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Discusses contemporary medievalism in studies ranging from Brazil to West Africa, from Manila to New York.Across the world, revivals of medieval practices, images, and tales flourish as never before. The essays collected here, informed by approaches from Global Studies and the critical discourse on the concept of a'Global Middle Ages', explore the many facets of contemporary medievalism: post-colonial responses to the enforced dissemination of Western medievalisms, attempts to retrieve pre-modern cultural traditions that were interrupted by colonialism, the tentative forging of a global'medieval'imaginary from the world's repository of magical tales and figures, and the deployment across borders of medieval imagery for political purposes. The volume is divided into two sections, dealing with'Local Spaces'and'Global Geographies'. The contributions in the first consider a variety of medievalisms tied to particular places across a broad geography, but as part of a larger transnational medievalist dynamic. Those in the second focus on explicitly globalist medievalist phenomena whether concerning the projection of a particular medievalist trope across borders or the integration of'medieval'pasts from different parts of the globe in a contemporary incarnation of medievalism. A wide range of topics are addressed, from Japanese manga and Arthurian tales to The O-Trilogy of Maurice Gee, Camus, and Dungeons and Dragons.

While Jane Austen is often regarded as an author who embodies Georgian refinement and restraint, this book argues that her work was deeply engaged with the medieval tradition of courtly love and its investment in happy endings. Revealing the influence of romance on Persuasion, Emma, and other novels, this study provides new insights into Austen's narrative style, representations of gender, and complex interest in happiness as both an affective and moral state. As Austen reimagines courtly love in her own idiom, she upends traditional gender roles, portraying women not as fine ladies but as rational creatures. Drawing on the structures of Christian narrative, she also illuminates the centrality of providence as a virtue that bestows grace on her characters, offering them deliverance and happiness. To be sure, Austen famously ironizes romance, criticizing emotional excess and downplaying conventionally romantic scenes. This study nonetheless finds creative power in her irony, showing how Austen's critique of romance is rooted in the paradoxes of Christian theology, which allow for both human suffering and divine order. In reframing key ethical and generic conventions of the medieval past, Austen's ironic, providentially arranged romances educate readers into wisdom and joy.

Neil Gaiman is one of the most widely known writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, having produced fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and horror, television, comics, and prose. He often attributes this eclecticism to his “compost heap” approach to writing, gathering inspiration from life, religion, literature, and mythology. Readers love to sink into Gaiman's medieval worlds—but what makes them “medieval”? Shiloh Carroll offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have impacted Gaiman's own use of medieval material. She examines influences from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales in order to expand readers'understanding and appreciation of Gaiman's work, as well as the rest of the medievalist films, TV shows, and books that are so popular today.

This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or “queer” the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still “medieval” – in other words, the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source material still reverberate and hold relevance for today's world. They do so by challenging the primacy of present over past, toppling the categories of old and new, and suggesting new interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike.

This book explores the connections between history and fantasy in George RR Martin's immensely popular book series'A Song of Ice and Fire'and the international TV sensation HBO TV's Game of Thrones. Acknowledging the final season's foregrounding of the cultural centrality of history, truth and memory in the confrontation between Bran and the Night King, the volume takes full account of the TV show's conclusion in its multiple readings across from medieval history, its institutions and practices, as depicted in the books to the show's own particular medievalism. The topics under discussion include the treatment of the historical phenomena of chivalry, tournaments, dreams, models of education, and the supernatural, and the different ways in which these are mediated in Martin's books and the TV show. The collection also includes a new study of one of Martin's key sources, Maurice Druon's Les Rois Maudits, in-depth explorations of major characters in their medieval contexts, and provocative reflections on the show's controversial handling of gender and power politics.Written by an international team of medieval scholars, historians, literary and cultural experts, bringing their own unique perspectives to the multiple societies, belief-systems and customs of the'Game of Thrones'universe, Memory and Medievalism in George RR Martin and Game of Thrones offers original and sparky insights into the world-building of books and show.

How do marginalized communities across the globe use the medieval past to combat racism, educate the public, and create a just world? Jonathan Hsy advances urgent academic and public conversations about race and appropriations of the medieval past in popular culture and the arts. Examining poetry, fiction, journalism, and performances, Hsy shows how cultural icons such as Frederick Douglass, Wong Chin Foo, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Sui Sin Far reinvented medieval traditions to promote social change. Contemporary Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial artists embrace diverse pasts to build better futures. “Makes the crucial move of tying medievalism studies readings to social and racial justice work explicitly … innovative and greatly needed in the field.” Seeta Chaganti, author of Strange Footing “A major accomplishment that belongs on the shelves of every person who believes in antiracism.” Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

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 Chelcický; 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. Contributors: Leticia Alvarez-Recio, Susan Aronstein, Matthias D. Berger, Shiloh Carroll, Louise D'Arcens, Laurie Finke, John C. Ford, Alexander L, Kaufman, Stephen Lahey, Scott Manning, Galit Noga-Banai, S.C. Thomson, Ethan Doyle White, Karen A. Winstead,

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages,To attract followers many professional politicians, as well as other political actors, ground their biases in (supposedly) medieval beliefs, align themselves with medieval heroes, or condemn their enemies as medieval barbarians. The essays in the first part of this volume directly examine some of the many forms such medievalism can take, including the invocation of'blood libels'in American politics; Vladimir Putin's self-comparisons to'Saint Equal-of-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir'; alt-right references to medieval Christian battles with Moslems; nativist Brexit allusions to the Middle Ages; and, in the 2019 film The Kid Who Would be King, director Joe Cornish's call for Arthurian leadership through Brexit. These essays thus inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which touch on politics in the course of discussing the director Guy Ritchie's erasure of Wales in the 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword; medievalist alt-right attempts to turn one disenfranchised group against another; Jean-Paul Laurens's 1880 condemnation of Napoleon III via a portrait of Honorius; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's extraordinarily wide range of medievalisms; the archaeology of Julian of Norwich's anchorite cell; the influence of Julian on pity in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter book series; the origins of introductory maps for medievalist narratives; self-reflexive medievalism in a television episode of Doctor Who; and sonic medievalism in fantasy video games. Contributors: Laura Cochrane, James Cook, Esther Cuenca, Andrew B.R. Elliott, Ali Frauman, JohnWyatt Greenlee, Sean Griffin, Christopher Jensen, M.J. Toswell, Laura Varnam, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Anna Fore Waymack, Daniel Wollenberg, Victoria Yuskaitis

First full-length investigation into Canadian literary medievalism as a discrete phenomenon.The essays in this volume consider what is original and distinctive about the manifestation of medievalism in Canadian literature and its origins and its subsequent growth and development: from the first novel published in Canadawritten by a Canadian-born author, Julia Beckwith Hart's St Ursula's Convent (1824), to the recent work of the best-selling novelist Patrick DeWitt (Undermajordomo Minor, published in 2015). Topics addressed includethe strong strain of medievalist fantasy itself in the work of the young-adult author Kit Pearson, and the longer novels of Charles de Lint, Steven Erikson, and Guy Gavriel Kay; the medievalist inclinations of Archibald Lampman and W.W. Campbell, well-known nineteenth-century Canadian poets; and the often-studied Wacousta by John Richardson, first published in 1832. Chapters also cover early Canadian periodicals'engagement with orientalist medievalism; and works by twentieth-century writers such as the irrepressible Earle Birney, the witty and intellectual Robertson Davies, and the fascinating and learned Margaret Atwood. M.J. TOSWELL is a Professor at theUniversity of Western Ontario, ANNA CZARNOWUS is a Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Contributors: D.M.R. Bentley, Agnieszka Klis-Brodowska, Anna Czarnowus, Brian Johnson, Laurel Ryan, David Watt, M.J. Toswell, Dominika Ruszkiewicz, Cory Rushton, Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Ewa Drab, and Michael Fox.

How is the medieval world depicted today? Two German museums serve as case studies for a vibrant, imaginative, and provocative enactment of twenty-first century medievalism: the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach in Wolframs Eschenbach (1995) and the Nibelung Museum in Worms (2001). Emerging around the turn of the 20th century, the museums explore medieval German literature, cultural memory and local history. As the museums reconstruct and transform medieval narratives for the contemporary audience, they enact the process of medievalism: they reveal how memory, through the lens of the middle ages, shapes modern cultural identity and heritage. Medieval Literature on Display thereby contributes to important conversations about medievalism's role in constructing and affirming cultural identity, in conceptualizing and finding places for the future of the past.This unique book is vital reading for scholars of medieval literature and historians of medieval Europe, as well as scholars of visual culture and museum studies.

From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past is a collection of essays that both analyses the historical and cultural medieval and early modern past, and engages with the medievalism and early-modernism—a new term introduced in this collection—present in contemporary popular culture. By focusing on often overlooked uses of the past in contemporary culture—such as the allusions to John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623) in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, and the impact of intertextual references and internet fandom on the BBC's The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses—the contributors illustrate how cinematic, televisual, artistic, and literary depictions of the historical and cultural past not only re-purpose the past in varying ways, but also build on a history of adaptations that audiences have come to know and expect. From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past analyses the way that the medieval and early modern periods are used in modern adaptations, and how these adaptations both reflect contemporary concerns, and engage with a history of intertextuality and intervisuality.

Combining elements of medievalism, the historical novel and the detective narrative, medieval crime fiction capitalizes upon the appeal of all three--the most famous examples being Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (one of the best-selling books ever published) and Ellis Peters'endearing Brother Cadfael series. Hundreds of other novels and series fill out the genre, in settings ranging from the so-called Celtic Enlightenment in seventh-century Ireland to the ruthless Inquisition in fourteenth-century France to the mean streets of medieval London. The detectives are an eclectic group, including weary ex-crusaders, former Knights Templar, enterprising monks and nuns, and historical poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer. This book investigates the enduring popularity of the largely unexamined genre and explores its social, cultural and political contexts.

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.One of the biggest attractions of George R.R. Martin's high fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and by extension its HBO television adaptation, Game of Thrones, is its claim to historical realism. The author, thedirectors and producers of the adaptation, and indeed the fans of the books and show, all lay claim to Westeros, its setting, as representative of an authentic medieval world. But how true are these claims? Is it possible to faithfully represent a time so far removed from our own in time and culture? And what does an authentic medieval fantasy world look like? This book explores Martin's and HBO's approaches to and beliefs about the Middle Ages and how those beliefs fall into traditional medievalist and fantastic literary patterns. Examining both books and programme from a range of critical approaches - medievalism theory, gender theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, andrace theory - Dr Carroll analyzes how the drive for historical realism affects the books'and show's treatment of men, women, people of colour, sexuality, and imperialism, as well as how the author and showrunners discuss these effects outside the texts themselves. SHILOH CARROLL teaches in the writing center at Tennessee State University.

This book is called a manifesto because it has an unapologetically political objective. Richard Utz wants to help reform the way we think about and practise our academic engagement with medieval culture, and he uses his own observations as a medievalist and medievalism-ist over the last twenty-five years to offer ways in which we might reconnect with the general public that has allowed us to become, since the late nineteenth century, a rather exclusive clan of specialists who communicate mostly with each other.The traditional academic study of the Middle Ages, after more than a century of growing and plateauing, is now on the decline. While, at least over the next five to ten years, we will still be basking in the reassuring proximity (at conferences) of thousands of others who are involved in what we do ourselves, there is a manifest discrepancy between the large number of students who request that we address their love of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and medieval-themed video and computer games, and the decreasing number of actual medievalists hired to replace retiring colleagues. We should pursue more lasting partnerships with so-called amateurs and enthusiasts for the sake of a sustainable future engagement with medieval culture. Richard Utz suggests some ways we might do this, and looks forward to “a more truly co-disciplinary, inclusive, democratic, and humanistic engagement with what we call, for better or worse, the Middle Ages”.

Montague Rhodes James authored some of the most highly regarded ghost stories of all time—classics such as “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” that have been adapted many times over for radio and television and have never gone out of print. But while James is best known as a fiction writer and storyteller, he was also a provost of King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and a legendary and influential scholar whose pioneering work in the study of biblical texts and medieval manuscripts, art, and architecture is still relevant today.In Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Patrick J. Murphy argues that these twin careers are inextricably linked. James's research not only informed his fiction but also reflected his anxieties about the nature of academic life and explored the delicate divide between professional, university men and erratic hobbyists or antiquaries. Murphy shows how detailed attention to the scholarly inspirations behind James's fiction provides considerable insight into a formative moment in medieval studies, as well as into James's methods as a master stylist of understated horror.During his life, James often claimed that his stories were mere entertainments—pleasing distractions from a life largely defined by academic discipline and restraint—and readers over the years have been content to take him at his word. This intriguing volume, however, convincingly proves otherwise.

With contributions from 29 leading international scholars, this is the first single-volume guide to the appropriation of medieval texts in contemporary culture.Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture covers a comprehensive range of media, including literature, film, TV, comics book adaptations, electronic media, performances, and commercial merchandise and tourism. Its lively chapters range from Spamalot to the RSC, Beowulf to Merlin, computer games to internet memes, opera to Young Adult fiction and contemporary poetry, and much more.Also included is a companion website aimed at general readers, academics, and students interested in the burgeoning field of Medieval afterlives, complete with:- Further reading/weblinks-'My favourite'guides to contemporary medieval appropriations- Images and interviews- Guide to library archives and manuscript collections- Guide to heritage collectionSee also our website at https://medievalafterlives.wordpress.com/.

Science fiction and fantasy, with their necessarily impossible worlds, are perhaps the ultimate in neomedievalism. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages. Studies of genres, moreover, often focus on a single medium—fiction, film, or television. Each section, and some individual chapters in the volume explores at least two, reflecting the multimedia nature of contemporary popular culture in general and genres in particular. By exploring the way medievalist discourses travel and shift across media within connected genres, the volume explores some of their internal complexities. Studies of popular genres illuminate social and cultural trends and concerns, while medievalisms reveal far more about the milieu in which they were created than they do about the Middle Ages. By exploring how popular genres develop, pulling on and being pushed by changing approaches to “the medieval,” this collection sheds light on twenty-first century popular culture's dynamic and at times conflicting moves, and those of the society which creates and consumes it. Individual chapters take diverse approaches, both synchronic and diachronic, some offering detailed case studies and others broader reviews of themes and trends. The variety enables a detailed picture of the complexities of fantasy and science fiction medievalisms to emerge. The first section explores the reception of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the two chapters together demonstrate that fantasy's “Tolkienian” medievalism is not that of a single author, but of many readers and creators making and remaking it in different media. The second shows that the dark and dirty medievalism of Game and Thrones and the subgenre of gritty fantasy is complex and at times contradictory. It illustrates the impact of market trends and forces on popular culture texts and the ways they are understood to engage with the past. The third section demonstrates that medievalism has been at the heart of science fiction since the ‘Golden Age'of the 1960s, and illustrates that use of medieval material and reference points connects it with fantasy as much as it separates the two genres. The final chapter shows that in the twenty-first century, fantasy definitions of medievalisms are expanding to include more than just references to the European Middle Ages which have long been conventional in the genre. Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms will be of much interest to scholars of fantasy and science fiction, and of medievalism.

Contemporary Western society is in the midst of an efflorescence of medievalism, from political rhetoric to the names of sports teams, advertising, and themed restaurants, to the pages and screens of popular culture. Medievalism in the twenty-first century is layered, folding into itself the practices, processes, and representations of earlier eras, as well as those of the time and place in which it is produced. Reimagining history for mass consumption has as much, if not more, to do with the needs and wants of the present than with any historical reality. Profit and pleasure define popular culture, and genres are a major framework organizing the making of both: creative industries use them to make the former, and consumers to help find the latter. When the Middle Ages are reimagined in popular-culture contexts, they are shaped by the genre in which any individual creative work is produced and consumed. The nexus of medievalism and popular genres is the focus of this collection, which interrogates the interplay between past and present in mass culture. Studies of popular culture medievalisms have not, to date, examined the interconnections of the two in any organized fashion, yet genre is a major framework structuring representation, production, consumption, and the making of meaning in popular culture. The conventions of any genre shape, even if they do not entirely circumscribe, what is possible in any constitutive creative work—this is as true of medievalism as it is of any other element—while genres themselves are shaped by the anxieties of the society which creates them. Given that a high proportion of today's popular culture medievalisms are filtered through genre, this volume's exploration of their interconnections sheds light not only on the nature of both, but on social issues and identity constructs of the present cultural moment. As the first volume to explore the nexus of medievalism and genre across such a wide range of texts, this collection illustrates the fractured ideologies of contemporary popular culture. The Middle Ages are more usually, and often more prominently, aligned with conservative ideologies, for example around gender roles, but the Middle Ages can also be the site of resistance and progressive politics. Exploring the interplay of past and present, and the ways writers and readers work engage with them demonstrates the conscious processes of identity construction at work throughout Western popular culture. The collection also demonstrates that while scholars may have by-and-large abandoned the concept of accuracy when considering contemporary medievalisms, the Middle Ages are widely associated with authenticity, and the authenticity of identity, in the popular imagination; the idea of the real Middle Ages matters, even when historical realities do not. This book will be of interest to scholars of medievalism, popular culture, and genre.

The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.

Knights and ladies, giants and dragons, tournaments, battles, quests and crusades are commonplace in stories for children. This book examines how late Victorians and Edwardians retold medieval narratives of chivalry--epics, romances, sagas, legends and ballads. Stories of Beowulf, Arthur, Gawain, St. George, Roland, Robin Hood and many more thrilled and instructed children, and encouraged adult reading. Lavish volumes and schoolbooks of the era featured illustrated texts, many by major artists. Children's books, an essential part of Edwardian publishing, were disseminated throughout the English-speaking world. Many are being reprinted today. This book examines related contexts of Medievalism expressed in painting, architecture, music and public celebrations, and the works of major authors, including Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow and William Morris. The book explores national identity expressed through literature, ideals of honor and valor in the years before World War I, and how childhood reading influenced 20th-century writers as diverse as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

This book is concerned with our ideological, technical and emotional investments in reclaiming medieval for contemporary popular culture. The authors illuminate both medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways while interrogating the many ways in which metamedievalism reinterprets and reconceptualises the medieval.

Through the consideration of canonical authors such as Blake, Scott, and Wordsworth and of lesser-studied works such as radical press writings and popular drama, this study explores the imaginative appeal of the social structures and literary forms of the Middle Ages, and how they raised awareness of Britain's tradition of freedom.

Modernity has historically defined itself by relation to classical antiquity on the one hand, and the medieval on the other. While early modernity's relation to Antiquity has been amply documented, its relation to the medieval has been less studied. This volume seeks to address this omission by presenting some preliminary explorations of this field. In seventeen essays ranging from the Italian Renaissance to Enlightenment France, it focuses on three main themes: continuities and discontinuities between the medieval and early modern, early modern re-uses of medieval matter, and conceptualizations of the medieval. Collectively, the essays illustrate how early modern medievalisms differ in important respects from post-Romantic views of the medieval, ultimately calling for a re-definition of the concept of medievalism itself.Contributors include: Mette Bruun, Peter Damian-Grint, Anne-Marie De Gendt, Daphne Hoogenboezem, Tiphaine Karsenti, Joost Keizer, Waldemar Kowalski, Elena Lombardi, Coen Maas, Pieter Mannaerts, Christoph Pieper, Jacomien Prins, Adam Shear, Paul Smith, Martin Spies, Andrea Worm, and Aurélie Zygel-Basso.

Medievalism examined in a variety of genres, from fairy tales to today's computer games.As medievalism is refracted through new media, it is often radically transformed. Yet it inevitably retains at least some common denominators with more traditional responses to the middle ages. This latest volume of Studies inMedievalism explores this phenomenon with a special section on computer games, examining digital echoes of the medieval past in subjects ranging from the sovereign ethics of empire in Star Wars to gender identity in on-line role playing. Medievalism in more conventional venues is also addressed, ranging from early French fairy tales to nineteenth-century neo-Byzantine murals. Great innovation and extraordinary continuity are thus juxtaposed not only within each article but also across the volume as a whole, in yet further testimony to the exceptional flexibility and enduring relevance of medievalism. CONTRIBUTORS: ALICIA C. MONTOYA, ALBERT D. PIONKE, GRETCHENKREAHLING MCKAY, CHENE HEADY, BRUCE C. BRASINGTON, STEFANO MENGOZZI, CAROL L. ROBINSON, OLIVER M. TRAXEL, AMY S. KAUFMAN, BRENT MOBERLY, KEVIN MOBERLY, LAURYN S. MAYER

Robichaud charts the growth of Jones's medievalism from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite influences, showing how his commitment to modernist aesthetics transformed his vision of the Middle Ages.

Leaving the traditional focus on Arthurian romance and Gothic tales, the essays in this collection address how the Victorians looked back to the Middle Ages to create a sense of authority for their own ideas in areas such as art, religion, gender expectations, and social services. This book will interest specialists in the Victorian period from various fields and will also be a welcome addition to any library serving substantial humanities divisions. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the essays, this collection would be useful in a wide range of humanities classes beyond the traditional literature class.