Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is available on this website. This fascinating study places multiple genres in dialogue and considers both medievalism and genre to be frameworks from which meaning can be produced. It explores works from a wide range of genres-children's and young adult, historical, cyberpunk, fantasy, science fiction, romance, and crime-and across multiple media-fiction, film, television, video games, and music. The range of media types and genres enable comparison, and the identification of overarching trends, while also allowing comparison of contrasting phenomena. As the first volume to explore the nexus of medievalism and genre across such a wide range of texts, this collection illustrates the fractured ideologies of contemporary popular culture. The Middle Ages are more usually, and often more prominently, aligned with conservative ideologies, for example around gender roles, but the Middle Ages can also be the site of resistance and progressive politics. Exploring the interplay of past and present, and the ways writers and readers work engage with them demonstrates the conscious processes of identity construction at work throughout Western popular culture. The collection also demonstrates that while scholars may have by-and-large abandoned the concept of accuracy when considering contemporary medievalisms, the Middle Ages are widely associated with authenticity, and the authenticity of identity, in the popular imagination; the idea of the real Middle Ages matters, even when historical realities do not. This book will be of interest to scholars of medievalism, popular culture, and genre.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries. Thirty-three chapters from an international group of scholars explore topics ranging from the representation of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century opera to medievalism in contemporary video game music, thereby connecting disparate musical forms across typical musicological boundaries of chronology and geography. While some chapters focus on key medievalist works such as Orff's Carmina Burana or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, others explore medievalism in the oeuvre of a single composer (e.g. Richard Wagner or Arvo P�rt) or musical group (e.g. Led Zeppelin). The topics of the individual chapters include both well-known works such as John Boorman's film Excalibur and also less familiar examples such as Eduard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The authors of the chapters approach their material from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historical musicology, popular music studies, music theory, and film studies, examining the intersections of medievalism with nationalism, romanticism, ideology, nature, feminism, or spiritualism. Taken together, the contents of the Handbook develop new critical insights that venture outside traditional methodological constraints and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism.

This book is concerned with our ideological, technical and emotional investments in reclaiming medieval for contemporary popular culture. The authors illuminate both medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways while interrogating the many ways in which metamedievalism reinterprets and reconceptualises the medieval.

Combining elements of medievalism, the historical novel and the detective narrative, medieval crime fiction capitalizes upon the appeal of all three--the most famous examples being Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (one of the best-selling books ever published) and Ellis Peters' endearing Brother Cadfael series. Hundreds of other novels and series fill out the genre, in settings ranging from the so-called Celtic Enlightenment in seventh-century Ireland to the ruthless Inquisition in fourteenth-century France to the mean streets of medieval London. The detectives are an eclectic group, including weary ex-crusaders, former Knights Templar, enterprising monks and nuns, and historical poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer. This book investigates the enduring popularity of the largely unexamined genre and explores its social, cultural and political contexts.

How ideas and ideals of an imagined, protean, national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why. After a period of abeyance, the link forged in the nineteenth century between the Middle Ages and national identity is increasingly being reclaimed, with numerous groups and individuals mining an imagined medieval past to present ideas and ideals of modern nationhood. Today's national medievalism asserts itself at the interface of culture and politics: in literature and television programming, in journalism and heritage tourism, and in the way political actors of various stripes use a deep past that supposedly proves the nation's steady exceptionalism in a hectic globalised world. This book traces these ongoing developments in Switzerland and Britain, two countries where the medieval past has recently been much invoked in negotiations of national identity, independence and Euroscepticism. Through comparative analysis, it explores examples of reemerging stories of national exceptionalism - stories that, ironically, echo those of other nations. The author analyses depictions of Robert the Bruce and Wilhelm Tell; medievalism in the discourse surrounding Brexit as well as at the Welsh Senedd; novels like Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake; community-based art such as the Great Tapestry of Scotland; and elaborate public commemorations of Swiss victories (and defeats) in battle. Basing his critical readings in current theories of cultural memory, heritage and nationalism, the author explores how the protean national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why.

Significant Others explores the transformative possibilities of alterity or otherness and offers concrete case studies that provide a greater understanding and nuance with regard to aspects of deviance and difference in premodern court cultures. Both public and nominally private spaces were subject to the important influence of significant others, such as women, ethno-religious minorities, and marginalized and/or difficult-to-categorize men. From their positions within and ties to court cultures, these diverse outsiders - ‘others’ - played crucial roles in maintaining a fluidity essential for the successful sustaining of territorial monarchies and polities, challenging our understanding of the more narrowly defined elite behaviours that shaped premodern dynasties, rulers, societies, and cultures of the past. By exploring a variety of case studies from history and literature, such as Moroccan Jews as dhimmis (‘protected persons’), to bastards, mistresses, and sodomites in ancien régime France, to the transformative role of magic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this volume makes use of empirical and contextually informed research to respond to theoretical questions posed by recent historiography. With a cross-disciplinary approach, this collection of essays will be a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in the diverse aspects and contexts of premodern ‘others’.

The typical vision of the Middle Ages western popular culture represents to its global audience is deeply Eurocentric. The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones imagined entire medievalist worlds, but we see only a fraction of them through the stories and travels of the characters. Organised around the theme of mobility, this Element seeks to deconstruct the Eurocentric orientations of western popular medievalisms which typically position Europe as either the whole world or the centre of it, by making them visible and offering alternative perspectives. How does popular culture represent medievalist worlds as global-connected by the movement of people and objects? How do imagined mobilities allow us to create counterstories that resist Eurocentric norms? This study represents the start of what will hopefully be a fruitful and inclusive conversation of what the Middle Ages did, and should, look like.

It is often assumed that those outside of academia know very little about the Middle Ages. But the truth is not so simple. Non-specialists in fact learn a great deal from the myriad medievalisms - post-medieval imaginings of the medieval world - that pervade our everyday culture. These, like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, offer compelling, if not necessarily accurate, visions of the medieval world. And more, they have an impact on the popular imagination, particularly since there are new medievalisms constantly being developed, synthesised and remade. But what does the public really know? How do the conflicting medievalisms they consume contribute to their knowledge? And why is this important? In this book, the first evidence-based exploration of the wider public's understanding of the Middle Ages, Paul B. Sturtevant adapts sociological methods to answer these important questions. Based on extensive focus groups, the book details the ways - both formal and informal - that people learn about the medieval past and the many other ways that this informs, and even distorts, our present. In the process, Sturtevant also sheds light, in more general terms, onto the ways non-specialists learn about the past, and why understanding this is so important. The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination will be of interest to anyone working on medieval studies, medievalism, memory studies, medieval film studies, informal learning or public history.

Beginning in 1976 with the first issue of the journal Studies in Medievalism, all things medieval and the concept of medievalism became a hot topic in culture studies. Medievalism examines how different groups, individuals, or eras use and shape the image of the Middle Ages, differentiating between historical knowledge of the Middle Ages and what we have made the period out to be. The 13 essays in this book explore the medieval invasion of today's media and consider the various ways--from film and print to websites and video games--that the Middle Ages have been packaged for consumption. Essays encompass diverse theoretical perspectives and are grouped loosely around distinct functions of medievalism, including the exposure of recent social concerns; the use of medieval images in modern political contexts; and the medieval's influence on products of today's popular culture. The legitimization of the study of medievalism and the effect of medievalism on the more traditional subject of medieval studies are also discussed. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages.