Books in the Medievalism series

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 "e;neomedievalism"e;, 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 survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages.What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts. This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals toHallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens. CLARE A. SIMMONS is a Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Offers new insights into the political and modern uses of public monuments devoted to figures from the past and the role of historical culture in the creation of national identity.

A survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages.

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The importance of the Anglo-Saxon past to England in the eighteenth century, politically and culturally, is here brought out.

Game of Thrones is famously inspired by the Middle Ages - but how "authentic" is the world it presents? This volume offers different angles to the question.