The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also about modernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literaturesat the University of Wollongong.

The Norman Conquest is one of the most significant events in British history - but how is it actually remembered and perceived today? This book offers a study of contemporary British memory of the Norman Conquest, focussing on shared knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. A major source of evidence for its findings are references to the Norman Conquest in contemporary British newspaper articles: 807 articles containing references to the Conquest were collected from ten British newspapers, covering a recent three year period. A second important source of information is a quantitative survey for which a representative sample of 2000 UK residents was questioned. These sources are supplemented by the study of contemporary books and film material, as well as medieval chronicles for comparative purposes, and the author also drawns on cultural theory to highlight the characteristics and functions of distant memory and myth. The investigation culminates in considering the potential impact of memory of the Norman Conquest in Britain today. Siobhan Brownlie is a Lecturer in the School of Arts, Languages & Cultures at the University of Manchester.

Literary medievalism played a vital role in the construction of the French Enlightenment. Starting with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, it influenced movements leading to the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and helped to shape new literary genres, from the epistolary novel to the fairy tale and opera. Indeed, the dominant mode of the early Enlightenment, 'galanterie', was of medievalist inspiration. Moreover, the academic study of medieval texts underlay modern ideals of scholarship, institutionalized at the royal academies. The Middle Ages polemically functioned as an alternative site, allowing authors to rethink their age's political and social ideologies. At the centre of these debates was the notion of historical progress. Was progress possible, as the 'philosophes' held, or was human history a process of degeneration, with the Middle Ages as a lost Golden Age? From the re-evaluation of the medieval thus emerged not only the seeds of a new poetics, but also the central questions that preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers from Montesquieu to Rousseau. This book shows how, in order to understand the aesthetic and intellectual transformations that marked modernity, it is essential to examine how this period conceived of the past, and particularly those "Dark Ages" that served as the defining foil for the modern Age of Light. Alicia C. Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen.