After sitting with the copy on my nightstand since the book’s debut, I finally sat down and read Rachel Fulton Brown and Dragon Common Room‘s Centrism Games: A Modern Dunciad. Having read it, my only regret is that I did not do so sooner.
A bit of background is in order: Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown is a medievalist at the University of Chicago, and is known in our circles as a traditional Christian professor fighting against social justice indoctrination and infiltration of the humanities.
One wouldn’t think the more esoteric realm of medieval history would be a major battleground for the ultra-woke, but it makes sense: the modern West is profoundly a product of the Middle Ages. With that in mind, it becomes clear why the progressive revisionists wish to dominate the field: in rewriting medieval history to fit their woke narrative, it makes the rest of their revisionist project—of casting all white, male, Christian endeavors as inherently wicked—that much easier.
Milo Yiannopoulos’s short book Medieval Rages: Why The Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America, details that struggle in more detail. I highly recommend picking it up, as it highlights the length to which the wokesters have gone to silence Dr. Brown. Correspondingly, it demonstrates Dr. Brown’s incredible courage and fortitude—as well as her cleverly elfish responses to her critics.
Dr. Brown founded a Telegram chatroom, Dragon Common Room, to be a “a place for training in the arts of virtue and poetry. And mischief making for God. We fight the demons with laughter and wit.” I participate infrequently in chat, but it has become one of my favorites on the platform. In addition to fighting “demons with laughter and wit,” Dr. Brown and her merry band of righteous mischief-makers wrote, workshopped, edited, and compiled Centrism Games, releasing it as a handsome little volume consisting of seven poems of thirty stanzas each.
The seven poems constitute a mock-epic narrative, modeled after Alexander Pope’s satirical epic The Dunciad. Whereas Pope’s Dunciad mocked the goddess “Dulness” and her agents, Centrism Games lampoons the goddess Fama—Fame—and her o’er eager knights
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