Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T09:21:37.453Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Afterword: National Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2023

Get access

Summary

WHEN THE GLOBAL pandemic hit Europe in early 2020, nationalist uses of the medieval past suddenly seemed a little more esoteric than they had only weeks before. And yet, the national Middle Ages would soon enough resume operations. Two years in, they appear to have taken on greater urgency, and in some cases downright feverishness, amid generally raised stakes. The medium- to long-term impact of the pandemic on national medievalism is harder to predict, however.

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

Type
Chapter
Information
National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century
Switzerland and Britain
, pp. 213 - 216
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×