A medieval review of X [Twitter] from TLS (Times Literary Supplement) [4/25/25]

 

Rarely has the study of the Middle Ages been as fast- moving, or as quick to turn sour, as in medievalists’ engagements with social media. Brantley L. Bryant’s Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval studies and new media (2010) celebrated the possibilities of the internet as a platform for humour, irony and fandom, often in distinctly Chaucerian ways. Fifteen years on, Alicia Spencer-Hall charts the short and bitter history of #MedievalTwitter, a hashtag that became widely used to announce events and publications, and to build medievalist communities, and was seen by some as a way to disrupt the norms of academic writing and the exclusions of academic structures. Over time, however, it became increasingly cacophonous and fractious.

Spencer-Hall’s story is framed as a tragedy. In her account, Twitter, now X, was killed off by Elon Musk, whose takeover changed irrevocably “the platform’s norms and culture”. “The world’s richest man had wanted something, so he had taken it, brutally.” What’s more, he paid no regard to “the collateral damage for users who had tended their social garden assiduously, even lovingly, for years” – users like Spencer-Hall. Medieval Twitter is sustained by such a plangent tone: the author clearly feels Twitter’s recent transformation as a personal betrayal.

In her book’s four main chapters, Spencer-Hall offers a comparison between medieval literary forms and twenty-first-century digital media. The Middle English debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale anticipates “the dynamics of Twitter at its most interpersonally toxic”; Marie de France’s Laüstic, in which a jealous husband kills a nightingale, parallels Musk’s “murder of the much-beloved blue bird”; the mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated her biography to a scribe in the early fifteenth century, is “the Ur-influencer, a Twitter power-user born five centuries too early to best capitalize on her knack for self-promotion”. Thus, Medieval Twitter offers a corrective to the idea that the cacophony of the internet is a contemporary invention. Medieval writers experimented with voice and reputation in ways similar to modern tweeters. More broadly, as Spencer-Hall points out, media forms such as Twitter share with medieval manuscript culture “the skilful recycling and reinterpretation of an existing narrative or trope”, where originality is less important than creative reiteration.

Spencer-Hall’s engaging book shows, above all, how the medieval past and the digital present are unhappily fraught with each other. I don’t recall Twitter ever being a beloved utopia. It was a dynamic medium for commentary, but was always subject to markets and vested interests and bigmouths. Indeed, not unlike European medieval culture, Twitter tended to be produced by, and cater best to, the educated, the leisured or the zealous.