Aotearoa New Zealand and global right-wing medievalism

15 March 2019 witnessed the most notorious weaponization of the Middle Ages in New Zealand history. On that day a white Australian terrorist, armed with a semiautomatic shotgun, murdered 51 Muslim people at prayer. Photographs of the weapon revealed a series of names and dates forming a cherry-picked genealogy of Christian “victories” over Muslims. It might seem disingenuous to call this “New Zealand medievalism”, since the gunman’s allusions to the Middle Ages connect to a widespread obsession with the period among right-wing extremists across Europe and the Anglosphere. These extremists are adherents of Renaud Camus’s racist “Grand Remplacement” (Great Replacement) ideology, which claims that immigration is leading to the “great replacement” of white Christian Europeans by non-white, non-Christian non-Europeans. The question remains, however, what Christchurch came to mean within the gunman’s medievalist-fuelled white supremacist vision. Camus has claimed that his Grand Remplacement thesis was inspired by the sight of veiled North African women living in a medieval French village; how did New Zealand, a white settler nation with significant Indigenous and migrant populations, come to be the site of “Camusian” medieval-inspired violence? This chapter examines this question while asking whether it is still possible to invoke national medievalisms as a meaningful category.