Each May some 3,000 scholars descend upon Kalamazoo, Michigan for an annual conference of medieval studies. It’s a kind of jamboree for a wildly diverse group of academics who love their historical subject. It’s not the sort of thing the New York Times usually writes about.
Yet just this week, Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler took a sudden interest in medieval studies, lamenting the way in which the election of Donald Trump coincided with the rise of ethno-nationalists who occasionally use deracinated symbols of imagined medieval crusaders. Sound relevant to Kalamazoo yet?
