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

More than any other historical period, the Middle Ages captivates the imagination of young readers. Its ubiquity in literature, film, and television series confirms the untiring appeal of the medieval. Equally expansive are the diverse ways that the Middle Ages are represented and exploited in contemporary writing for young readers. Clare Bradford’s ambitious study The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature aims to parse the “uses and abuses of the medieval in… post-medieval texts which respond to and deploy medieval culture” (2). Aligning the study of medievalism—that is, the creative depiction of the Middle Ages in post-medieval periods—with that of children’s literature as two disciplines which have emerged from the margins, Bradford brings together theoretical approaches and reading strategies used within these two scholarly areas to explore the way in which medievalisms for young people make use of the Middle Ages to convey and interrogate contemporary social standards.

Each of the seven chapters of the book explores medievalist texts through a separate conceptual approach. The theoretical scope of Bradford’s study is broad and so too is the body of texts she examines, which range from picture books and fantasy to animation and paranormal romances. Drawing on Alan Robinson’s notion of the present past—“the imagining of the past shaped in relation to the present” (26)—Bradford considers how representations of the Middle Ages reflect contemporary ideologies and world views, whether consciously or not. In doing so, she argues, medievalist texts distance readers from the present but often interrogate current issues, such as gender binarism or the marginalization of ethnic minorities. In a similar vein, Bradford reflects on the medieval and temporality in order to explore the way present-day authors comprehend the past through their own understanding of the present. In both cases, she posits, the medieval is placed in the service of making sense of the world modern audiences inhabit. The real-world materiality of the Middle Ages—the architectural styles, gardens, and landscapes—is also shown to be consciously deployed in medievalist fiction as sites rich with symbolic associations that allow authors to interrogate cultural and race-based hierarchies.

In the second half of her study, Bradford shifts attention from temporal and spatial locations of narratives to the body in order to explore the numerous disabled bodies, monstrous bodies, and human-animal relationships that populate medievalist texts for young readers. Employing disability theory—specifically, the notion of textual prosthesis—Bradford reflects on the use of disability in medievalist texts as a marker of difference and exceptionality. She argues that disabled bodies are used to undermine hegemonic masculinity, as in the animated film How to Train Your Dragon (2010), or to reconsider cultural and religious difference, as in Elizabeth Laird’s Crusade (2008). According to Bradford, representations of monsters in medievalist texts similarly raise questions of belonging but also offer young readers new ways of thinking about their identity. Bradford’s discussion of medievalist animals, strongly inflected by Bruno Latour’s notion of actor-network theory, draws attention to the way in which these texts reject anthropocentric depictions and instead highlight animals’ roles as agents who participate actively in social networks. As a coda to her study, Bradford includes a chapter that explores comic representations of the Middle Ages. Returning to the concept of the present past, she highlights the different ways that the Middle Ages is often used as a “comic foil” (158)—a period that embodies a set of outdated and constrictive values—to deride heroic masculinity, rigid social hierarchies, and patriarchal gender relations.

The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature offers a valuable contribution to discussions of medievalist texts for young readers on account of its thorough and multifaceted consideration of a broad spectrum of work. Most importantly, this book brings together a variety of theoretical approaches to medievalist fiction that offer new avenues for reading these narratives. However, the extensive...