Introduction

Medievalism is an umbrella term for any engagement with the medieval past, including ideas about the Middle Ages, conscious revivals of medieval motifs, narratives, forms and genres, repressed continuities, perhaps even the scholarly study of the Middle Ages itself. It is likely to strike most literary scholars as a fairly sleepy topic. Yet in the past decade, medievalism has received a dramatic resurgence of interest. Two convictions have driven this resurgence: first, that the topic has never received anywhere near the attention it warrants, and second, that it should be of interest to the field of literary studies as a whole, not just medievalists. This newer work on medievalism, though necessarily still rooted in historical research, has tried to break away from an older case-study approach. It has confronted the rather hazy distinctions between medievalism as a general cultural impulse and medieval studies as an academic discipline, and has begun to offer more precise definitions of its own methods and proper objects. It has also begun to address itself to some more overarching questions. These include the nature and function of periodization; the relation between continuity and recreation in engagements with the past and the corresponding relations between nostalgia and anxiety of influence; the essential character of the medieval, whether in itself or its recreations; and whether medievalism is distinct from revivals of other cultural moments from the past, classicism, for example.

We can view this new approach to medievalism as something of a byproduct of the major changes in literary studies that have taken place in the past four decades. First, there is the recognition, issuing from post-structuralism and deconstruction, that the discipline of literary studies and its subfields are complex, historically variable intellectual, discursive, and institutional constructions, and not the simple reflections of a self-evident object. This is especially true for Medieval Studies, given the overdetermined tangle that constitutes modern notions of the Middle Ages. Medieval literature as we now know it is largely the product of the nineteenth century in that it was during the nineteenth century when medieval writings were systematically collected, mapped, and edited. Transforming the disparate and abundant remnants of a manuscript culture into the medium of print was an enormous intellectual undertaking that entailed, among other things, imposing on those materials modern notions of authorship, textual identity, and political community at least partially alien to them. As many have argued—including David Matthews in the pages to follow—the irreducibly modern component in the discipline of Medieval Studies means that—its intellectual rigor notwithstanding—it too must ultimately be considered a medievalism.

This recognition strategically redeploys the notion of medieval difference—that difference which modernists no less than medievalists have for so long taken as axiomatic. Yet it complements a broader and more amorphous one regarding continuity. New approaches have had as large an influence on the study of medieval literature as they have had everywhere else. To tell the story perhaps too schematically, by and large the newer trends, be they feminism, New Historicism, Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, cultural studies, even race theory and postcolonial critique, have come to Medieval Studies from thinkers and scholars based in later-period fields. Medieval Studies as a field has not necessarily been more receptive to these new approaches, but it has not been any less receptive either. The new approaches naturally enough brought with them various markers of their novelty, and not infrequently assumed a kind of hypermodernity not just in their method but in their proper objects. For some more traditionally minded medievalists, such markers confirmed the sense that the new approaches were anachronistic impositions. However, what most medievalists discovered was that these approaches worked all too well. That surprising fact in turn led more enterprising medievalists to question the ineluctability of the difference between medieval and modern, and to look more systematically at possible postmedieval continuities and residues. If Medieval Studies is a modern construction, could not the same be said for the broader disciplinary structure of periodization within which Medieval Studies nests?

The essays to follow should give some indication of the wide variety of inquiry this question can produce. But...