‘The pure springs of English literature’: Percy MacKaye’s eugenic medievalism

The popular twentieth-century poet and playwright Percy MacKaye, a keen medievalist, was deeply embedded in the American ‘Progressive’ eugenics movement. This study uses MacKaye’s published work and his vast unpublished personal archive to establish the theoretical and practical connection between eugenics and medievalism in the context of early twentieth-century drama, and its implications for medievalists today. I draw original connections between the medievalist literary culture of the New Hampshire-Vermont border from 1910–1930 and the Vermont Eugenics Project, as well as between early twentieth-century American medievalism more generally and the racial assimilation movement in the US. I propose a fundamental connection between the popularity of the European Middle Ages, particularly their drama and literature, and the white American élite’s desire for a racially and culturally ‘pure’ nation at the beginning of the last century. My methodology combines close reading and critical race theory, broadly defined.