Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, with a particular concentration on environmental matters. Ecoconcerns and ecocriticism are a rising trend in medievalism studies, and form a major focus of this collection. Topics under discussion in the first part of the volume include figurations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism; environmental medievalism in Sidney Lanier's Southern chivalry; nostalgia and loss in T.H. White's "forest sauvage"; and green medievalism in J.R.R. Tolkien's elven realms. The eleven subsequent articles continue to take in such themes more tangentially, testing and buillding on the methods and conclusions of the first part. Their subjects include John Aubrey's Middle Ages; medieval charter-horns in early modern England; nineteenth-centuryreimaginings of Chaucer's Griselda; Dante's influence on Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"; multi-layered medievalisms in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire; (coopted) feminism via medievalism inDisney's Maleficent; (neo)medievalism in Babylon 5 and Crusade; cosmopolitan anxieties and national identity in Netflix's Marco Polo; mapping Everealm in The Quest; undergraduate perceptions ofthe "medieval" and the "Middle Ages"; and medievalism in the prosopopeia and corpsepaint of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Daniel Helbert, Ann F. Howey, Carol Jamison, Ann M. Martinez, Kara L. McShane, Lisa Myers, Elan Justice Pavlinich, Katie Peebles, Scott Riley, Paul B. Sturtevant, Dean Swinford, Renee Ward, Angela Jane Weisl, Jeremy Withers.

The importance of the Anglo-Saxon past to England in the eighteenth century, politically and culturally, is here brought out. A valuable addition to both our understanding of Anglo-Saxonism, and of eighteenth-century culture. Eloquently written, the book will be the key reference for any future understanding of the way in which eighteenth-century culture received the Anglo-Saxon period. David Matthews, Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies, University of Manchester. Long before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the Anglo-Saxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century - closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals - also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English. This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain's burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to Anglo-Saxon remains. Patriotism, imagination and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors - as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenth-century Britain.