The Middle Ages, and ideas about modern culture drawn from or rooted in the medieval period, have found themselves recurring with alarming frequency within recent political discourse. From President Bush's crusade rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror to the Far Right's location of White nationalism within an ongoing framework of medieval nation‐founding, the past has increasingly been used in the service of the present. In their more egregious forms—such as the rise of White supremacist movements in Europe, the USA, and Australia and their amalgamation into mainstream political discourse—the use of medieval national and cultural memories has led to a whitewashing of the medieval past. This article argues that these instances of medievalism are not simply inaccuracies but come about through a recirculation of vague ideas about the Middle Ages through online in‐groups. Consequently, such political uses of the medieval past are often what have been termed “banal” medievalisms in the sense that they are not always intended as deliberate references to history by useful appropriations in the service of the present.

中文翻译：

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互联网中世纪与白人中世纪

中世纪以及起源于或扎根于中世纪的现代文化观念在最近的政治讨论中频频出现，令人震惊。从布什总统在反恐战争中的激烈论述到在中世纪民族建立的持续框架内极右派白人民族主义的定位，过去已被越来越多地用于当下。在欧洲，美国和澳大利亚，白人至上主义运动的兴起，以及它们融合为主流政治言论之后，中世纪民族和文化记忆的使用导致了中世纪过去的粉饰。本文认为，中世纪主义的这些例子不仅是不准确的，而且是通过在线小组对关于中世纪的模糊观念的重新出现而产生的。因此，中世纪过去的这种政治用途通常被称为“平庸的”中世纪主义，在某种意义上，它们并非总是旨在通过有用的拨款为当今服务而刻意地参考历史。