"Invention of tradition" is a great term. It was originally coined by Eric Hobsbawm, to mean a conscious effort to create a vision of the past that will support whatever you are doing (or want to do) in the present. "We have always done this," or "These are our traditional values" has enormous weight. If one isn't quite sure what one has always done, or what one's traditional values might be, a little historical research should do the trick, especially if one has a pretty good idea of what is intended to be found.
Hobsbawm focused primarily on Great Britain, where he noted that the people of Scotland in particular pulled together all sorts of elements to identify Scottish identity during the nineteenth century. For example, the idea that each clan had a distinctive tartan, and that people with certain last names might belong to a clan with a different name and still be entitled to wear its tartan, is no more than 200 years old, even though it was presented as medieval (and surely connected to Robert the Bruce). The careful identification of the colors and patterns of each distinctive tartan and their assignment to certain groups was in fact a nineteenth-century project.
A Scotland identified by kilts and bagpipes was also a Scotland of sturdy folks, full of heroism and wholesome country values. Something similar happened in Switzerland. In the nineteenth century a country that had been seen as made up of rather backward, dirty and uneducated mountain folks, living snuggled up to their cows, set out to reinvent itself. In the late Middle Ages, Switzerland had fought to free itself from rule by Austria. William Tell was one of the legendary war leaders. William Tell became in the nineteenth century a great national hero, standing strong against Austrian tyranny, worthy of having an opera written about him (older people today still think of that opera's overture as "Lone Ranger" music). The "shoot an apple off someone's head" story if a bawdlerized version of the legend.
Besides William Tell, the other great hero of nineteenth-century Swiss reinvention was Heidi. I loved the book Heidi as a child and must have read it a dozen times or more. I cried when I realized that in the book Heidi had curly black hair, which I do not have (in movie versions she's always blonde). Little did I realize that the idealized world of life in the Alps that the book portrayed was intended to combat the image of dirty Swiss who were almost cows (or goats) themselves. Heidi thrives under the care of her goat-keeping and loving grandfather, goes to school to get a good education, and, as her greatest triumph, heals a sickly Austrian girl by bringing her to the pure air and food of the Alps. (Take that, imperial Austria!)
Switzerland completed its transformation from dirty backwater to highpoint of wholesome country values during the twentieth century, especially with the spread of downhill skiing. Sure, other countries have mountains, even Alps, but the Swiss led the way with resorts, ski lifts, and the like. Swiss hotels are aggressively clean, even the simplest. As a Portuguese restaurant keeper, living and working in Switzerland, once told me, if anyone ever suspected his food was not the purest and freshest, it would be, at once, back to Portugal.
The Middle Ages is often chosen as the source of the tradition that someone wants to invent. For example, modern white nationalists have seized upon a very poorly understood vision of Anglo-Saxon England as the basis of what they want to do, as I have discussed earlier. The Middle Ages is a popular choice to base origin myths because it is when Europe's countries first took on something like the borders and languages they have today, and (I fear) because, especially in the US, it is so little studied.
"There were three orders of society! The church told everybody what to think and believe! Kings were absolute! Women had no rights! Everyone lived under feudalism!" This is about what even well educated people may tell you about the Middle Ages (clearly not the people who've been reading this blog, if you still think so, go back and read it again). "Since we know almost nothing about those thousand years, it can mean whatever we want!"
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
For more on society during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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