![]() In my experience, today’s southern students are up to the task. I am confronted every day with both the complexities of the region I live in and the period I study. Teaching the Middle Ages in the modern southern United States allows me to facilitate conversations with both students and the wider public that ask them to reexamine their ideas about the past in light of cutting-edge scholarship to shake off antiquated ideas that reflect neither historical realities nor who we are now in the 21st century. As a medieval historian teaching in Mississippi and living in New Orleans, I am confronted every day with both the complexities of the region I live in and the period I study. ![]() Our understanding of the past, our historical consciousness, is always shaped by how it was taught to us. Students encountering medieval views of the nature of just war, the treatment of women and minorities, or the development of good government see that they were rather different from modern views of these topics-and, sometimes, not different enough. However, scholars and teachers of the period today are attuned to the role that race and racism plays in minimizing the reality of the global nature of the Middle Ages. Some of my students come to courses on the Middle Ages seeking stories of white heritage or exceptionalism, a narrative they might have learned from conceptions of the period here in the South and in popular culture more broadly. History as a discipline, not just medieval history, has a race problem history degrees earned at all levels are dominated by white people. ![]() Ideas about the glory of the Middle Ages have been used by white supremacists in the United States and Europe to reduce the real and complex history of that period to one focused on the supposed “white” origins of civilization. Joan of Arc herself was appropriated by the women’s order of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s as an example that white women should emulate. However, the unknown tagger wasn’t wrong to associate a monument of a medieval figure with monuments of Confederates. The vandalism of the statue of a medieval saint in the midst of local controversy over monuments and memorialization may have been a simple case of mistaken identity. In an interview with the Times-Picayune, the krewe’s founder, Amy Kirk Duvoisin, also expressed confusion about why Joan was targeted: “Surely, people realize she’s not related to American history.” This Mardi Gras walking parade kicks off Carnival season each year on January 6 and stops at the statue to pay homage to its namesake. Zachary Riggins, University of AlabamaĪmong New Orleanians, the 15th-century saint Joan of Arc is known mostly for the Krewe de Jeanne d’Arc. Hoole Special Collections Library encapsulates the kind of medievalism prevalent in the American South. A stained-glass window in the University of Alabama’s W.
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