Who Owns the Middle Ages? Participatory Medievalism and Structural Exclusion

The recent study of political and online medievalism has placed a range of new ideas under scrutiny about the ways in which the Middle Ages (in particular) and history (as a whole) can be used outside of scholarship as powerful modes of supporting almost any given ideology. Perhaps the most powerful tool in all of this has been the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies, which aggregate User-Generated Content into public and social media sites. Early apologists for Web 2.0 argued that these are democratising and revolutionary technologies, which allow for an increasingly fluid and demotic mode of participatory culture. Closer scrutiny, however, suggests otherwise, noting that the structural inequalities of the internet merely replicate—or even amplify—the structural inequalities of the offline world. This chapter explores three case studies of historical appropriations, which seemingly demonstrate a kind of ‘participatory medievalism’ but which, I argue, offer indications of the limits of democratic participation. In each case I analyse what happens to historical authority in those instances where users are invited to decode medievalism? In an online environment in which a blog post can rank higher than a journal article on Google, I ask, who owns the medieval past