Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Summary
In this paper I would like to address a question that is absolutely central to the definition of “medievalism”: namely, should this term be used for everything that derives from the Middle Ages, or should it be reserved for post-medieval interest in the revival of phenomena belonging to the period or notion of the Middle Ages? The importance of this question has been underscored by its great relevance to many of the conferences and publications sponsored by Studies in Medievalism over the years. Moreover, I am convinced that in limiting the possibility of conclusively theorizing about or mapping medievalism, the ambiguity addressed by this question has significantly hampered scholarly interest in the field. I therefore believe we must tackle this question directly and stake our position(s) in relationship to it.
Of course, I have no illusion that I can give anything near a definitive answer to it, but I would like to contribute to the debate on it by taking up Leslie Workman's classic position that medievalism is the continued construction of the Middle Ages. In one of his editorial introductions, which also observes that the term “The Middle Ages” was a Renaissance humanist creation that has “been elaborated and reinforced from different perspectives from the sixteenth century to the present,” Workman wrote: “[…] medieval historiography, the study of the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different generations, is the Middle Ages. And this of course is medievalism.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Studies in Medievalism XVIIDefining Medievalism(s), pp. 36 - 44Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009