Medievalism in Finland and Russia

Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students.
The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russiaoffers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently even more poorly understood than Russia in the discussions about global medievalism. It is usually mentioned only as of the birthplace of the Soldiers of Odin. The street patrol is, however, a marginal phenomenon in Finnish medievalism as this volume demonstrates. Instead of merely adopting the medievalist interpretation of the international alt-right, even the right-wing populists in Finland refer more to the nationalistic medievalist tradition, where crusades do not mark a Western Christian victory over the Muslim East, but a Swedish occupation of Finnish lands. In addition to presenting particular cases of medievalism, the chapters here on Finland challenge and diversify today's prevailing interpretation of shared online medievalism of European and American right-wing populists.
This book reveals that while medievalisms in Finland and Russia share many features with the contemporary Anglo-American medievalist imaginations, they also display many original characteristics due to particular political situations and indigenous medievalist traditions. They have their own meta-medievalisms, cumulative core ideas and interpretations about the medieval past that are thoroughly examined here in English for the very first time.

Reima Välimäki is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turku, Finland. He is the author of Heresy in Late Medieval Germany (2019).

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Preface: Medievalism in Finland and Russia and why it matters Introduction: Who owns the Middle Ages? Metamedievalism and structural exclusion Andrew B. R Elliott (University of Lincoln, UK) 1. Middle Ages on the 'Map of the Memory' of Russian Society Evgenii Rostovtsev (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia) 2. 'A thousand years of history': References to the past in the addresses to the Federal Assembly by the president of Russia, 2000-19 Kati Parppei (University of Eastern Finland, Finland) 3. Mapping the pseudohistorical knowledge space in the Russian World Wide Web Mila Oiva and Anna Ristilä (University of Turku, Finland) 4. A lens most obscured: Western perceptions of contemporary Russian medievalisms Evan Wallace (University of Central Florida, USA) 5. Memorializing the Finnish medieval past Sirpa Aalto & Timo Ylimaunu (University of Oulu, Finland) 6. The Missing Finnish Runestones Kendra Wilson (University of Turku, Finland) 7. Masculine online medievalism in twenty-first-century Finland Heta Aali (University of Turku, Finland) 8. Particularizing the Universal: Medievalist Constructions of Cultural and Religious Difference in the Crusader Kings II Jere Kyyrö (University of Turku, Finland) Appendices Notes Bibliography Index