Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, This volume continues the theme of its predecessor, addressing how the Middle Ages have been invoked to score political points, particularly with reference to the rise of populism fueled by recent recessions and a pandemic. The nine essays in the first portion of the volume directly address political medievalism in Tariq Ali's 2005 novel on Mideast instability, A Sultan in Palermo; attempts by twentieth-century Czech politicians to anchor their causes in the fifteenth-century Czech hero Petr Chelcicky; far-right deployment of Robin Hood memes to slander Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama; the ways Rory Mullarkey's 2017 play Saint George and the Dragon comments onEnglish national identity relative to Brexit; how national stereotypes have come into play amid cross-channel reporting on Brexit; nationalism in the medievalizing German monument to their fallen at the 1942 Battle of El Alamein;the English-speaking world's reception of Anthony Munday's 1589 book on conduct, Palmendos; nationalism in the self-characterization of two contemporary British Pagan movements; and how various communities in the television series Game of Thrones comment on medieval and/or contemporary nations. Nor are politics entirely absent from the final four articles in the volume, as they examine attempts to promote such particular agendas as toxic masculinity in Game of Thrones; misogyno-feminism there and in the George R.R. Martin book series on which the television program is based, A Song of Ice and Fire; the potential for audience self-realization amid the tension between the individual and the collective in The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley's 2018 adaptation of Beowulf; and ideal individual and collective behavior as modeled in the Ringling Brothers' 1912-13 spectacles about Joan of Arc.

Medievalism - the creative interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages - has had a major presence in the cultural memory of the modern West, and has grown in scale to become a global phenomenon. Countless examples across aesthetic, material and political domains reveal that the medieval period has long provided a fund of images and ideas that have been vital to defining 'the modern'. Bringing together local, national and global examples and tracing medievalism's unpredictable course from early modern poetry to contemporary digital culture, this authoritative Companion offers a panoramic view of the historical, aesthetic, ideological and conceptual dimensions of this phenomenon. It showcases a range of critical positions and approaches to discussing medievalism, from more 'traditional' historicist and close-reading practices through to theoretically engaged methods. It also acquaints readers with key terms and provides them with a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary for discussing the medieval afterlife in the modern.

Medievalism - the creative interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages - has had a major presence in the cultural memory of the modern West, and has grown in scale to become a global phenomenon. Countless examples across aesthetic, material and political domains reveal that the medieval period has long provided a fund of images and ideas that have been vital to defining 'the modern'. Bringing together local, national and global examples and tracing medievalism's unpredictable course from early modern poetry to contemporary digital culture, this authoritative Companion offers a panoramic view of the historical, aesthetic, ideological and conceptual dimensions of this phenomenon. It showcases a range of critical positions and approaches to discussing medievalism, from more 'traditional' historicist and close-reading practices through to theoretically engaged methods. It also acquaints readers with key terms and provides them with a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary for discussing the medieval afterlife in the modern.

This volume explores the reciprocal relationships that can develop between medieval women writers and the modern scholars who study them. Taking up the call to 'research the researcher', the authors indicate not only what they bring to their study from their own personal experience, but how their methodologies and ways of thinking about and dealing with the past have been influenced by the medieval women they study. Medieval women writers discussed include those writing in the vernacular such as Christine de Pizan and Margaret Paston, those writing in Latin such as Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Birgitta of Sweden, and the works transcribed from women mystics such as Margery Kempe, Hadewijch, and Julian of Norwich. Attention is also given to medieval women as the readers, consumers and patrons of written works. Issues considered in this volume include the place of ethics, interestedness and social justice in contemporary medieval studies, questions of alterity, empathy, essentialism and appropriation in dealing with figures of the medieval past, the permeable boundaries between academic medieval studies and popular medievalism, questions of situatedness and academic voice, and the relationship between feminism and medieval studies. Linked to these issues is the interrelation between medieval women and medieval men in the production and consumption of written works both for and about women and the implications of this for both female and male readers of those works today. Overarching all these questions is that of the intellectual and methodological heritage - sometimes ambiguous, perhaps even problematic - that medieval women continue to offer us.

First full-length critical study of humour in medievalism. The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also aboutmodernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literaturesat the University of Wollongong.

Voice is a fleeting physical phenomenon that leaves behind traces of its existence. Medieval literary voices offers a wide-reaching approach to the concept of literary voices, both the vanished authorial ones and the implicit textual ones. Its impressive lineup deepens our understanding of how literary voices evoke the elusive voices lurking beyond the text, capturing the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the soundscape of the uttered text. It explores multiple dimensions of medieval voice and vocalisations, and the interactions between literary voices and their authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It contends that through the theorizing of literary voices we can begin to understand the ways in which medieval voices mediate or proclaim an embodied selfhood or material presence, how they dictate or contest moral conventions, and how they create and sustain narrative soundscapes. -- .

This volume is the first close examination of the rich and diverse body of medievalist texts produced in late colonial and early Federal (ie post-1901) Australia. It examines the many ways in which early Australian novelists, poets, and dramatists drew on the motifs, events, and personages of the medieval past, and places particular emphasis on how they used the European past to illuminate their sense of the Australian present. Broadly stated, the book argues that a study of early Australian medievalist literature and theatre uncovers a rich and revealing drama in which the forces of cultural nostalgia and cultural amnesia sometimes contended against one another, and sometimes harmonised, to produce a unique and distinctive corpus. The book significantly extends current knowledge about nineteenth-century literary and theatrical medievalism by offering an exploration of how medievalist discourses and idioms came to be taken up within a major, but as yet under-examined, branch of Anglophone literature. It aims also to broaden the cultural ambit of nineteenth-century medievalism by offering analyses of popular and ephemeral instances alongside more 'serious' medievalist texts. The study balances an interest in how this medievalism responded to local conditions with an interest in its international complexion, examining how Australian medievalist novels, poems, and plays, participated in imperial and transpacific intellectual and entertainment circuits.While the emphasis of the volume is on close, historically-contextualising interpretations of texts, it has woven through its arguments a series of meditations on such theoretical matters as how we determine the boundaries of medievalism, how we might develop an account of colonial medievalism as non-derivative, whether medievalist discourses are equally amenable across gender, class, and ideological lines, and how the premodern past is evoked as a means for formulating the present and the future. Louise D'Arcens is an Associate Professor in the English Literatures Program. Her two main current research areas are medievalism and medieval women's writing.

The second part of Medievalism and the Academy identifies the four specific questions that have come to focus recent scholarship in medievalism: What is difference? what is theory? woman? God? The impact of cultural studies on contemporary medieval studies is investigated in this latest volume of Studies in Medievalism, which also offers an account of the developing interest of contemporary cultural theorists inthe medieval period. Rather than dismissing the connection between medieval studies and cultural criticism as an expression of academic self-interest, the essays identify specific questions which engage both, such as race, history, women, religion, and literature. Topics include the use of Augustine by postcolonial theorists; the influence of studies in medieval mysticism on the development of women's studies programs; and the influence of Foucault and NewHistoricism on the study of medieval history. Contributors: ELLIE RAGLAND, TIMOTHY RICHARDSON, MICHAEL BERNARD-DONALS, CLAY KINSNER, LINDA SEXSON, REBECCA DOUGLASS, LOUISE SYLVESTER, RICHARD GLEJZER, CHARLES WILSON, ANDREW J. DELL'OLIO

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies-from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia-it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways 'the Middle Ages' have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book's case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as 'world-disclosing' a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past 'world' opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received, and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localised forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.

Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.