Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II

This latest volume of Studies in Medievalism further explores definitions of the field, complementing its landmark predecessor. In its first section, essays by seven leading medievalists seeks to determine precisely how tocharacterize the subjects of study, their relationship to new and related fields, such as neomedievalism, and their relevance to the middle ages, whose definition is itself a matter of debate. Their observations and conclusions are then tested in the articles second part of the book. Their topics include the notion of progress over the last eighty or ninety years in our perception of the middle ages; medievalism in Gustave Dore’s mid-nineteenth-century engravings of the Divine Comedy; the role of music in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films; cinematic representations of the Holy Grail; the medieval courtly love tradition in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passionand The.Powerbook; Eleanor of Aquitaine in twentieth-century histories; modern updates of the Seven Deadly Sins; and Victorian spins on Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend.

CONTRIBUTORS: Carla A. Arnell,Aida Audeh, Jane Chance, Pamela Clements, Alain Corbellari, Roberta Davidson, Michael Evans, Nickolas Haydock, Carol Jamison, Stephen Meyer, E.L. Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Clare A. Simmons, Richard Utz, Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling