In recent years, the Middle Ages have increasingly served as a projection surface for expressions of national identity in Western societies. In medievalizing conceptions of national belonging, the place of immigrants and ethnolinguistic and racial minorities is precarious. The supposed uprootedness of immigrants – who are literally foreign bodies – makes them particularly suspect in a national(ist) framework, which, in theory, divides the whole of humanity into contiguous nationalities. While not all variant nationalist interpretations of the deep past subscribe to ideas of national identities as wholly unchanging over time, nationalism consistently presents itself as timeless and organic. Thinking of nationhood in terms of a shared history reaching back to the Middle Ages rarely aims at including newcomers. In fact, when conceived as a fantasy of non-migration and of cultural and racial homogeneity, the ‘national Middle Ages’ of cultural memory provide an effective discriminatory bulwark against racial and ethnic inclusivity today.

The connotations of ethno-racial homogeneity some have claimed, erroneously, on behalf of the Middle Ages have led many progressives to abandon the period as a reference point for positive identification altogether. Instead, if the medieval past features in progressive thought at all, it does so mostly in the guise of a negative caricature that illustrates the necessity of continuingly bettering the lot of humanity in the face of ignorance, obscurantism, and injustice. For most progressives today, the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity is one of happy historic rupture.

As this volume's third part on activist medievalism shows, however, there are contemporary – and earlier – exceptions to this that directly counter the idea that a sense of connection to, and inspiration drawn from, the deep past needs to conflict with hybrid identities and progressive politics. The poetico-political project I explore in this essay foregrounds the binding nature of native tradition but does so in the service of inclusion rather than exclusion. A consciously left-wing and activist example of medievalism, Refugee Tales invokes a series of medievalist signifiers of England and Englishness, most prominently Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, to protest an inhumane British immigration policy that criminalizes refugees, and to imagine a more inclusive national community in contemporary Britain. In a striking irony, Refugee Tales harnesses meanings of long national continuity and rootedness to make its case for accommodating the experiences of discontinuity and deracination of migrants.