This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d'Angouleme, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amelie, and Adelaide d'Orleans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy, but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles.

Essays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims. Like its two immediate predecessors, this volume tackles the most pressing and contentious issue in medievalism studies: how the Middle Ages have been subsequently deployed for political ends. The six essays in the first section directly address that concern with regard to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges's contemporaneous responses to the 1871 Commune; the hypocrisy of the Robinhood App's invocation of their namesake; misunderstood parallels and differences between the Covid-19 pandemic and medieval plagues; Peter Gill's reworking of a major medieval Mystery play in his 2001 The York Realist; celebrations of medieval monks by the American alt-right; and medieval references in twenty-first-century novels by the American neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's seven articles as they examine widely discredited alt-right claims that strong kings ruled medieval Finland; Norse medievalism in WWI British and German propaganda; post-war Black appropriation of white jousting tournaments in the Antebellum South; early American references to the Merovingian Dynasty; Rudyard Kipling's deployment of the Middle Ages to defend his beliefs; the reframing of St. Anthony by Agustina Bessa-Luis's 1973 biography of him; and post-medieval Portuguese reworkings of the Goat-Foot-Lady and other medieval legends.

This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d'Angouleme, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amelie, and Adelaide d'Orleans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy, but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles.

This volume discusses a practical approach to cultural transfer and exchange through the concept of "memory box". Ideas of displacement, transfer, and cultural memory are explored through case studies from Scotland to Italy and Germany and from Finland and France to the American colonies. The authors develop an understanding of memory boxes as cultural constructions that are involved in the process of making and disputing memory - but which, simultaneously, are important agents for cultural transfer over space and time. This book emphasises "memory box" as an idea that allows us to study the cultural processes of transfer in conjunction with cultural memory.