![]() Looking back on summer 2020’s medieval undertones, perhaps there was something about the plague’s associations with Monty Python and fourth-grade history projects that felt comfortingly hyperbolic-a relic of truly different and distinctly less hygienic times. But why, during a period of overlapping hopes for a virus vaccine and political change, had medieval script become a go-to font for sharing progressive content? Given the plague-ish circumstances of the coronavirus, something about this ye-aulden lettering felt fitting: serious, yet tongue-in-cheek, and almost mirroring the incredulity so many people were feeling about our own moment in history. Seeing these posts felt akin to perusing digital versions of illuminated texts or handwritten scrolls. I also started noticing a certain medieval aesthetic proliferate across social media platforms, especially on Instagram: calligraphic fonts often called Gothic or Old English but technically called “blackletter” were appearing on leftist infographics with phrases like “abolish the police” or quotes about social, cultural, and environmental injustice. I recall encountering several history-lite reports of merchants in Italy who “have revived a Black Death tradition: wine windows.” Reminders bounced around Twitter that “when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear,” a claim that sparked both inspiration and consternation among the newly unemployed. ![]() Do not use the icons and symbols that you see everywhere typical to represent your subject.Some time in the middle of last summer-between the semi-naive, early pandemic days of spring 2020 and the considerably world-wearier winter we presently inhabit-things began to feel a bit, well, medieval. ![]()
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