Review of The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past

I recently read The Devil’s Historians and I cannot praise this book highly enough. The only reason I give it two thumbs up is because I lack more thumbs.

This book is a brilliant analysis of how people use history to craft extremist narratives, and it uses plain language,  rather than academic jargon, to explain how it is done. The book clarifies that although people “tend to think of history as rigid and fixed … history is not the same thing as the past.” There are facts about the past, but the way those facts are shared, interpreted, or elided makes all the difference in what is considered history. History, in sum, is not a collection of unvarnished facts – it “is our way of rendering the past into stories.”

As you can infer from its title, the book focuses on the way medieval history in particular that has often been “wielded as a weapon when traditional power structures are threatened … The fantasy of a pure, orderly partial and monarchial medieval past in which everyone knew his or her place gives people the “historical” evidence they think they need to resist social progress.” This is especially true of groups who want to present the medieval makeup of Western Europe as ethnically homogenous.

The idea that Western Europe was all-white and ruled by unchallenged patriarchal systems is, to be frank, ahistorical hogwash.  People of color could be found in England and Norway, just as white people could be found in Tunisia and India. Not only are various ethnicities recorded in Medieval art, there are “records of regular travel between Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.” Records from pilgrimage sites in Spain reveal visitors from “Nubia, Turkey, and from even farther afield.” Although provincial areas may have been mostly white, any of the major population centers, “like Rome, Constantinople, Paris, or far-flung London should include racial diversity.”

Furthermore, modern social issues — including what we now call feminism, homosexuality, and gender identity – were around in the medieval period too. Women wrote treatises and spoke up in defense of their rationality and their rights. Same-sex couples fell in love and had relationships, and a few even formed socially-sanctioned unions (which can be found in Church records). Biologically presenting men and women lived as members of the opposite sex, and were often undiscovered until their bodies were being prepared for burial. Was it harder to be a feminist or homosexual or transgender in the Medieval period? Indubitably. But it still happened.

The whole book is chockablock with facts, the debunking of poplar conceptions of history, and critical examinations of the use of history in nationalism and propaganda. Any history buff would benefit from reading this book, if for no other reason than to feel smug that they knew better when they heard someone erroneously claim that ‘medieval people didn’t take baths’. It is well-written, concise, factual, and interesting – everything a nonfictional history book should aspire to be.