Political Fictions: The ‘Aryan’ Medievalisms of Harold A. Covington

In the twenty-first century, political medievalism has been dominated by the right wing, including but not limited to far-right violent extremists. Scholarship exploring the medievalisms of the post-war far right has tended towards the very contemporary and reactive with, for example, examinations of the manifesto of the Oslo White terrorist murderer,¹ the digital medievalisms of the English Defence League and Al-Qaida,² US identitarians and other extremist groups,³ and the circulation of medievalist memes.⁴ These investigations are typically focused on the digital realm, including social media, and often on overtly political speech. Cord Whitaker finds roots of alt-right medievalisms in twentieth-century...