The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming. Medievalism - the ways in which post-medieval societies perceive, interpret, reimagine, or appropriate the Middle Ages - permeates popular culture. From Disney princesses to Game of Thrones, medieval fairs to World of Warcraft, contemporary culture keeps finding new ways to reinvent and repackage the period. Medievalism itself, then, continues to evolve while it is also subject to technological advances, prominent invocations in political discourse,and the changing priorities of the academy. This has led some scholars to adopt the term "neomedievalism", a concept originating in part from the work of the late Umberto Eco, which calls for new avenues of inquiry into the wayswe think about the medieval. This book examines recent evolutions of (neo)medievalism across multiple media, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the film Beowulf and medieval gaming. These evolutions can take the form of what one might consider to be pop culture objects of critique (art, commodity, amusement park, video game) or academic tools of critique (monographs, articles, lectures, university seminars). It is by reconciling theseseemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual, interconnected, and often politicized reinvention of the Middle Ages in both popular and academic culture. KELLYANN FITZPATRICK is an affiliated researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, the work of William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of this polymath, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across the book’s five sections – “Art and Design,” “Literature,” “Political Contexts,” “Pasts and Presents,” and “Digital Humanities” – readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching beyond the classroom by way of books, museums, and digital resources.

An engagement with the huge growth in neomedievalism forms the core of this volume, with other essays testing its conclusions. Following on from previous issues, this volume continues to explore definitions of neomedievalism and its relationship to traditional medievalism. In four essays that open the volume, Harry Brown, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, David W. Marshall, and Nils Holger Petersen underscore the elusive nature of distinctions between the two fields, particularly when assessing contemporary film, music, and electronic media. Seven articles then test the need for these distinctions, on subject matter ranging from Sir Walter Scott as a historian; M. E. Braddon's gendered medievalism; friendship models in Mary Elizabeth Haweis's Chaucer for Children; Jorge Luis Borges's Northern interests; medieval practices in Ellis Peters's Cadfael novels; innovative exhibits at the Museum of Wolframs-Eschenbach; and Celtic patterns in modern tattoos. Theory and practice are thus juxtaposed once again in a volume that is certain to fuel a central debate in not one but two of the fastest growing areas of academia. Contributors: Harry Brown, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, David W. Marshall, Nils Holger Petersen, Mark B. Spencer, Megan L. Morris, Karla Knutson, Vladimir Brljak, Alan T. Gaylord, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Maggie M. Williams