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  • Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones by Kellyann Fitzpatrick
  • Helen Young
Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones. By Kellyann Fitzpatrick. Medievalism. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. Pp. xxii + 229.

This book offers more than the subtitle promises; from some viewpoints there is only a short distance between The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Kellyann Fitzpatrick’s investigation of neomedievalism is both deeper and more expansive than the title suggests. It ranges temporally from the nineteenth century to the present, and across novels, art, film and television, and card and video games, as well as academic neomedievalisms. The range of material Fitzpatrick examines reflects the pervasiveness of recreations of the Middle Ages in modern Western popular culture. The book is arranged by “theme and medium” (p. xxi) rather than in chronological order and divided into three sections: “Producing Neomedievalism,” “Shaping Neomedievalism,” and “Playing Neomedievalism.” It is clearly written and accessible in this sense to its intended audiences both within and outside the academy. Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy makes a significant contribution to the field of Medievalism Studies with its enlightening account of a broad and complex field.

The first chapter gives an account of the development of academic studies of medievalism since the 1990s, the (at times) fraught relationship between medieval studies and medievalism, and theorizations of neomedievalism. As Fitzpatrick observes, medievalism is “somewhat slippery,” as Gwendolyn Morgan (quoted on p. 16) suggests, but “neomedievalism is outright ephemeral” (p. 17). Fitzpatrick surveys academic attempts at definition that traverse postmodernism, playfulness, and mass-market commodification to arrive at a “working definition of neomedievalism as the product of an ongoing process of re-evaluating what can be done with the Middle Ages in an ever-moving present” (p. 28; italics original). This conceptualization highlights the importance of understanding any instance of medievalism–neo- or not–as relational with medievalisms past, contemporary, and future. The chapters which follow include some original and interesting analysis, but this conceptualization of neomedievalism is the most important contribution the book makes to the field. It offers a way of thinking about a specific type of engagement with “the medieval” (whatever that might be) differentiated by what is being done rather than any fixed or predetermined quality (p. 68).

J. R. R. Tolkien is at the center of the second chapter. True to the relational bent of Fitzpatrick’s working definition, the first half of the chapter outlines the nineteenth-century medievalist academic, as well as conservative and progressive influences on Tolkien through accounts of Early Medieval English Studies: Sir Walter Scott and William Morris, respectively. A relatively short analysis of how Tolkien’s academic and creative writing connect is followed by an account of Tolkien’s critical reception. Fitzpatrick observes that Tolkien’s “conservative representation of the Middle Ages” supports “outmoded” concepts of gender, race, and class and argues that he “moved beyond” both medieval material and the scholarship of his day to advance “what can be done with the Middle Ages.” The point that neomedivalism has no particular political allegiance is an important one.

The following chapter, the first in the “Shaping Neomedievalism” section, changes tack to explore gender and neomedievalism in three Hollywood films: Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007) and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Maleficent (2014). Fitzpatrick shows that all three can be considered neomedieval, albeit in different forms. She argues that the first two in this list deploy medievalism to [End Page 121] “naturalize” gender constructs contemporary to their production (p. 74), but that Maleficent uses neomedievalism to rewrite twentieth-century patriarchal codes as an imagined conservative past that had distorted the “true” Sleeping Beauty story into Disney’s earlier film. The diachronic approach to the chapter highlights the importance of reading neomedievalisms in the context of their production and relationally as proposed by Fitzpatrick’s useful definition.

Chapter 4 focuses on myths of inheritance in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the franchise built around it. It explores how history functions within the secondary world of the franchise and Martin...

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