The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature by Clare Bradford (review)

Medievalisms play an outsize role in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western children’s culture, and Clare Bradford’s The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature, part of Palgrave’s “Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature” series, works through this ubiquity with clarity and purpose. Whether children’s “medievalist” narratives (as Bradford refers to them) follow the stories of medieval youth, place child protagonists into fantastical situations fitted with medieval trappings, or demonstrate how modern imaginative play can transport young people to an invented moment of premodern innocence and adventure, visions of the Middle Ages repeatedly depict and define modern-day childhood in children’s literature and media. At the same time, such texts regularly suggest a reciprocal relationship between childhood reading and subject formation, offering a metatextual commentary on their own importance in shaping child identities and their subsequent adult lives. As Bradford points out, it is reading The Idylls of the King that inspires Anne Shirley’s ill-fated performance of Elaine’s final voyage in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908); while Anne comically fails at replicating Tennyson’s Victorian dream of a chivalric Middle Ages, this medievalist misadventure brings her classmate Gilbert Blythe to her rescue and foreshadows the real-world romance that awaits them in adulthood.

Ranging from classic works of children’s literature to contemporary picture books and films, Bradford’s volume “adopts a capacious approach” and provides a broad, engaging introduction to how the medieval period functions in primarily Anglophone books and media for young people (9). The seven chapters that follow the introduction are each organized around a particular subject: cultural and historiographical conceptualizations of the Middle Ages, temporality, spatiality, disability, monstrosity, animals, and humor. In spite of its expansive title, The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature is especially useful for thinking about medievalist children’s texts as they have appeared in the past several decades: of the sixty primary children’s and young adult texts that appear in this volume, over 90% appeared in 1980 or later and over half since the year 2000. Bradford’s ordered chapters and wide coverage of texts limit her ability to explicitly connect and delve into the medievalisms that appear throughout her book, but her approach will be welcome to those looking for insights into specific topics and recent works.

The introductory chapter concisely describes the scholarly and cultural landscape that informs this study, beginning with the shared marginalization of medievalism and children’s literature studies within the academy. In spite of the scholarly perception of both fields as relatively “unserious and lightweight” (4), Bradford demonstrates the importance of children’s literature to defining the Middle Ages in the (implicitly Western) popular imagination and the role of both childhood and the medieval in shaping contemporary conceptions of modernity. This framing chapter builds upon the work of recent medievalism and children’s culture scholars such as Louise D’Arcens, Andrew Lynch, and Seth Lerer, providing not only a foundation for the coming chapters but also a helpful list of additional reading for those new to this subject area. Rather than proposing a single argument about how or why the Middle Ages appears in children’s culture as it does, Bradford puts forward the claim—rehearsed by Pugh and Weisl and others—that medievalist texts typically have more to say about the times in which they are developed than about the past per se. Within this context, she commits the book to analyzing the literary, cultural, moral, social, and speculative functions of medievalism in works for young people through a range of critical and theoretical lenses.

Chapter 1, “Thinking about the Middle Ages,” discusses enchantment in children’s medievalist fiction, the ways in which the Middle Ages can provide valuable distancing strategies for contemporary readers, and historiographical understandings of accuracy and authenticity in depictions of the past. The concept that Bradford raises in this chapter that proves most important to her book is Alan Robinson’s...