Extended Bibliography
Note: This list contains sources on medieval-themed extremism published in academic books and journals within the last 20 years. For earlier studies of medievalism, see our other relevant resources section here. For articles on these issues published in journalistic outlets, see our “in the news” section here. Where practical, we have listed an entire anthology or journal special issue in lieu of individual essays.
Racism, Antisemitism, and White Supremacy
Racism and Antisemitism (broad discussions)
Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Karl Fugelso, ed., Medievalism and Discrimination: Studies in Medievalism XXVIII (2019).
Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter, ARC Humanities Press, 2021. (also in progressive medievalisms)
Maghan Keita, “Race: What the Bookstore Hid,” in Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder, eds., Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, Routledge, 2011: 130-140.
Lisa Lampert, “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3 (2004): 391–421.
Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Jews and Other Minorities, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto, Arc Humanities Press, 2017.
Matthew Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, New York: Palgrave, 2018.
Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: Modern Racism/Medieval Race-Thinking, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Cord J. Whitaker, “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future,” Postmedieval 6 (2015): 3-11.
Helen Young, “Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 28 (2013): 2–6.
Helen Young, “Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race,” Studies in Medievalism XXIV (2015): 39–49.
Antisemitism
Nina Caputo and Hannah Johnson, eds., The Holocaust and the Middle Ages, a special issue of postmedieval 5.3 (Fall 2014).
Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1997.
Esther Liberman Cuenca, “Historical Malapropism and the Medieval Blood Libel in American Politics,” Studies in Medievalism XXIX 2020: 3–12.
Hannah Johnson, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History, University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Christine M. Neufeld, “Unmasking the Leper King: The Spectral Jew in The Kingdom of Heaven,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 23 (2008), 81-96.
Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton, Cornell University Press, 2016.
Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Jews and Other Minorities, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Magda Teter, “Blood Libel, a Lie and Its Legacies,” in Albin et al., eds. Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, Fordham University Press, 2019: 44-57.
Richard Utz, “Remembering Ritual Murder: The Anti-Semitic Blood Accusation Narrative in Medieval and Contemporary Cultural Memory,” in Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, ed. Eyolf Østrem, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005: 145-162.
Contemporary Racism
Andrew B. R. Elliott, “Internet Medievalism and the White Middle Ages,” History Compass 16.3 (March 2018): 1-10.
Michael R. Evans, “Is Pre-Columbian America Medieval?: Indigenous Absence in American Medievalisms,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 30 (2015).
Ali Frauman, “Chasing Freyja: Rape, Immigration, and the Medieval in Alt-Right Discourse,” Studies in Medievalism XXX, 2021.
Wan-Chun Kao, “Identitarian Politics, Precarious Sovereignty.” Postmedieval 11 (2020): 371–383.
Alexander L. Kaufman, “Robin Hood Political Memes: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Far Right’s Appropriation of the English Outlaw,” Studies in Medievalism XXX, 2021.
Dorothy Kim, The Alt-Medieval: Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies, University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming).
Julia Costa Lopez and Katharine M. Millar, “Conspiratorial Medievalism: History and Hyperagency in the Far-Right Knights Templar Security Imaginary,” Politics, 2021. (also in religious extremism)
Adam Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019).
Coral Lumbley, “‘Velut in sentinam congessit’: Refugees and racism, modern and medieval,” Postmedieval 11 (2020), 407–415.
Nahir Otaño-Gracia and Daniel Armenti, “Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today,” Medieval Feminist Forum 2017: 176-201.
Maggie M. Williams, “‘Celtic’ Crosses and the Myth of Whiteness,” in Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, Fordham University Press, 2019: 220-232.
Daniel Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics, Arc Humanities Press, 2019.
Daniel Wollenberg, “The Battle of Tours and the US Southern Border,” Studies in Medievalism XXIX (2020): 21–30.
Daniel Wollenberg, “The New Knighthood: Terrorism and the Medieval,” postmedieval 5.1 (2014): 21–33.
Historical Racism
Annie Abrams, “ ‘The miserable slaves, the degraded serfs’: Frederick Douglass, Anglo-Saxonism, and the Mexican War,” Postmedieval 10.2 (2019): 151-161.
William J. Diebold, “The Nazi Middle Ages,” in Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, Fordham University Press, 2019: 104-115.
Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, Punctum Books: 2019.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, University Press of Florida, 2004
Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, Duke University Press, 2003.
Amy S. Kaufman, “Purity,” in Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, eds., Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, D. S. Brewer, 2014: 199-206.
Mary Dockray Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Shyama Rajendran, “Undoing ‘the Vernacular”: Dismantling Structures of Raciolinguistic Supremacy,” Literature Compass 16.9-10, 2019.
Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages, University Press of Florida, 2014.
Tison Pugh, Queer Chivalry: The Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature, LSU Press, 2013.
Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War, Louisiana State University Press, 2009.
Helen Young, “Race, Medievalism and The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Turn,” Postmedieval 11 (2020): 468–475.
Racism in Popular Culture
Madeline Caviness, “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008): 1–33.
Shiloh Carroll, “Barbarian Colonizers and Postcolonialism in Westeros and Britain,” in Brian A. Pavlac, ed., Game of Thrones versus History: Written in Blood, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017: 73-84.
Shiloh Carroll, Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, D. S. Brewer, 2018.
Marie Sachiko Cecire, Re-enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Brian de Ruiter, “A Defense Against the ‘Other’: Constructing Sites on The Edge of Civilization and Savagery,” in Game of Thrones versus History: Written in Blood, ed. Brian A. Pavlac, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017: 85-96.
Stephanie Downes and Helen Young, “The Maiden Fair: Nineteenth-Century Medievalist Art and the Gendered Aesthetics of Whiteness in HBO’s Game of Thrones,” Postmedieval 10.2 (2019): 219-235.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Kavita Mudan Finn, ed. Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Mat Hardy, “Game of Tropes: The Orientalist Tradition in the Works of G.R.R. Martin,” International Journal of Arts & Sciences 8.1 (2015): 409–20.
Mat Hardy, “The Eastern Question,” in Game of Thrones versus History: Written in Blood, ed. Brian A. Pavlac, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017: 97-110.
Touria Khannous, Black-Arab Encounters in Literature and Film, Routledge, forthcoming 2022.
Tison Pugh and Lynn Tarte Ramey, eds. Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and The Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, New York University Press, 2019.
Michelle R. Warren, “’The Last Syllable of Modernity’: Chaucer in the Caribbean,” postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 79–93.
Katherine Wymer, “A Quest for the Black Knight: Casting People of Color in Arthurian Film and Television,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012).
Helen Young, “It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!” Race, Neo/medievalisms, and the World of Dragon Age,” Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012): 2-9.
Helen Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness, Routledge, 2016.
Helen Young, “Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness on Westeros.org,” Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28 (2014): 737-747.
Helen Young, “Racial Logics, Franchising, and Video Game Genres: The Lord of The Rings, Games and Cultures 11 (2016): 343-364.
Helen Young, “Whitewashing the “Real” Middle Ages in Popular Media,” in Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, Fordham University Press, 2019: 233-242.
