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.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: This volume addresses the intersections between three significant strands which have emerged within contemporary medieval literary scholarship: (i) medievalist scholarship, with its analysis of the intellectual, cultural and political post-medieval constructions of the Middle Ages; (ii) critical medieval scholarship, with its focus on methodological reflexivity, scholarly 'situatedness' and theoretical concerns such as subjectivity, power and embodiment; and (iii) feminist medieval scholarship, with its interest in representations of gender in medieval texts and the reception of medieval women's writing by modern readers...read more