Preface

Summary

This book is a guide to the field which has become known as medievalism studies; it also sketches out a history of medievalism and offers a critique of the practices that have grown up around the study of medievalism, doing so sympathetically and with the aim of furthering future study. Each of these three aims presents a potentially large task and as a result my account does not aim to be a total history, an exhaustive guide or a comprehensive critique. Medievalism is a vast field and it is difficult to imagine comprehensiveness other than in a large collaborative work. A recent French work shows the extent of the problem: La fabrique du moyen âge is a collaborative volume limited to the impact of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century French literature. It nevertheless extends to 1,100 pages written by nearly 70 contributors. Even so, its editors concede that they “pretend neither to exclusivity nor exhaustiveness” and that the work is not an encyclopaedia but merely a beginning resource.

A general history of anglophone medievalism is still a desideratum, though large collaborative projects are in progress. It has been remarked before now that medievalism studies as a discipline has consisted of proliferant case studies, usually in essay form in journals (pre-eminently, Studies in Medievalism and more recently, in postmedieval), but has not been well served by longer studies. I do not pretend to offer that general history here, but I do attempt to offer a meta-commentary on the study of medievalism of a kind which up until now has been lacking. This is necessarily restricted to the cultures I have lived in or visited (chiefly Britain, Australia, and France, and to a lesser extent, Germany and America) and rarely extends beyond those languages that I can read. This book is meant to be exemplary rather than comprehensive, provocative rather than conclusive, agenda-setting rather than argument-settling.