Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages. This volume not only defines medievalism's margins, as well as its role in marginalizing other fields, ideas, people, places, and events, but also provides tools and models for exploring those issues and indicates new subjects towhich they might apply. The eight opening essays address the physical marginalizing of medievalism in annotated texts on medieval studies; the marginalism of oneself via medievalism; medievalism's dearth of ecotheory and religious studies; academia's paucity of pop medievalism; and the marginalization of races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and literary characters in contemporary medievalism. The seven subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing: the distancing of oneself (and others) during imaginary visits to the Middle Ages; lessons from the margins of Brazilian medievalism; mutual marginalization among factions of Spanish medieval studies; and medievalism in the marginalization of lower socio-economic classes in late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain, of modern gamers, of contemporary laborers, and of Alfred Austin, a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poet also known as Alfred the Little. In thus investigating the margins of and marginalization via medievalism, the volume affirms their centrality to the field. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Nadia R. Altschul, Megan Arnott, Jaume Aurell, Juan Gomis Coloma, Elizabeth Emery, Vincent Ferre, Valerie B. Johnson, Alexander L. Kaufman, Erin Felicia Labbie, VickieLarsen, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly, Alicia C. Montoya, Serina Patterson, Jeff Rider, Lindsey Simon-Jones, Richard Utz, Helen Young.

One of the foundational premises of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical project was that the history of philosophy concealed the history of desire, and one of the goals of his work was to show how desire is central to philosophical thinking. In Lacan's Medievalism, Erin Felicia Labbie demonstrates how Lacan's theory of desire is bound to his reading of medieval texts. She not only alters the relationship between psychoanalysis and medieval studies, but also illuminates the ways that premodern and postmodern epochs and ideologies share a concern with the subject, the unconscious, and language, thus challenging notions of strict epistemological cuts. Lacan's psychoanalytic work contributes to the medieval debate about universals by revealing how the unconscious relates to the category of the real. By analyzing the systematic adherence to dialectics and the idealization of the hard sciences, Lacan's Medievalism asserts that we must take into account the play of language and desire within the unconscious and literature in order to understand the way that we know things in the world and the manner in which order is determined. Erin Felicia Labbie is assistant professor of English at Bowling Green State University.