyone considered 'Other'. By calling into doubt the experts who study the Middle Ages, their online pick-and-mix of the past allows them to sidestep accusations of racism by adopting a seemingly celebratory mode of medievalism. In their attempts to dissociate themselves from overtly fascist or neo-Nazi organizations, these networks congregate around the Middle Ages as a shared past and point of contact. The Middle Ages in this context is forcefully conscripted to support their racism and anti-Muslim invective.

Tying these ideas together, it becomes obvious that the normalization of terms like 'medieval', to mean barbarous or primitive play perfectly into the right-wing playbook. The insistence by far-right groups that Islam is 'medieval' subtly implies that the religion is fundamentally incompatible with modernity. In light of this, their closed-circle media strategies thus offer these groups a dangerous platform to rewrite the past.

In this fraught online landscape, the Middle Ages provides fertile ground for a staggering range of ideologies. In the context of the so-called 'post-truth' social landscape before us, amid the deepening mistrust of experts and intellectuals, the rejection of authority means the loss of any ability to talk reasonably about the validity of interpretations of the past. The Middle Ages can mean whatever we-whatever they-want them to mean. The debate is thus not about the past, but about who owns and controls that past. It is for this reason, then, that it is so important that sites like The Public Medievalist and others are able to play a role in the online discussion of complex issues like race, gender, religion and cultural identity in public forums. And scholars have to assume as much responsibility as anyone else to promote inclusivity in their curricula.

Bruce Holsinger suggests-with tongue firmly in cheek-'we are all medievalists now'. Medievalists, and people interested in the real Middle Ages, must work to ensure that the Middle Ages does not end up meaning whatever a specific ideologue decides it should, but instead reflects all the evidence, particularly all the historical nuances and complexities. It is these nuances and complexities that make history both true and meaningful.
Continue to Part III of our Series: "Race" in the Trenches The Public Medievalist does not pay to promote these articles, so we would love it if you shared this with your history-loving friends! Click to share with your friends on Facebook, or Twitter.
As Nicolas Sarkozy lamented in the 'tug-of-love' over Joan of Arc in the 2007 presidential elections, "Joan of Arc is France [and not a symbol of racial exclusion] How could we have let the extreme right confiscate her for so long?"

&copy Copyright 2017 Andrew B.R. Elliott, All rights Reserved. Written For: The Public Medievalist

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A Vile Love Affair: Right Wing Nationalism and the Middle Ages

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This is Part II of The Public Medievalist's continuing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, written by Dr. Andrew Elliott. His next book, Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media : Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Read the Introduction to the our series here, and Part I, here.

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Daniel Dennett: ‘I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics’ | Science | The Guardian

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Daniel Dennett: ‘I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics’ | Science | The Guardian

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I meet Daniel Dennett, the great American rationalist, on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, as good a day as any to contemplate the fragility of civilisation in face of overwhelming technological change, a topic he examines in his latest book.

Dennett is a singular figure in American culture: a white-haired, white-bearded 74-year-old philosopher whose work has mined the questions that erupt at the places where science, technology and consciousness meet. His subject is the brain and how it creates meaning and what our brains will make of a future that includes AI and robots. He's in London with his wife, Susan, to mark the publication of his latest book - From Bacteria to Bach and Back - and I find him in a rented flat in Notting Hill, scowling at his laptop. "I was about to send a tweet," he says. "Something like, 'Republican senators are in an enviable position. How often does anybody get a real opportunity to become a national hero? Who's going to step up and enter the pages of history?'"

Daniel Dennett (@danieldennett)
I envy Republican senators. How often do people get a chance to be a hero without risking their lives? Be brave. Do the right thing.

Dennett has the intellectual heft for his pronouncements to have impact: a star speaker on the TED circuit and friend to many of the Silicon Valley elite, he's also that rare breed, the mythical creature of publishers' dreams - a writer of meaty, serious books that also sell.

It's clear that his latest was conceived and written in a different time. Dennett, a close ally of Richard Dawkins (and a similarly quasi-militant atheist), had decided to look at culture from an evolutionary perspective. His last chapter, where he contemplates our technological future, was intended to be thought-provoking. Instead, it's quietly terrifying: we're only just starting to wake up to the potential outcomes of the technology that we're inventing but increasingly don't understand, he writes. Human co-operation and trust aren't givens. They're the byproducts of a cultural process that can be reversed. And civilisation is far, far more fragile than any of us want to realise.

I was thinking that perhaps philosophers are exactly what's needed right now. Some deep thinking about what is happening at this moment?
Yes. From everybody. The real danger that's facing us is we've lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it's much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn't matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you're fake news. We're entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we've not experienced since the middle ages.

You wrote a paper a few years ago about how technology will bring transparency to both people and organisations, whether they want it or not, and the explosive impact of that. That's what seems to be happening isn't it?
Yes, I wrote it with Deb Roy, a brilliant young computer scientist and roboticist who is now head of research at Twitter. We compared it to the Cambrian explosion, which is regarded as a time of immense creativity. All these brand new life forms were created, but at the same time just as many were destroyed. It was an arms race.

So, you say there are all these fantastic tools that are going to be created...
Yes, and counter-tools.

And you suggest that will lead to an information war. By some descriptions, that's exactly where we are, isn't it?
Absolutely. I had been revelling in the information transparency because it was making it much harder for religion. But it's not all good. It can be terrifying.

There's a perception that philosophy is a dusty discipline that belongs in academe, but actually, questions such as what is a fact and what is the truth are the fundamental questions of today, aren't they?
Philosophy has not covered itself in glory in the way it has handled this. Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren't quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You'd have people going around saying: "Well, you're part of that crowd who still believe in facts."

My understanding of postmodernism - and you're a very prominent atheist - is that in the absence of a single meta-narrative, which is God, you had competing narratives...
Yes and one's true and the others are false. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren't; it's as simple as that.

The Trump phenomenon raises interesting questions about the way people think and how our brains work, which you've spent your life looking at. Is it affecting the way you think about things?
It is in the obvious way that I find that I simply must take time out from what I'd really like to be doing to think about the political near future and what steps, if any, I might take to fend off disaster. Political activism is not my favourite activity but sometimes one has to engage in it. I felt a moral obligation to write Breaking the Spell [Dennett's 2006 study of religion as a natural phenomenon] because I was so concerned about the rise of theocracy in America and the overreaching of the religious right. What I'd really like to work on is some very exciting new developments in theories of consciousness, which has almost nothing to do with politics. I begrudge every hour that I have to spend worrying about political issues instead.

So is that what you'll do next?
I'm an eternal optimist. Every Republican senator has an opportunity to grow a spine and stand up for truth and justice and the rule of law. My other hope is that if Trump has to choose between being president and being a billionaire, I think he may just resign.

This has the comforting quality of religion to me. It's nice to believe there's a heaven. It's be nice to believe that Trump will resign...
Well, I told you, I'm an optimist.

But in your latest book, you ask if civilisation can fail and conclude that it can. You say there's a huge and present danger because the modern world has become too complex to fix. Does that have a different resonance now than when you wrote it?
I suppose it does. When I wrote it, I thought it would be a hard sell for a lot of people. Whereas now, well, we're all facing it, aren't we? My optimism is well surrounded by very pessimistic thoughts, which are in some way probably more realistic.

You also talk about cultural evolution in the book. For most people, that suggests the idea of things becoming better. But that's not necessarily true, is it?
Well, the view of things getting better is of course the view of those who survive. It's sort of weak history. The same is true of culture. The striking thing is that we now understand more about how evolution works and we're beginning to harness it. And this exposes the fragility of some features of our modern world. We now have to take care not to run off the cliff with our new technology, without looking closely at what its implications are.

You talk about memes, which is Richard Dawkins's name for units of cultural transmission. Can you view Trump as a really bad meme, but a really successful one?
Well, one of the most powerful and unsettling parts of Dawkins's vision is that memes have their own fitness. In the same way that germs and viruses have their own fitness. That means that there can be a very, very successful meme, which is really dangerous.

The debate around fake news seems to be a microcosm of this...
Absolutely. I'll tell you one thing that surprised me. There's a higher order principle that I thought would be more important than has turned out to be the case. I'll give you an example: why do advertisements cost so much at the Super Bowl? Answer: it's not just that millions of people are watching but that millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, know that hundreds of millions of people are watching. And that gives it additional credibility. And the web isn't like that. But when you've got Trump tweeting to millions of people at a time, they know that he's tweeting to millions at a time. He's getting one of the advantages of this credibility effect without the disadvantages. So the siloing effect is really very unnerving. This is one of the features of the new transparency that is most worrying. No sooner do we develop the hardware to give the globe a nervous system than we spoil it. We're at great risk of going blind.
I've been writing about problems with Google search and one of the examples I found is that if you type "The Holocaust is" into Google, it will suggest, in order, "a lie", "a hoax"etc. And if you click on "The Holocaust a lie", you get 10 links to neo-Nazi sites that say: "Yes, the Holocaust is a lie"... So, whatever is the top link disseminates fastest, becomes the most successful version of the truth, the meme that wins...

That's very interesting. And disturbing. It's part of this arms race of the tools made possible by transparency. This is going to undermine many good things and many bad things too. We're entering a period of a sort of lawlessness.

Google is interesting because it's not just our gateway to these facts but it's also a cultural transmission device, it's a meme machine.
Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, the underlying Google algorithm that made Google possible in the first place, that Larry and Sergey created, has been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and they have some of the smartest people in the world trying to correct the flaws they see. Whether these smart and well-intentioned people can keep up is anybody's guess but we do know they're trying. I'm very glad that Deb Roy is the scientific person at Twitter. He and his team are working hard to try to understand and anticipate the problems.

You've been an influential figure among the Silicon Valley crowd?
Maybe. I sort of hang out with them, yeah.

Does the relationship between technology companies and the US government concern you? Seeing them all at Trump's tech summit, for example?
I didn't really follow it but it sits ill with me, yes. I don't see what the right path is between keeping the technology as far away from government as possible. My friend Danny Hillis gave a TED talk where he pointed out that the vital services of the nation are much more dependent on the internet than they should be. If the internet went down, and a lot of people say it's just a matter of time, it will probably take the power grid down, cellphones, radio, television - we'll be plunged into electronic darkness. We're not used to that. If you thought 9/11 was scary, this is going to be a tremendous panic-inducer. We should be planning what to do about that.

You say you've been surprised by the gains of AI and while you're not concerned about us being enslaved by a race of robots, you have other concerns...
Oh, sure. The whole singularity stuff, that's preposterous. It distracts us from much more pressing problems.

AI tools that we become hyper-dependent on, that is going to happen. And one of the dangers is that we will give them more authority than they warrant. We will let them advise us about things that we shouldn't let them advise us about.

You quote your colleague who suggests the Google autocomplete, which uses AI and machine learning, could be controlling the way that we see the world. Is that what you think? That the robots are already controlling our minds in ways we don't yet realise?
Yes, we're beginning to furnish ourselves with technological oracles. We will be able to prove that they give very accurate results, results that we don't have any other way of getting. We also know that we can't understand how they do it. People talk about black-box science. It's not just news. It's not just politics. It's science.

What's the danger of a world where even the scientists don't understand how this stuff works?
One of the big themes in my book is how up until recently, the world and nature were governed by competence without comprehension. Serious comprehension of anything is very recent, only millennia old, not even a million years old. But we're now on the verge of moving into the age of post-intelligent design and we don't bother comprehending any more. That's one of the most threatening thoughts to me. Because for better or for worse, I put comprehension as one of my highest ideals. I want to understand everything. I want people to understand things. I love understanding things. I love explaining things to myself and to others. We've always had plenty of people who, for good reason, said, "Oh, don't bother explaining to me how the car engine works, I don't care. I just push the ignition and off I go." What happens when we take that attitude towards everything?

Are we already in a situation where the technology is too complicated even for the people who created it to understand it?
That's a worry and possibility. I don't think that point has been reached, but that point could be reached. What's interesting is that philosophers for hundreds of years have talked about the limits of comprehension as if it was sort of like the sound barrier. There was this wall we just couldn't get beyond and that was part of the tragic human condition. Now, we're discovering a version of it, which, if it's true is sort of true in a boring way. It's not that there are any great mysteries, it's just that the only way we can make progress is by division of labour and specialisation. For example, the papers coming out of Cern with 500 authors, no one of whom understands the whole paper or the whole science behind it. This is just going to become more and more the meme. More and more, the unit of comprehension is going to be group comprehension, where you simply have to rely on a team of others because you can't understand it all yourself. There was a time, oh, I would say as recently as, certainly as the 18th century, when really smart people could aspire to having a fairly good understanding of just about everything.

What are the implications of that?
Well that's the fragility, the hyper-fragility of civilisation right there. We could all be bounced back into the 19th century.

To order From Bacteria to Bach and Back (Allen Lane) for £18.75 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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Daniel Dennett: 'I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics'

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I meet Daniel Dennett, the great American rationalist, on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, as good a day as any to contemplate the fragility of civilisation in face of overwhelming technological change, a topic he examines in his latest book.

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What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like - The New York Times

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What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like - The New York Times

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Everything about Trump that appalls 65 percent of America strengthens him with the other 35 percent, and he can ride that group for a while. Even after these horrible four weeks, Republicans on Capitol Hill are not close to abandoning their man.

The likelihood is this: We're going to have an administration that has morally and politically collapsed, without actually going away.

What does that look like?

First, it means an administration that is passive, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. To get anything done, a president depends on the vast machinery of the U.S. government. But Trump doesn't mesh with that machinery. He is personality-based while it is rule-based. Furthermore, he's declared war on it. And when you declare war on the establishment, it declares war on you.

The Civil Service has a thousand ways to ignore or sit on any presidential order. The court system has given itself carte blanche to overturn any Trump initiative, even on the flimsiest legal grounds. The intelligence community has only just begun to undermine this president.

President Trump can push all the pretty buttons on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, but don't expect anything to actually happen, because they are not attached.

Second, this will probably become a more insular administration. Usually when administrations stumble, they fire a few people and bring in the grown-ups - the James Baker or the David Gergen types. But Trump is anti-grown-up, so it's hard to imagine Chief of Staff Haley Barbour. Instead, the circle of trust seems to be shrinking to his daughter, her husband and Stephen Bannon.

Bannon has a coherent worldview, which is a huge advantage when all is chaos. It's interesting how many of Bannon's rivals have woken up with knives in their backs. Michael Flynn is gone. Reince Priebus has been unmanned by a thousand White House leaks. Rex Tillerson had the potential to be an effective secretary of state, but Bannon neutered him last week by denying him the ability to even select his own deputy.

In an administration in which "promoted beyond his capacity" takes on new meaning, Bannon looms. With each passing day, Trump talks more like Bannon without the background reading.

Third, we are about to enter a decentralized world. For the past 70 years most nations have instinctively looked to the U.S. for leadership, either to follow or oppose. But in capitals around the world, intelligence agencies are drafting memos with advice on how to play Donald Trump.

The first conclusion is obvious. This administration is more like a medieval monarchy than a modern nation-state. It's more "The Madness of King George" than "The Missiles of October." The key currency is not power, it's flattery.

The corollary is that Trump is ripe to be played. Give the boy a lollipop and he won't notice if you steal his lunch. The Japanese gave Trump a new jobs announcement he could take to the Midwest, and in return they got presidential attention and coddling that other governments would have died for.

If you want to roll the Trump administration, you've got to get in line. The Israelis got a possible one-state solution. The Chinese got Trump to flip-flop on the "One China" policy. The Europeans got him to do a 180 on undoing the Iran nuclear deal.

Vladimir Putin was born for a moment such as this. He is always pushing the envelope. After gifting Team Trump with a little campaign help, the Russian state media has suddenly turned on Trump and Russian planes are buzzing U.S. ships. The bear is going to grab what it can.

We're about to enter a moment in which U.S. economic and military might is strong but U.S. political might is weak. Imagine the Roman Empire governed by Monaco.

That's scary. The only saving thought is this: The human imagination is vast, but it is not nearly vast enough to encompass the infinitely multitudinous ways Donald Trump can find to get himself disgraced.

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Opinion | What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like

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Everything about Trump that appalls 65 percent of America strengthens him with the other 35 percent, and he can ride that group for a while. Even after these horrible four weeks, Republicans on Capitol Hill are not close to abandoning their man.

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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: There's Nothing Medieval about Trump

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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: There's Nothing Medieval about Trump

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Columnists keep wanting to distance us moderns from Trump, but he's as modern as it gets.

GUEST POST by Eric Weiskott

In an interview for The Guardian last week, philosopher Daniel Dennett was asked whether "deep thinking" is what's needed in the current political climate. He responded:

Yes. From everybody. The real danger that's facing us is we've lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it's much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn't matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you're fake news. We're entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we've not experienced since the middle ages.

These are the words of someone totally unacquainted with the Middle Ages. It's not just that the picture of the medieval period as an endless cycle of ignorance and repression is wrong (it is), but the picture itself is a modern one. It's an effect of the Enlightenment and secularization, which retrospectively created premodernity. Ironically, by describing American politics as a regression to a medieval past, Dennett is reifying the very ideology that created 'the Middle Ages' in the first place. There's no there there-no real confrontation with the past and no meaningful comparison.

Dennett isn't alone. Lou Mastriani writes for NorthJersey.com that "Donald Trump has taken us back to medieval times." David Brooks thinks the Trump administration "is more like a medieval monarchy than a modern nation-state. It's more 'The Madness of King George' than 'The Missiles of October.'" (Note: George III reigned in the nineteenth century!) Katty Kay opines for the BBC that Trump's White House "acts like some medieval court." Louis René Beres at Arutz Sheva, describing Trump's presidency as "forged in an atmosphere of determined unreason and anti-thought," identifies it with the prediction of what he terms "resurrected medieval darkness" in W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." And this is just from the past week.

These statements are historically ignorant. They're also a window onto modern liberal subjects' sense of the world.

The real payoff of assigning current politics to the distant past is to protect the notion of a just society, ruled by reason. The notion of a society ruled by reason stands in need of protecting because, well, it keeps bumping up against reality. Indeed, this notion has always been a fantasy, a way of papering over the violence and imperialism of modernity.

You don't get Hume without the transatlantic slave trade. You don't get Kant without the Holocaust. The just and rational world projected by Enlightenment philosophers turned out to be a space of whiteness called "Europe," cloaked in universalism. Enlightenment has winners and losers across the world in 2017.

None of this is to say that the various ideas and practices we now call the Enlightenment were a bad thing. Historicism teaches us that transhistorical judgments are problematic, in any case, since there exists no position outside history from which to judge. The crucial point is that the Enlightenment inculcated new forms of hegemony even as it promised new forms of liberation. If you are sure enlightenment has been good to you, that is because you live in the historical alleyways opened up by enlightenment. You are the product of enlightenment and its beneficiary. One of the minor exports of Enlightenment thought was the idea of the Middle Ages, the negative mirror image of secularist modernity.

So when Dennett makes an offhand reference to "the middle ages," all that historical baggage is packed in yet goes unacknowledged. He means, approximately, 'a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we've not experienced since what I imagine my rationalist, secularist self would feel in the Middle Ages.' So stated, the sentiment is obviously devoid of historical content. Ultimately, Dennett's appeal is an appeal to whiteness, scientism, secularism, and related ideological formations. Any of my colleagues in medieval studies will recognize this rhetorical move. It's the same move that made Anglo-Saxons and West Africans appear primitive to nineteenth-century white Europeans. (Notice how modernity transects both space and time.) Medievalists have learned to disarm this line of reasoning by asking, "'Primitive' to whom? On what grounds? For whose benefit? At whose expense?" The idea that Trump is making America medieval again deserves to be greeted with the same skepticism, and for the same reason.

Dennett's historical attitude is bound up with his own reflexive disdain for religious belief and religious institutions, a habit of thought characteristic of secularist modernity. (Every medievalist has been asked by a friend or family member, "How can you study such a religious period?") Tellingly, Dennett remarks that "the rise of theocracy in America" is one of the few threats that can spur him to political activism. He admits to resenting politics in general, because "I simply must take time out from what I'd really like to be doing to think about the political near future." Needless to say, the luxury of escaping politics is only afforded to those with substantial privilege and security. Dennett's comments on organized religion suggest what's at stake for him when he does choose to drop the pretense that his work is apolitical. Like Stephen Greenblatt, Dennett is invested in anti-religious polemic, in vindicating secularization as absolute social progress.

Like racial slavery, the scientific method, ISIS, the automobile, and phenomenology, Trumpism is an irreducibly modern response to modern conditions. Trump isn't taking us back to the Middle Ages because history only points in one direction. We can learn much from the violence of the past, but not by wishing away the violence of the present.

Eric Weiskott teaches medieval English poetry at Boston College; he's working on a book about the division of the past into medieval and modern periods.

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Columnists keep wanting to distance us moderns from Trump, but he's as modern as it gets. GUEST POST by Eric Weiskott In an interview for The Guardian last week, philosopher Daniel Dennett was asked whether "deep thinking" is what's needed in the current political climate. He responded: Yes. From everybody.

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Antiquity for Everyone: How Classics is Misappropriated for Evil Ends | SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE

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Antiquity for Everyone: How Classics is Misappropriated for Evil Ends | SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE

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In a response to a recent post on Thomas Jefferson's enthusiasm for Classical reading, a Twitter follower wrote:

@sentantiq probably helped justify slave ownership too

- imsodden gruit (@impossiblefruit) February 23, 2017

This is the sort of reactive comment which the character limit of Twitter fosters, but the issue here is much deeper and problematic than the 140-character limit can address. In our time, Classics is being threatened by a familiar (but resurgent) enemy: a set of dangerous reactionaries who want to read their own disturbing ideology into the Classics as a form of cultural appropriation; it is thought that Classical precedent confers legitimacy upon their thinking. For that reason, we ought to carefully examine and attempt to understand the nature of this type of cultural appropriation, and Jefferson's views provide a perfect reference point. The relation of Jefferson's Classical reading to his views on slavery is not so direct; nor is it true that he used the Classics to justify slavery, considering that he actually argued for eventual abolition. Yet, it is true that Jefferson's use of Classical references helps to highlight the more racist aspects of his thought. We should consider Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia as a case study in which Jefferson misappropriates Classical models to justify his thought.

Jefferson compares the life of slaves in Augustan Rome to the life of those in America:

We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America. The two sexes were confined in separate apartments, because to raise a child cost the master more than to buy one. Cato, for a very restricted indulgence to his slaves in this particular, took from them a certain price. But in this country the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without restraint. The same Cato, on a principle of oeconomy, always sold his sick and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to a master visiting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old tools, old and diseased servants, and every thing else become useless. . . . The American slaves cannot enumerate this among the injuries and insults they receive. It was the common practice to expose in the island Esculapius, in the Tyber, diseased slaves, whose cure was like to become tedious. The emperor Claudius, by an edict, gave freedom to such of them as should recover, and first declared that if any person chose to kill rather than expose them, it should be deemed homicide. The exposing them is a crime of which no instance has existed with us; and were it to be followed by death, it would be punished capitally. We are told of a certain Vedius Pollio, who, in the presence of Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his fish, for having broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their masters' children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.

Here, Jefferson tries to paint a picture of slave life in Rome which is worse than that of slave life in America, but his comparison is disgusting and absurd. Setting aside the dubious notion that suffering ought to be the subject of abstract comparison, Jefferson's factual claims about Roman slavery are not wide of the mark. Yet, where Jefferson errs is in minimizing the dreadful nature of slavery in America. Thus, Jefferson's argument is a form of misappropriation of a Classical model, but we cannot say that his claim was in any real way justified or rooted in his Classical reading. Rather, his argument hinges upon his callous disregard of the suffering of his contemporaries, and not on his reading of Roman history; he is, in other words, misunderstanding his own time, and giving this misunderstanding a veneer of respectability with an almost burdensome load of Classical comparison. His lack of empathy was not founded on his choice of reading, and there is no reason to suppose that he would have been more enlightened or compassionate if he had avoided the Classics.

Further, Jefferson writes:

"Homer tells us it was so 2600 years ago.
'Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.'
But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites."

Much of what Jefferson writes throughout the essay is undeniably racist, though he concludes that emancipation will and should eventually occur. Yet, it would be fallacious to suppose that Jefferson's racism was caused by his reading in Classical literature. A majority of the nation at the time held a wide range of racist views, but it makes no more sense to ascribe this racism to the prevalent Classical education of the time than it does to ascribe it to medicinal bloodletting or the popularity of powdered wigs. Rather, it should be clear to a serious reader of Classical literature that these thinkers read racism into the Classics. Consider Jefferson's claim that "the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites." This is patently absurd. The traditional notion of a "white" person as being, more specifically, of Anglo-Saxon (or at any rate, Northern European) ancestry would likely preclude most of the slaves mentioned in the world which Homer depicts. Many of the slaves would have been taken from various regions in the Mediterranean, and would have possessed varying ethnic backgrounds, and I submit that we have no firm footing in trying to determine the skin color or physical characteristics of any person mentioned in the poems except in passages where these features are explicitly described. Clearly, Jefferson has made an assumption and read this assumption into Homer's works.

The pattern of selective reading of the Classics is recurrent and widespread. At SententiaeAntiquae, we are guilty of a form of this. Quotes about tyranny seem so well suited to describe the terror we feel regarding Donald Trump, but in truth he has so far been more like Bibulus than Caesar. But we should not ignore the fact that Classics is not the only field which is misappropriated for horrific purposes: everything from arcane academic subjects to the most fashionable popular culture can be excerpted and willfully mangled to justify an agenda. Indeed, even science has throughout the ages been used in an attempt to bolster dangerous racist agendas, from segregation to eugenics programs. Yet, we do not (and should not) then dismiss science as a fundamentally racist pursuit; we should double down on our resistance to racist thought itself, and its tendency to degrade all of human life.

Jefferson grappled with the issue of slavery, and his arguments for gradual emancipation should make it clear that, although he was a racist, he was not necessarily an ardent enthusiast for slavery. He justified his thoughts on this subject by reference to Classical exempla because those formed the basis of his entire education, not because they contain some germ of racist thought. Any educated person of the time would have shared Classical references as a cultural touchstone, and I have little doubt that, regardless of what position a person may have argued for, and regardless of what the topic was, the cache of the argument would have been enhanced by reference to Classical exempla. It is said that the difference between Hamilton's Federalism and Jefferson's Republicanism is brought out clearly in an incident in which Jefferson was horrified at Hamilton's claim that Julius Caesar was the greatest man who ever lived. Here, Caesar served as a common reference point, but each man read into Caesar's biography his own ideas concerning statecraft. Where Hamilton saw a strong and enlightened central authority, Jefferson saw a disturbing threat to human liberty. As an even more salient example of the use of Classical exempla in the late 18 th century, consider Phillis Wheatley, the African American poet contemporary with Jefferson, who wrote in her poem To Maecenas,

The happier Terence all the choir inspir'd,
His soul replenish'd, and his bosom fir'd;
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric's sable race;
From age to age transmitting thus his name
With the finest glory in the rolls of fame?

Many of Phillis Wheatley's poems are imbued with the Classical spirit, and are very much engaged with a response to Classical models, yet she here employs her Classical knowledge to open a discussion about African achievement throughout history. Where Jefferson drew on Classical exempla to discuss the nature and experience of slavery, Wheatley drew on a Classical exemplum to note the profound influence of one of Antiquity's most popular African authors. It is this same Terence whom John Adams so forcefully recommends to his son (Letter, Feb 12, 1781):

"Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin... His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model."

Classical literature is particularly susceptible to misappropriation precisely because of its universality and trans-cultural appeal. The literature, history, and exempla of the Classics can hardly be considered exclusively Greek and Italian property, and it would be even more absurd to suggest that the remote peoples of Northern Europe could claim them. Classical Antiquity is a possession for all humans; it is a common cultural artifact which everyone can and should have access to. Indeed, recent work by The HistoryMakers has served to highlight the way in which prominent African American leaders have drawn on Classical education in the fight for social justice. In making the facile observation that Classical references were used in justifying racism, we run the risk of abandoning Antiquity entirely to the unsavory elements who would want to weaponize it for racial and class warfare. To a racist, everything justifies racism; their core ideology should be resisted, and not the exempla by which they attempt to provide a retroactive apologia for their thinking. We should instead look to the Classics for models of how to create a better pluralistic society, and remember the words of Terence: homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. (I am a human, and consider nothing human foreign to me.)

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Antiquity for Everyone: How Classics is Misappropriated for Evil Ends

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In a response to a recent post on Thomas Jefferson's enthusiasm for Classical reading, a Twitter follower wrote: @sentantiq probably helped justify slave ownership too - imsodden gruit (@impossiblefruit) February 23, 2017 This is the sort of reactive comment which the character limit of Twitter fosters, but the issue here is much deeper and problematic than the...

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Teaching & Researching the Medieval Past in the Face of Present Crisis: Why and How Medieval Studies *Now*? (with images, tweets) · cbboxer · Storify

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Teaching & Researching the Medieval Past in the Face of Present Crisis: Why and How Medieval Studies *Now*? (with images, tweets) · cbboxer · Storify

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Teaching & Researching the Medieval Past in the Face of Present Crisis: Why and How Medieval Studies *Now*? (with images, tweets) · cbboxer

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On March 8, Medievalists from the University of Chicago and beyond gathered to discuss the state of the field, what the study of the Middle Ages can provide in a time of political crisis, and what we can do to fight against the appropriation of the medieval by the radical right.

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There's no such thing as a 'pure' European—or anyone else | Science | AAAS

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There's no such thing as a 'pure' European—or anyone else | Science | AAAS

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When the first busloads of migrants from Syria and Iraq rolled into Germany 2 years ago, some small towns were overwhelmed. The village of Sumte, population 102, had to take in 750 asylum seekers. Most villagers swung into action, in keeping with Germany's strong Willkommenskultur, or "welcome culture." But one self-described neo-Nazi on the district council told The New York Times that by allowing the influx, the German people faced "the destruction of our genetic heritage" and risked becoming "a gray mishmash."

Special package: Human migrations

In fact, the German people have no unique genetic heritage to protect. They-and all other Europeans-are already a mishmash, the children of repeated ancient migrations, according to scientists who study ancient human origins. New studies show that almost all indigenous Europeans descend from at least three major migrations in the past 15,000 years, including two from the Middle East. Those migrants swept across Europe, mingled with previous immigrants, and then remixed to create the peoples of today.

Using revolutionary new methods to analyze DNA and the isotopes found in bones and teeth, scientists are exposing the tangled roots of peoples around the world, as varied as Germans, ancient Philistines, and Kashmiris. Few of us are actually the direct descendants of the ancient skeletons found in our backyards or historic homelands. Only a handful of groups today, such as Australian Aborigines, have deep bloodlines untainted by mixing with immigrants.

"We can falsify this notion that anyone is pure," says population geneticist Lynn Jorde of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Instead, almost all modern humans "have this incredibly complex history of mixing and mating and migration."

Wind back the clock more than a thousand years-a trivial slice of time compared with the 200,000 years or so since our species emerged-and stories of exclusive heritage or territory crumble. "Basically, everybody's myth is wrong, even the indigenous groups'," says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University.

Tacitus, the Roman historian, reports that in 9 C.E. a member of the Germanic Cherusci tribe called Arminius led a rebellion against the Romans near the village of Kalkriese in northern Germany. Against all odds, the tribes slaughtered three Roman legions in what became known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

After Tacitus's account resurfaced in the 15th century, German nationalists resurrected the myth of Arminius, who is often depicted as a blond, muscular young chieftain and known as Hermann. Hailed as the first "German" hero, he was said to have united the Germanic tribes and driven the Romans from their territory. That was considered the start of a period when fearsome Germanic tribes such as the Vandals swept around Europe, wresting territory from Romans and others.

In the 20th century, the Nazis added their own dark spin to that origin story, citing Arminius as part of an ancient pedigree of a "master race" from Germany and northern Europe that they called Aryans. They used their view of prehistory and archaeology to justify claims to the tribes' ancient homelands in Poland and Austria.

Scholars agree that there was indeed a real battle that sent shock waves through the Roman Empire, which then stretched from the island of Britain to Egypt. But much of the rest of Arminius's story is myth: The Romans persisted deep in Germania until at least the third century C.E., as shown by the recent discovery of a third-century Roman battlefield in Harzhorn, Germany. And Arminius by no means united the more than 50 Germanic tribes of the time. He persuaded five tribes to join him in battle, but members of his own tribe soon killed him.

Moreover, Arminius and his kin were not pure "Aryan," if that term means a person whose ancestors lived solely in what is now Germany or Scandinavia. The Cherusci tribe, like all Europeans of their day and later, were themselves composites, built from serial migrations into the heart of Europe and then repeatedly remixed. "The whole concept of an ethnic German ... it's ludicrous when you look at the longue durée [long time] scale," says archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

After World War II, many scholars recoiled from studying migrations, in reaction to the Nazi misuse of history and archaeology. The Nazis had invoked migrations of "foreign" groups to German territory to justify genocide. "The whole field of migration studies was ideologically tainted," says archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Some researchers also resisted the idea that migration helped spread key innovations such as farming, partly because that might imply that certain groups were superior.

Nor did researchers have a reliable method to trace prehistoric migrations. "Most of the archaeological evidence for movement is based on artifacts, but artifacts can be stolen or copied, so they are not a real good proxy for actual human movement," says archaeologist Doug Price of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who tracks ancient migration by analyzing isotopes. "When I started doing this in 1990, I thought people were very sedentary and didn't move around much."

Today, however, new methods yield more definitive evidence of migration, sparking an explosion of studies. The isotopes Price and others study are specific to local water and food and thus can reveal where people grew up and whether they later migrated. DNA from ancient skeletons and living people offers the "gold standard" in proving who was related to whom.

The new data confirm that humans have always had wanderlust, plus a yen to mix with all manner of strangers. After the first Homo sapiens arose in Africa, several bands walked out of the continent about 60,000 years ago and into the arms of Neandertals and other archaic humans. Today, almost all humans outside Africa carry traces of archaic DNA.

That was just one of many episodes of migration and mixing. The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago. But some of those pioneers, such as a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania, have little connection to today's Europeans, Reich says.

His team studied DNA from 51 Europeans and Asians who lived 7000 to 45,000 years ago. They found that most of the DNA in living Europeans originated in three major migrations, starting with hunter-gatherers who came from the Middle East as the glaciers retreated 19,000 to 14,000 years ago. In a second migration about 9000 years ago, farmers from northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Greece and Turkey, moved in.

That massive wave of farmers washed across the continent. Ancient DNA records their arrival in Germany, where they are linked with the Linear Pottery culture, 6900 to 7500 years ago. A 7000-year-old woman from Stuttgart, Germany, for example, has the farmers' genetic signatures, setting her apart from eight hunter-gatherers who lived just 1000 years earlier in Luxembourg and Sweden. Among people living today, Sardinians retain the most DNA from those early farmers, whose genes suggest that they had brown eyes and dark hair.

The farmers moved in family groups and stuck to themselves awhile before mixing with local hunter-gatherers, according to a study in 2015 that used ancient DNA to calculate the ratio of men to women in the farming groups. That's a stark contrast to the third major migration, which began about 5000 years ago when herders swept in from the steppe north of the Black Sea in what is now Russia. Those Yamnaya pastoralists herded cattle and sheep, and some rode newly domesticated horses, says archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.

In the journal Antiquity last month, Kristiansen and paleogeneticist Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen reported that the sex ratios of the earliest Yamnaya burials in central Europe suggest that the new arrivals were mostly men. Arriving with few women, those tall strangers were apparently eager to woo or abduct the local farmers' daughters. Not long after the Yamnaya invasion, their skeletons were buried with those of women who had lived on farms as children, according to the strontium and nitrogen isotopes in their bones, says Price, who analyzed them.

The unions between the Yamnaya and the descendants of Anatolian farmers catalyzed the creation of the famous Corded Ware culture, known for its distinctive pottery impressed with cordlike patterns, Kristiansen says. According to DNA analysis, those people may have inherited Yamnaya genes that made them taller; they may also have had a then-rare mutation that enabled them to digest lactose in milk, which quickly spread.

It was a winning combination. The Corded Ware people had many offspring who spread rapidly across Europe. They were among the ancestors of the Bell Beaker culture of central Europe, known by the vessels they used to drink wine, according to a study by Kristiansen and Reich published this month. "This big wave of Yamnaya migration washed all the way to the shores of Ireland," says population geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College in Dublin. Bell Beaker pots and DNA appeared about 4000 years ago in burials on Rathlin Island, off the coast of Northern Ireland, his group reported this year.

This new picture means that the Hermann of lore was himself a composite of post-ice age hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and Yamnaya herders. So are most other Europeans-including the ancient Romans whose empire Arminius fought.

The three-part European mixture varies across the continent, with different ratios of each migration and trace amounts of other lineages. But those quirks rarely match the tales people tell about their ancestry. For example, the Basques of northern Spain, who have a distinct language, have long thought themselves a people apart. But last year, population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden reported that the DNA of modern Basques is most like that of the ancient farmers who populated northern Spain before the Yamnaya migration. In other words, Basques are part of the usual European mix, although they carry less Yamnaya DNA than other Europeans.

Farther north, the Irish Book of Invasions, written by an anonymous author in the 11th century, recounts that the "Sons of Míl Espáine ... after many wanderings in Scythia and Egypt" eventually reached Spain and Ireland, creating a modern Irish people distinct from the British-and linked to the Spanish. That telling resonates with a later yarn about ships from the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the shores of Ireland and the Scottish Orkney Islands in 1588, Bradley says: "Good-looking, dark-haired Spaniards washed ashore" and had children with Gaelic and Orkney Islands women, creating a strain of Black Irish with dark hair, eyes, and skin.

Although it's a great story, Bradley says, it "just didn't happen." In two studies, researchers have found only "a very small ancient Spanish contribution" to British and Irish DNA, says human geneticist Walter Bodmer of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, co-leader of a landmark 2015 study of British genetics.

The Irish also cherish another origin story, of the Celtic roots they are said to share with the Scots and Welsh. In the Celtic Revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers such as William Butler Yeats drew from stories in the Book of Invasions and medieval texts. Those writings described a migration of Gaels, or groups of Celts from the mainland who clung to their identity in the face of later waves of Roman, Germanic, and Nordic peoples.

But try as they might, researchers so far haven't found anyone, living or dead, with a distinct Celtic genome. The ancient Celts got their name from Greeks who used "Celt" as a label for barbarian outsiders-the diverse Celtic-speaking tribes who, starting in the late Bronze Age, occupied territory from Portugal to Turkey. "It's a hard question who the Celts are," says population geneticist Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Bodmer's team traced the ancestry of 2039 people whose families have lived in the same parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales since the 19th century. These people form at least nine genetic and geographic clusters, showing that after their ancestors arrived in those regions, they put down roots and married their neighbors. But the clusters themselves are of diverse origin, with close ties to people now in Germany, Belgium, and France. "'Celtic' is a cultural definition," Bodmer says. "It has nothing to do with hordes of people coming from somewhere else and replacing people."

English myths fare no better. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that in 449 C.E., two Germanic tribespeople, Hengist and Horsa, sailed from what is now the Netherlands to southeast England, starting a fierce conflict. As more Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived, violence broke out with the local Britons and ended in "rivers of blood," according to accounts by medieval monks. Scholars have debated just how bloody that invasion was, and whether it was a mass migration or a small delegation of elite kings and their warriors.

An answer came in 2016 from a study of the ancient DNA of Anglo-Saxons and indigenous Britons, who were buried side by side in the fifth and sixth centuries in a cemetery near Cambridge, U.K. They lived and died together and even interbred, as shown by one person who had a mix of DNA from both Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and a genetic Briton who was buried with a large cruciform Anglo-Saxon brooch. Although the stories stress violence, the groups "were mixing very quickly," says Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, U.K., who co-wrote the study.

The team went on to show that 25% to 40% of the ancestry of modern Britons is Anglo-Saxon. Even people in Wales and Scotland-thought to be Celtic strongholds-get about 30% of their DNA from Anglo-Saxons, says co-author Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K.

The boom in studies of migration is centered on Europe, where access to ancient remains is relatively easy and cold climates can help preserve DNA. But geneticists are beginning to probe the makeup of ancient people elsewhere. For example, findings from recent excavations in Israel are close to solving a long-standing mystery from the Bible: the identity of the ancient Philistines.

In biblical texts, those "uncircumcised" people are known as the bitter enemies of the Israelites; the name "Philistine" is still a slur in English. They're said to have lived in Canaan, between present-day Tel Aviv and Gaza in Israel. They ate pork, battled Samson's armies, and stole the Ark of the Covenant. Goliath, whom David slew with a sling, was a Philistine. But after Old Testament times, the group disappears from both scripture and historical accounts.

To find the Philistines' origins, researchers have studied artifacts and remains from ancient Philistine cities in Israel. The evidence, including isotopic analysis, shows that the Philistines were a motley crew of immigrants, possibly pirates, who hailed from many ports, bringing pigs from Europe and donkeys in caravans from Egypt. "The Philistines are an entangled culture from western Anatolia, Cyprus, Greece, the Balkans, you name it," says Maeir, who has directed excavations at the Philistine city of Gath for 2 decades.

Maeir says he thinks that the Philistines soon intermarried with people already living in Canaan instead of going extinct. If so, the loathsome Philistines are part of the ancestral stock for both Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews. Those groups, so full of enmity today, are genetically closely related, according to a study in 2000 of the paternally inherited Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Seventy percent of the Jewish men and half of the Arab men inherited their Y chromosomes from the same set of paternal ancestors who lived in the Middle East within the last few thousand years.

As techniques for probing ethnic origins spread, nearly every week brings a new paper testing and often falsifying lore about one ancient culture or another. The Kashmiri of northern India do not seem to be related to Alexander the Great or the lost tribes of Israel. Parsis in Iran and India are not solely of ancient Iranian heritage, having mixed with local Indian women, although Parsi priests do descend chiefly from just two men.

"Ethnic groups in the past and present create an 'imagined past' of the longtime and 'pure' origins of their group," Maeir says. But that created past often has "little true relation to the historical processes" that actually created the group, he says.

So far, the origin stories that appear to hew most closely to reality belong to indigenous peoples around the world. For example, the Tlingit and Tsimshian tribes of British Columbia in Canada and Alaska claim to have lived along the west coast of North America from "time immemorial." Living tribespeople do descend in part from three ancient Native Americans who lived in the region 2500 to 6000 years ago, according to DNA analyses published last month. Even so, most modern Native Americans are not directly related to the ancient people who lived in the same areas because their offspring moved, were displaced, or went extinct over the millennia, Reich says.

In Australia, aboriginal stories recall even longer connections to their lands, even seeming to refer to times when sea levels rose and fell more than 15,000 years ago. Those claims are among the few that genome studies support. DNA evidence puts aboriginal ancestors on the continent 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Once the first Australians arrived, they settled in three regions and remained in those discrete homelands for tens of thousands of years, a DNA study published in March suggests.

But the Aborigines are rare among the peoples of Earth, where migrations have been the norm. Almost always, Reich says, "the idea that the ancestors of any one population have lived in the same place for tens of thousands of years with no substantial immigration is wrong."

Back in Sumte in the fall of 2015, the 750 refugees from Syria arrived on schedule. The adults mostly kept to themselves, learning German and taking occasional construction jobs. But their children sang "O Tannenbaum" in a local church at Christmas and their teens ventured out often, seeking cellphone signals in the quiet town.

In the following months, almost all the refugees dispersed to larger towns throughout Germany. In time, some of the young immigrants will contribute their DNA to the next generation of Germans, re-enacting on a small scale the process of migration and assimilation that once played out repeatedly on this same land-and far beyond.

doi:10.1126/science.aal1186

Ann is a contributing correspondent for Science

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There's no such thing as a 'pure' European-or anyone else

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Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was impressed by what he called "the evidence of an immense ancient population". And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.

Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had "culture" in the title: Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, culture was the "pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world". Arnold wasn't interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called "culture", which he defined as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society". Civilisation, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture's many modes.

Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor's or Arnold's notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic. Arnold's ideal was "the man of culture" and he would have considered "primitive culture" an oxymoron. Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. Yet these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern western people. So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call the west.

Someone asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation, and he replied: "I think it would be a very good idea." Like many of the best stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but also like many of the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavour of truth. But my own response would have been very different: I think you should give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is not at all a good idea, and western culture is no improvement.

One reason for the confusions "western culture" spawns comes from confusions about the west. We have used the expression "the west" to do very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England's poet of empire, wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet", contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the cold war, "the west" was one side of the iron curtain; "the east" its opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the world. Often, in recent years, "the west" means the north Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America - now dubbed "the global south" - though many people in Latin America will claim a western inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South Africans, so that "western" here can look simply like a euphemism for white.

Of course, we often also talk today of the western world to contrast it not with the south but with the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr, the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition further. Because European and American debates today about whether western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.

This civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years, then. But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier.

or the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents: he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to "why the earth, which is one, has three names, all women's". Still, despite his puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.

But here's the important point: it would not have occurred to Herodotus to think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people: Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus - Bodrum in modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn't make him an Asian; it left him a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word "European" as an adjective, never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of Europeans as a people, either.

Then the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the prophet's death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere 30 years to defeat the Persian empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest provinces from Rome's residue in Byzantium.

The Umayyad dynasty, which began in 661, pushed on west into north Africa and east into central Asia. In early 711, it sent an army across the straits of Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries. Within seven years, most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly 800 years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.

The Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north. But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus, and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the conquest of Frankish Europe. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they could have sailed up the Thames. "Perhaps," he added, "the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet."

What matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as " Europenses ", Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a "European" was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims. (Even this, however, is a bit of a simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was not yet Christian.)

Now, nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word "western" for that job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula - part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe - until nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between Islam and the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.

Starting in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman empire gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent 's army at Vienna, did the reconquest of eastern Europe begin. It was a slow process. It wasn't until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early 19th century, Bulgaria even later.

We have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe - Christendom - defining itself through opposition. And yet the move from "Christendom" to "western culture" isn't straightforward.

For one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred kilometres south-west of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: "Greece once had the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning," he wrote. "Then chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has come to France."

The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the " translatio studii": the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg: "The foundation of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second."

So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally reunited - pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn - in the academies of Europe and the United States.

here are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the golden nugget the core of a civilisation opposed to Islam. Because the classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid, translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the Arabs.

In the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of Tours pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of al-Andalus, bellicose as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless others.

There were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba's ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Cordoba's Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century, was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the Caliph's medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides's De Materia Medica, he took up Ibn Shaprut's suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the 12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as "The Commentator", because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.

The term 'western culture' is surprisingly modern - more recent certainly than the phonograph

But the golden-nugget story was bound to be beset by difficulties. It imagines western culture as the expression of an essence - a something - which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. The pitfalls of this sort of essentialism are evident in a wide range of cases. Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer, father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it isn't going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so, when some of those in one generation move from the territory to which English identity was once tied - move, for example, to a New England - the label can even travel beyond the territory. Identities can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences. You don't get to be called "English" because there's an essence that this label follows; you're English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label by being somehow connected with a place called England.

So how did the people of the north Atlantic, and some of their kin around the world, get connected to a realm we call the west, and gain an identity as participants in something called western culture?

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James Gillray's 1805 cartoon, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, depicts prime minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images

t will help to recognise that the term "western culture" is surprisingly modern - more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney. "One," Tylor wrote, "had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine, whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred ... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and roasting an onion representing him." Primitive culture, indeed.

So the very idea of the "west," to name a heritage and object of study, doesn't really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century. When, around the time of the first world war, Oswald Spengler wrote the influential book translated as The Decline of the West - a book that introduced many readers to the concept - he scoffed at the notion that there were continuities between western culture and the classical world. During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, the writer and journalist Rebecca West recounted a visitor's sense that "it's uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our western culture". The "recent blow" in question was the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.

To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn't spend so much time talking it up

If the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe - something that few stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England's great universities. To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn't spend so much time talking it up.

Of course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was bound to become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture, producing a photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.

Talk of "western culture" has had a larger implausibility to overcome. It places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted intellectual and artistic achievements - philosophy, literature, art, music; the things Arnold prized and humanists study. But if western culture was there in Troyes in the late 12th century when Chrétien was alive, it had little to do with the lives of most of his fellow citizens, who did not know Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato. Today the classical heritage plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans or Britons. Are these Arnoldian achievements that hold us together? Of course not. What holds us together, surely, is Tylor's broad sense of culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behaviour that shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and civilians, shop assistants and consumers. Intellectuals like me have a tendency to suppose that the things we care about are the most important things. I don't say they don't matter. But they matter less than the story of the golden nugget suggests.

So how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to tell ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? Well, by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something that was already present in Tylor's work. Remember his famous definition: it began with culture as "that complex whole". What you're hearing is something we can call organicism. A vision of culture not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an organic unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully adapted to occupy a particular place, each part essential to the functioning of the whole. The Eurovision song contest, the cutouts of Matisse, the dialogues of Plato are all parts of a larger whole. As such, each is a holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if you have never personally checked it out. Even if it isn't your jam, it is still your heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our everyday selves could be dusted with gold.

Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they're all having a cheeky Nando's

Now, there are organic wholes in our cultural life: the music, the words, the set-design, the dance of an opera fit and are meant to fit together. It is, in the word Wagner invented, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. But there isn't one great big whole called culture that organically unites all these parts. Spain, in the heart of "the west," resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off in India and Japan in "the east," the home of Oriental despotism. Jefferson's cultural inheritance - Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom - did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily - perhaps even more easily - than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. The same is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they're all having a cheeky Nando's.

Once we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan picture in which every element of culture, from philosophy or cuisine to the style of bodily movement, is separable in principle from all the others - you really can walk and talk like an African-American and think with Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant, as well as with Martin Luther King and Miles Davis. No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam.

The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify playlist we have never quite listened to. If these thinkers are part of our Arnoldian culture, there is no guarantee that what is best in them will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in modern Muslim cultures.

Values aren't a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the west, however you define it, being western, provides no guarantee that you will care about western civilisation. The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is true in the other direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests that we cannot help caring about the traditions of "the west" because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a western destiny.

In the year of Edward Burnett Tylor's death, what we have been taught to call western civilisation stumbled into a death match with itself: the Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other, marching young men to their deaths in order to "defend civilisation". The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked Tylor's evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold's worst fears about what civilisation really meant. Arnold and Tylor would have agreed, at least, on this: culture isn't a box to check on the questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with others.

Culture - like religion and nation and race - provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.

We live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I can draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation, because I don't think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African. He once wrote, " Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." "I am human, I think nothing human alien to me." Now there's an identity worth holding on to.
* This is an edited version of Kwame Anthony Appiah's BBC Reith lecture, Culture, the fourth part of the series Mistaken Identities, which is available on the Radio 4 website

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There is no such thing as western civilisation | Kwame Anthony Appiah

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Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip.

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Suspect in Portland Hate Crime Murders is a Known White Supremacist - Blogtown - Portland Mercury

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Suspect in Portland Hate Crime Murders is a Known White Supremacist - Blogtown - Portland Mercury

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The man accused of the brutal hate crime slayings of two people at the Hollywood Transit Center on Friday afternoon is a known local white supremacist.

Jeremy Christian, 35, was booked early Saturday morning on two aggravated murder charges, an attempted murder charge, two intimidation (hate crime) charges, and a felon in possession of a restricted weapon charge.

The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) reported that the man "was on the MAX train yelling various remarks that would be best characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions. At least two of the victims attempted to intervene with the suspect and calm him down. The suspect attacked the men, stabbing three, before leaving the train."

Witnesses told the police that he was harassing two women who appear to be Muslim. One was described as wearing a hijab. One of the men he stabbed died at the scene, one was pronounced dead at a hospital, and one is expected to survive.

Christian is a known right wing extremist and white supremacist. On April 29, Christian showed up to the right-wing "March for Free Speech" on 82nd Avenue in Montavilla with a baseball bat in an attempt to assault left-wing protesters. The bat was quickly confiscated by Portland police officers. He ranted how he was a nihilist. He'd soon yelled racial slurs ("fuck all you n*****s") and gave the Nazi salute throughout the day. He yelled " Hail Vinland" throughout the day.

A few Portland police officers on April 29 appeared to be familiar with Christian, but not threatened by him. They claimed he had a head injury and was mentally ill.

Here's my video of Christian, draped in a flag, arriving at the event.

Here's another video. At the 25-second mark, he yells "fuck all you n*****s". The right-wing rally organizers refused to let him.

Shortly later, I asked him his name. I recognized the name and remembered the he posted on Facebook that he'd shoot police officers if they tried to disarm him (he was never arrested).

He later gave the Nazi salute.

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Suspect in Portland Hate Crime Murders is a Known White Supremacist

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The man accused of the brutal hate crime slayings of two people at the Hollywood Transit Center on Friday afternoon is a known local white supremacist. Jeremy Christian, 35, was booked early Saturday morning on two aggravated murder charges, an attempted murder charge, two intimidation (hate crime) charges, and a felon in possession of a restricted weapon charge.