This past week I reflected on the unexpected convergence of two very different writers, sources, and (on the surface) topics: Katherine Karkov's book, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia, and a blog entry by (Bishop) Nick Knisely on watching the light-weight series Ancient Aliens, and its implicit (and occasionally explicit) racism.
Karkov's writing is pointed. “Anglo-Saxon England has always been an imaginary place.” (p.1) A loaded term, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has a history of very hazy meanings. Susan Oosthuizen notes the confusing early documentary evidence of “Old English” (sometimes also called “Anglo-Saxon”) from a mention of Englisc in Aethelbert’s law code of about 600 C.E., and in Bede, ca. 731. (The Emergence of the English, p.1) The nomenclature “Anglo-Saxon” was first used by Carolingian writers to distinguish those on the continent speaking Saxon or other Germanic languages from those in the island of the Angli. (Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, p. 123). Conventionally the term has referred to those who lived in much of what is now England from 400 to 1100 C.E., a span of 700 years conventionally divided into three periods that exhibit marked differences. (Oosthuizen, p. 1)
The phrase "Anglo-Saxon" willy-nilly throws together disparate peoples who arrived on the island of Great Britain, roughly 400-600 C.E., from many places, including Southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Presumed cultural cohesion is very hard to trace, as is the implied assumption that those denominated as Anglo-Saxons did not assimilate readily with the majority of the island’s residents who had already lived there a long time, whether they were of Celtic, Gallic, or other origins. Oosthuizen concludes, “The apparent clarity, cohesiveness, and implied cultural identity of the phrase “Anglo-Saxon" is a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it.” (p. 4)
Karkov’s point is that "Anglo-Saxon" as a term denoting a people, cultural identity, or even language was a construct of the educated elite of Norman England, and then thei heirs in many succeeding generations. “Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier.” (p.2) The island that seemed to be on the edge of the world known to Europeans (ignoring Ireland, as usual) occupied a liminal space between the known and the unknown—a true midgard—of exceptional purity that inherited an imperial dream from Roman remnants and antecedents, culminating in the conviction that the English (or Anglo-Saxons) ought to be the rightful rulers of the earth. (Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World, p. 21)
The Anglo-Saxon cultural domain continues to be re-imagined today in violent nationalist and racist ways based on a set of powerful and enduring origin legends. Those legends hold that those arrivals from the Continent and elsewhere imagined for themselves a distinctive outlook and coherent culture. Evidence of cohesion is almost impossible to find. What is found and famous, cultural works (such as Beowulf and the Franks Casket) that were originally produced for local purposes, were pressed into service generations later to justify the displacement and exile of indigenous peoples by self-referential heirs to the "Anglo-Saxons."
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The term "Anglo-Saxon" has become an expression for what Karkov terms retrotopia.
Retrotopia "involves both a looking back to an idealized past and a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular types of modern presents." (p. 24 and following for below) (The word was coined by Zygmunt Bauman in 2017.) Specifically, retrotopia refers "to the twenty-first-century loss of hope and community and the resulting location of happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past". Such a turn emphasizes tribal loyalties and identities, texts and symbols specifically associated with heritage. More than ordinary nostalgia (itself an eighteenth and nineteenth century coinage), retrotopia "is fueled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first century and uncanny isolated yet overcorrected state they create." Retrotopia creates "an undead past." Karkov vividly recounts the violence a retrotopia of "Anglo-Saxon" has done and continues to do, and she is ready to burn the field down and start over. Is that even possible?—leave alone advisable?
Karkov is concerned with the rhetorical use of "Anglo-Saxon" which is (and has always been) far more loaded than simply "Old English." It is one among several, alas. In the ferment of isolated yet hyperconnected individuals and online so-called "communities," there is more than one retrotopia.
Mary Beard tangled some time ago with internet trolls who firmly believe that ancient statuary and sculpture, now often presented as white-ash marble buffed to a finish, had to have been white and could not have been painted --despite convincing evidence that the ancients painted them. Beard famously took on the trolls. Somehow the concept of painted (maybe even gaudily) statuary violates an idealized of the Romans as "white." Modern racism just does not map neatly onto the ancient world.
Donna Zuckerberg (yes, related to that Zuckerberg) devoted an entire book to the misuse and misappropriation of ancient philosophy (especially Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius) and the threat that the alt-Right poses to classical studies. A "retrotopia" of Ancient Rome or Athens presents itself as "Western Civ" but carried all kind of internal contradictions, which usually remain unacknowledged. A retrotopia of ancient Rome has to sort out its allegiances in the Teutoberg Forest (glad the Rome lost? Or sorrow?), and has to navigate around the idea that the ancient Athenians didn't want Socrates to be celebrated, they wanted him dead (or at least exiled).
Is it because the real past presents so many complexities--even for those who care not a whit for complication--that the most facile retrotopia of all imagines "ancient aliens" and recasts them as foils for the twenty-first century? This is where Nick Knisely's intuition springs to life: that the stories told on that remarkably light-weight media series are always eccentrically mis-directed, invariably privileging the big names of "western civ" (such as the Egyptians or the Babylonians, who were of course not western at all) and ignoring Meso-Americans, southern Africans, not to mention ancient Chinese or ancient Indians. (--The last despite some of Indians' so-called "Aryan" status in the eyes of some nineteenth century Germans and their racist heirs.) The best retrotopia of all is one that never has to worry about annoying questions about real people and events from the past. Imagined aliens will always outmatch the pesky realities of ancient Romans.
Closer to home:
Christians are not at all immune from the currents that point to varieties of retrotopia. It's hard not to see the Museum of the Bible (I refuse to link to it) as a paean to ancient Judea and Israel, despite the visible reminders of ancient conflicts that often resulted in nothing anyone might call "blessed." Mainline Christians might quietly sneer at the primary Evangelical audience the Museum seeks, but are not immune to retrotopian thinking and feeling as well: idealized versions of the Reformation, or idealized figures of American Christian leaders, live on in sermons and homilies Sunday after Sunday.
I am a highly ambivalent member of a parish church that describes itself as "Anglo-Catholic," a designation I really prefer to avoid. It's not hard yearning and nostalgia in an implicit appeal to a glossy, idealized vision of a distant Anglican, Anglo-Saxon past. Various Anglican identities are steeped in memory, but too often memories can be invoked as a warrant for a liturgical style that dulls the edge of many ambiguous symbols. (The Good Friday liturgy and preaching too often just ignore the tangled and tragic history of Christian anti-Semistism.) Anglo-Catholicism was built (see, Keble, Pusey, Newman, and John Mason Neale) on a highly idealized, melancholic and nostalgia vision of purity located in large part in "Anglo-Saxon Christians" in some kind of pure past. (They might be better styled: Christians in the British Isles in late ancient and early medieval times).
Linking an idealized vision of a hallowed early medieval past with markedly Reformation language is a standing contradiction. Rite I can come off as seventeenth-century English prose (Episcopal Rite I) —Milton's language— dressed up in Aethelred's robes. What exactly are are Anglo-Catholic traditions trying to evoke? 597? King Alfred of Wessex? 1545? 1559? 1612? 1662? 1928? So-called "Anglo-Catholic" liturgical commitment just do not map neatly onto any of the several medieval periods.
That said, the roots to retrotopian longing run close to ecclesial nostalgia, but not simply. Retrotopia is well beyond the dignified melancholia of the type purveyed by Henry Vaughan (1845-1917, the architect of Christ Church, New Haven, and portions of the National Cathedral). Retrotopia is a fever-dream incubated in digital toxins. But it feeds off of a cultural nostalgia that is first cousin to the ecclesiastical nostalgia all too present in many ecclesial traditions (—not just Anglo-Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or whatever you want to call it).
It behooves academic scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin literatures, medieval languages and literatures, and church historian sof several eras to beware of the mis-appropriation of important Christian symbols and discourse by those who simply cannot abide defenestration from a white Christian castle of supremacy. Historical study can curdle into nostalgia, nostalgia into retrotopia, and retrotopia into fascism. It can happen here.