Table Of ContentMedievalisms
From King Arthur and Robin Hood, through to videogames and jousting-
themed restaurants, medieval culture continues to surround us and has retained
a strong influence on literature and culture throughout the ages.
This fascinating and illuminating guide is written by two of the leading
contemporary scholars of medieval literature, and explores:
(cid:1) the influence of medieval cultural concepts on literature and film, including
key authors such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Mark Twain;
(cid:1) the continued appeal of medieval cultural figures such as Dante, King
Arthur, and Robin Hood;
(cid:1) the influence of the medieval on such varied disciplines as politics, music,
children’s literature, and art;
(cid:1) contemporary efforts to relive the Middle Ages.
Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present surveys the critical field and sets
the boundaries for future study, providing an essential background for literary
study from the medieval period through to the twenty-first century.
Tison Pugh is Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA.
Angela Jane Weisl is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, USA.
Medievalisms
Making the Past in the Present
Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl
Firstpublished2013
byRoutledge
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SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada
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©2013TisonPughandAngelaJaneWeisl
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Medievalisms:makingthepastinthepresent/TisonPugh
andAngelaJaneWeisl.
p.cm.
ISBN978-0-415-61726-0(hardback)—ISBN978-0-415-61727-7
(paperback)—ISBN978-0-203-10828-4(ebook)
1.Medievalism.2.Medievalism—Socialaspects.3.Medievalism—Political
aspects.4.Popularculture.5.Commercialproducts—Socialaspects.
6.MiddleAgesinart.7.MiddleAgesinliterature.8.MiddleAges
inmotionpictures.I.Weisl,AngelaJane,1963-II.Title.
CB353.P742012
909.07—dc23
2012001437
ISBN:978-0-415-61726-0(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-415-61727-7(pbk)
ISBN:978-0-203-10828-4(ebk)
TypesetinSabon
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
To David Dean and Bob Squillace, non-medievalists
who, not very surprisingly, make all things, medieval
or not, more fun.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Medievalisms: The Magic of the Middle Ages 1
2 A Case Study of Dante: Naked Icons of Medievalism 12
3 Literary Medievalisms: Inventing Inspirations 30
4 “Medieval” Literature for Children and Young Adults:
Fantasies of Innocence 47
5 King Arthur’s and Robin Hood’s Adventures in
Medievalism: Mythic Masculinities (and Magical Femininities) 64
6 Movie Medievalisms: Five (or Six) Ways of Looking at an
Anachronism 83
7 Medievalisms in Music and the Arts: Longing for
Transcendence 101
8 Experiential Medievalisms: Reliving the Always Modern
Middle Ages 122
9 Political Medievalisms: The Darkness of the Dark Ages 140
Bibliography 158
Index 170
Acknowledgements
Chapter 2, “A Case Study of Dante: Naked Icons of Medievalism,” is also
published in Medieval Perspectives; we thank the Southeastern Medieval Asso-
ciation and Dan O’Sullivan, the editor of Medieval Perspectives, for permission
toreprintthisessay.Also,oursincerethankstoJelloBiafraandtheGuantanamo
School of Medicine for permission to quote “The New Feudalism” in its
entirety, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to reproduce
images of the Antioch Chalice and the Annunciation Triptych.
Our understanding of medievalisms would not be nearly so rich without
the assistance of many others who offered their expertise, understanding, and
time to help our project succeed. Helen Evans, Curator of Medieval Art at the
Metropolitan Museum and the Cloisters, Melanie Holcomb, Associate Curator
of Medieval Art, and Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator-in-Charge of the
Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke to us in
great detail and candor about medieval art and the way it is displayed, as well
as giving us great insight into museum culture and current ideas about exhibit
design.TheworldofVikingMetalwasopeneduptousinallitseccentricglory
by Gesina Phillips, DJ and Promotions Director, and Michcella Tiscornia, DJ
andTechnicalOperationsDirectorofWSOU-Radio,SouthOrange,NewJersey.
Medieval gamers and enthusiasts Matt Honig and Gesina Phillips (whose
understanding of medievalisms is all-encompassing) discussed many different
videogames and answered multiple questions at length, and Kevin Stevens
played the Dante’s Inferno videogame for us; without their expertise, our sense
of the world of the electronic Middle Ages would not be nearly so rich.
EveleenaFults,along-timeprincessatMedievalTimes®DinnerandTournament,
Orlando, provided insights that even a pilgrimage there could not. Cathryn
WiatroskiandKevinStevensvisitedtheMetropolitanMuseumandtheCloisters
and took copious notes on the differences between the Medieval Hall, the Old
Master Paintings Galleries, and the Greek and Roman exhibits. Mary Balkun,
ElizabethCentanni,A.J.Cunder,AshleyLorenzo,BobSquillace,andMichcella
Tiscornia attended the New York Renaissance Faire in Sterling Forrest and the
Fort Tryon Park Medieval Festival and shared their experiences and commen-
tary, and A. J. Cunder is particularly to be commended for his own act of
medievalism: wearing a sword on the New York City subway. We also
Acknowledgements ix
benefited from the support of several research assistants at Seton Hall: Jamie
Rooney and Christine Mallon provided support at the end of the project, while
Kevin Stevens proved himself boundlessly helpful and unceasingly useful,
including undertaking research, participating in various medieval activities,
reading chapters and offering commentary on them, and bringing us interesting
exampleswewouldnothavefoundonourown.Hehasbeenaninvaluablepart
of the project from its inception, and his input can be found on many of these
pages.
Additional thanks are due to our institutions, the University of Central
Florida and Seton Hall University, for their support of our scholarship.
Audiences at many conferences, including the Southeast Medieval Association,
New Jersey College English Association, and the Plymouth Medieval and
Renaissance Forum provided commentary on early drafts of chapters, and we
have benefited as well from thoughtful readings by our colleagues, including
Mary Balkun, Jonathan Farina, and Karen Gevirtz. The editorial and produc-
tion team at Routledge has been a joy to work with, including Emma Joyes,
Polly Dodson, and Niall Slater. The support of our students, and the patience
of our families and friends, throughout the project has been legion.
The “Antioch Chalice” and The Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)
by Robert Campin images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source:
Art Resource, NY.
1 Medievalisms
The Magic of the Middle Ages
The magic of the Middle Ages: the phrase should collapse in its inherent
ridiculousness, yet it holds firm in the cultural imaginary, as it has held firm, in
multiple and contradictory permutations, for the many centuries since the
Middle Ages was created by Renaissance thinkers determined to establish a
break with the past. Distinguished as the “Dark Ages” by Petrarch in the 1300s
to set it apart from the classical period that preceded it, and defined as “med-
ieval,” or “Middle” by Leonardo Bruni in History of the Florentine People
(1442) and by Flavio Biondo in Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romanorum
Imperii (1483), the “Middle Ages” emerges as an invention of those who came
after it; its entire construction is, essentially, a fantasy.1 Set apart both from
therationalclassicalperiodandfromtheostensiblereturntothesevaluesinthe
Renaissance, the Middle Ages by definition encodes a kind of magical thinking,
in which both cultural difference and continuity can be cordoned off from prior
andsubsequenteras.TheostensibleallureandmagicoftheMiddleAgesshould
implode as a cultural fantasy for multiple reasons, beginning with the prosaic
realization that the various wars, plagues, diseases, turmoil, and strife of the
period renderedliferathermiserable for much of itspopulace, and extendingto
the observation that not many of even the most devoted of today’s “medieval”
aficionados would surrender the comforts of the twenty-first century for the
uncertainties of the fourteenth. Also, life in the western European Middle Ages
offered harsh restrictions on individual freedom and autonomy, particularly for
any person not granted the statusof the normative, including but not limited to
women, Jews, homosexuals, and Muslims. And yet, despite the unpleasantness
of historical reality, the Middle Ages is magic: it is continually reborn in new
stories, new media, new histories. It continues to enthrall for its pageantry
and its manners, for its ideals of courtly love and chivalry, for its literary and
artistic accomplishments, in such plenitude that, although the Middle Ages did
in fact end, medievalisms, it appears, will never cease to be reborn.
In its simplest sense, medievalism refers to the art, literature, scholarship,
avocational pastimes, and sundry forms of entertainment and culture that turn
to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration, and in doing so,
explicitly or implicitly, by comparison or by contrast, comment on the artist’s
contemporary sociocultural milieu. Numerous scholars have put forth
2 Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present
definitions of this term, including Leslie Workman, a leading figure in the
field of medievalisms due to his role as the founding editor of the journal
Studies in Medievalism. In his editorial published in its first volume, he defined
the field as:
the study of the scholarship which has created the Middle Ages we know,
idealsand models derived from the Middle Ages, and the relations between
them. In terms of these things medievalism could only begin, not simply
when the Middle Ages had ended, whenever that may have been, but when
theMiddleAgeswereperceivedtohavebeensomethinginthepast,something
itwasnecessarytoreviveordesirabletoimitate.2
As Workman observes, a sense of nostalgia for a lost past percolates through-
out many medievalist endeavors, in that the turn to history often reveals a
sense of discontentment with the present. Workman also focuses on the con-
nection between scholarship and medievalism, in that even academic studies of
the Middle Ages become implicated with such nostalgia. Pauline Stafford
likewise sees a scholarly component to medievalisms, suggesting that the term
refers to the “use of and responses to the medieval past … and the scholarly
study of these responses,”3 and Clare Simmons posits that medievalism is
“the later reception of the Middle Ages,” noting also its “reputation as an
aberration from scholarly Medieval Studies.”4 As Simmons posits, the scholarly
study of the MiddleAges isoften seen as distinct from its re-creation in various
artistic and entertainment media, yet as medievalisms themselves increasingly
become the focus of scholarly study, this distinction may fade. Summarizing
such sentiments, Tom Shippey affirms that medievalism includes “[a]ny post-
medieval attempt to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle
Ages, for the modern world, in any of many different media; especially in
academic usage, [it is] the study of the development and significance of such
attempts.”5
Perhaps the most famous theorist of medievalisms is novelist and social critic
Umberto Eco, the author of the murder mystery The Name of the Rose
(1983)butalsowidelyacclaimedforsuchworksasFoucault’sPendulum(1989),
Baudolino (2003), On Ugliness (2007), and The Prague Cemetery (2011). In his
groundbreaking study of medievalism, included in his collection Travels in
Hyperreality (1986), Eco identifies “Ten Little Middle Ages,” each of which
captures a particular trope of post-medieval re-creations of the medieval past.
His “Ten Little Middle Ages” include: Middle Ages as a pretext; as a site of
ironical revisitation; as a barbaric age; of Romanticism; of the philosophia
perennis or of Neo-Thomism; of national identities; of Decadentism; of philo-
logical reconstruction; of so-called Tradition; and of the expectation of the
Millennium. Among this plenitude of converging and diverging Middle Ages,
Eco urges his readers to openly declare their allegiance to the particular fantasy
of the past to which they subscribe: “we have the moral and cultural duty of
spelling out what kind of Middle Ages we are talking about. To say openly
