This new monograph devoted to a detailed exploration of the ways in which the medieval past has been wielded to propagandic effect in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia.

From politicians' speeches to popular culture, from Orthodox Christianity to neo-paganism, the medieval Russian past remains crucial in constructing national identity, mobilizing society during times of crisis, and providing alternative models of communal belonging. Frequent appeals to a medieval Slavic past, its heroes and myths, have provided - and continue to provide - a particularly powerful tool for animating imperialist and populist sentiments.

This study explores persuasive - and pervasive - recourse to tropes concerned with the Middle Ages in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, seeking to explain why an often romanticized medieval past remains potent in Russian politics, society, and culture today.

This book examines feminist textual and cinematic engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the idea of the medieval past is central to the work of novelists and directors interested in embodiment and vulnerability. Careful and illuminating analysis of particular moments in fiction, film, and political discourse dismantles the false binary between popular and intellectual medievalisms, which rests on gendered understandings of genre and audience, while demonstrating that masculinist or patriarchal medievalisms have an equal but understudied counterpart.

The book's first three chapters cover Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and its afterlives, the final works of Virginia Woolf, and late twentieth-century film and music videos from the United States. The final chapter examines the treatment of women's bodies and vulnerability in both political theory and recent electoral politics, arguing that they share a common thread of misogyny rooted in the idea of the medieval past, and that one way to challenge that misogyny is by looking at complex feminist engagements with that same past, both real and imagined.

Caroline Bergvall's celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary medievalist texts and projects - Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019) - documents methods of reading and making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged.

Drawing on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall's work and material from Bergvall's archive, together with newly commissioned texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities; interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical, psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.

In a young American republic seeking to define itself in relation to European cultural and political models past and present, it was assumed that the history of Europe's peoples could be tracked across time over the longue durée. From this perspective, even the barbarous long-haired kings of the distant Merovingian era helped to define the political and cultural identity of a France-and, indeed, a Europe-whose actions Americans recognized as relevant to their own republic. Americans saw medieval parallels not only in the actions of successive French regimes, but in contemporary transatlantic issues of anxiety, including the adjudication of claims of political legitimacy and the debate over the perpetuation of racial slavery. That early American writers located their own meanings in the history of Merovingian Francia is indicative of a less linear, and more diverse and transnational, historiography than previously recognized.

This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.

This is the first volume fully dedicated to Iberoamerican neomedievalisms. It examines 'The Middle Ages' and its uses in Iberoamerica: the Spanish and Portuguese American postcolonies. It is an especially timely topic as scholars in neomedievalism studies become increasingly conscious that the field has different trajectories outside Europe and beyond the English-speaking world.

The collection provides needed alternatives to the by-now standardized understanding of neomedievalism as allied to nationalism, nostalgia, xenophobia, origin stories, elitism, and white Christian identity. It dislocates the field from its established trends and finds generative, yet unexplored examples of neomedievalism: political, religious, literary, and gendered. The volume will be of interest to established scholars of neomedievalism studies, to scholars of Latin America, and to the new and growing generation of students and colleagues interested in truly global neomedievalist studies.