Keywords

Neomedievalism, Pseudohistory, Digital Humanities, Russian War, Banal Medievalism

Abstract

This dissertation examines how medieval historical narratives circulate within contemporary Western digital discourse surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian political rhetoric has frequently invoked the medieval polity of Kyivan Rus’ to assert civilizational continuity between the medieval past and the modern Russian state. While these claims have been widely discussed in political and media contexts, less attention has been given to how such narratives appear within everyday online discourse. This study investigates how medieval references are mobilized, circulated, and interpreted within social media environments during the early conflict.

The research draws on a dataset of approximately 160,000 tweets collected from Twitter (now X) between February 2022 and April 2023 using the Twitter Archiving Google Sheet tool. A mixed-methods approach combines computational topic modeling with qualitative, human-in-the-loop historical interpretation. BERTopic modeling identifies clusters of semantically related discourse, while close reading contextualizes these clusters within the historiography of medieval Rus’ and contemporary geopolitical rhetoric. The analysis focuses on eight periods of heightened online activity associated with major war and media events during the early conflict.

Across these moments, references to medieval history appear consistently but at low frequencies within the broader corpus. Rather than forming dominant narratives, these references function as brief rhetorical gestures embedded within discussions of sovereignty, identity, and legitimacy, constituting banal medievalism. The findings demonstrate that medievalism operates as background discourse, circulating as familiar cultural shorthand through which participants interpret contemporary geopolitical conflict.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Dr. Bruce Janz

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

Texts & Technology

Format

PDF

Document Type

Dissertation

Identifier

DP0053252

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