Our colleague Jonas Hermann has just published a paper in the academic journal Das Mittelalter. The article is titled: 'Grimdark Ages: On the Neomedievalism of "Warhammer 40,000'. Check it out here:
https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/mial/article/view/25323/19524
New article on Warhammer by Jonas Hermann
New article on Warhammer by Jonas Hermann
Academic based at Lancaster University, UK.
Co-founder of Warhammer Conference.
Co-founder of Warhammer Conference.
Re: New article on Warhammer by Jonas Hermann
Finally I've read the article and with great interest. Thank you very much! What I especially appreciated was the way it brings together different elements of the Warhammer universe through a historical and cultural reconstruction of ideas, motifs, and images. The neo-medieval framework seems very productive for understanding how forms such as crusade, heresy, relics, sacred texts, purity, and imperial theology are reactivated in a futuristic setting.
At the same time, I wonder whether the effect of Warhammer is broader than Eco’s idea of neo-medievalism can fully explain. To me, these medieval motifs do not function only as aesthetic or historical references. They also become symbolic forms through which modern consciousness tries to contain very contemporary anxieties: psyche as a phenomenon and psychic contamination, bodily transformation, technological dehumanisation, endless war, ideological possession, the collapse of stable meaning and so on...
I would not say that these medieval images are universal. On the contrary, Warhammer, to my mind, could probably have emerged only from a European cultural background, and not from any other. Its imagery is deeply rooted in a specifically European religious imagination. But its resonance seems to exceed that background. Even for readers whose own cultural history is not grounded in the European Middle Ages, these images may still become legible because they give form to something larger than local history.
So for me the article feels like a very valuable starting point for a further question: not only where these neo-medieval images come from, but why this historically specific symbolic language continues to speak so strongly to modern consciousness.
At the same time, I wonder whether the effect of Warhammer is broader than Eco’s idea of neo-medievalism can fully explain. To me, these medieval motifs do not function only as aesthetic or historical references. They also become symbolic forms through which modern consciousness tries to contain very contemporary anxieties: psyche as a phenomenon and psychic contamination, bodily transformation, technological dehumanisation, endless war, ideological possession, the collapse of stable meaning and so on...
I would not say that these medieval images are universal. On the contrary, Warhammer, to my mind, could probably have emerged only from a European cultural background, and not from any other. Its imagery is deeply rooted in a specifically European religious imagination. But its resonance seems to exceed that background. Even for readers whose own cultural history is not grounded in the European Middle Ages, these images may still become legible because they give form to something larger than local history.
So for me the article feels like a very valuable starting point for a further question: not only where these neo-medieval images come from, but why this historically specific symbolic language continues to speak so strongly to modern consciousness.
Irina Keranza,
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
psychologist|psychoanalysis and analytical psychology|
myth and contemporary symbolic worlds
Re: New article on Warhammer by Jonas Hermann
I also really enjoyed the paper. Not being much of a 40k buff since the Rogue Trader days, I always saw 40k as sitting on top of the lore of the Old World which is very overt in being based on a kind of fantasised Holy Roman Empire. (GW has stated they are different universes, despite sharing the Chaos powers)
The Old World is one of holy emperors and elector counts and draws directly on real world politics and histories. If you see the Warhammer universe(s) through that lens, then there's a very strong and purposeful historical (both real world and meta) reason for the ideas of the religious significance of an emperor existing in tension with a Pope, the gothicism that underpins everything and a satirical look at medieval Catholicism. So whilst there is definitely a neomedievalism to the 40k universe, I am intrigued as to how much that can be divorced from an already largely realised Warhammer universe in which those motifs were already embedded in a sort of 17thCentury/emerging from medievalism world. I always enjoyed the tension between the sort of superstitious rise of the chaos powers in the world, chanelling Lovecraftian themes of cultishness, and the emerging technologies of the setting never quite reaching the renaissance.
In terms of the paper, I guess my question is does the meta now draw on medievalism directly, or is it the result of a purposeful post-medieval setting which avoided Tolkienesque world tropes to build a vibrant, deliberately European fantasy world? You could also point to contemporary culture like 200AD and Monty Python in the early genesis of Warhammer having an influence which mixed ideas of inquisition and Catholic imagery with satire.
The Old World is one of holy emperors and elector counts and draws directly on real world politics and histories. If you see the Warhammer universe(s) through that lens, then there's a very strong and purposeful historical (both real world and meta) reason for the ideas of the religious significance of an emperor existing in tension with a Pope, the gothicism that underpins everything and a satirical look at medieval Catholicism. So whilst there is definitely a neomedievalism to the 40k universe, I am intrigued as to how much that can be divorced from an already largely realised Warhammer universe in which those motifs were already embedded in a sort of 17thCentury/emerging from medievalism world. I always enjoyed the tension between the sort of superstitious rise of the chaos powers in the world, chanelling Lovecraftian themes of cultishness, and the emerging technologies of the setting never quite reaching the renaissance.
In terms of the paper, I guess my question is does the meta now draw on medievalism directly, or is it the result of a purposeful post-medieval setting which avoided Tolkienesque world tropes to build a vibrant, deliberately European fantasy world? You could also point to contemporary culture like 200AD and Monty Python in the early genesis of Warhammer having an influence which mixed ideas of inquisition and Catholic imagery with satire.