Medievalism, gender and politicised nostalgia in the British extreme right, 1962 – 1982

Abstract
The extreme right’s preoccupation with medieval tropes provides a vital touchstone for understanding processes of radicalisation that particularly target white boys and men with emotional appeals to their gendered identity as well as their ethnonationalist and socio-economic grievances. Extreme right evocations of the medieval past are used to generate radicalised emotional economies that dramatically reject mainstream values, and feed into an alternate ‘emotionology’ (the way a society or group thinks about emotions and their expression) designed to convert target audiences through the promise of achieving emotional liberty via the embrace of extremism. This project will examine materials in the Searchlight Archive in the period 1962 – 1982.