For a movement conventionally counted among the (modern European) utopian avant-gardes, Surrealism was rather obsessed with the past. The array of historical figures one encounters in Surrealist sources is quite broad, and changed over time, but among the well-known persons claimed in one way or another as Surrealist predecessors are Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Isidore Ducasse/Comte de Lautreamont, Lewis Carroll, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as artists such as William Blake, Francisco Goya, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paolo Uccello. A less specific, but no less tangible sense of nostalgia for a past runs through the many different media that Surrealism produced as well. Overall, the Surrealist interest in the (European) past ran the whole gamut from late classical gnostic coins to modern Art Nouveau architecture, but figuring prominently in Surrealist sources are the nineteenth century and the Middle Ages. The last is of course very much an invented middle ages; that which Surrealism considered medieval or ascribed to the medieval extends well into what would today be qualified as early modern, and was furthermore frequently seen through the lens of the nineteenth century.

This essay will examine Surrealism's medievalism, a subject that, while not understudied, has hardly been exhausted either. The literary works of Andre Breton (1896–1966), one of Surrealism's main theoreticians, have been well studied, and attention has been drawn to his favoring of medievalizing motifs and topoi such as the (ruined) castle, grail and other quests, philosopher's stones, chivalrous love, and the serpent-woman Melusina of French medieval legend. Another important Surrealist theoretician was Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Breton's foremost frenemy and a trained medievalist and numismatist. His contributions to medieval and medievalism studies have been analyzed by Bruce Holsinger, among others. That these two central figures carried the flag of medievalism in their work and imparted their interest to their respective circles and the movement overall is clear. That a middle ages – in the form of visual art or literature, tropes, thought, paradigms, or historical or legendary figures – hold a special place in Surrealism's heart generally appears beyond dispute too. Still, studies of the medievalism of other Surrealists or of the widely diverging forms Surrealist medievalism and its reception trajectories can take are few.

Medieval Battlefields and National Authenticity

In this essay, I will explore performances of what logic suggests cannot be performed at all: authenticity. More specifically, I am interested in anniversary events that recently took place on two Western European medieval battlefields, the British Hastings and the Swiss Morgarten. At these sites, I will argue, medievalism and nationalism intersected with practices of cultural heritage and national politics to create places richly layered in meanings of rootedness and abiding identity in the twenty-first century.

The comparison of these Swiss and British sites, though perhaps not an immediately obvious one, is fruitful for at least three reasons. The first is methodological and has to do with the fact that, without exception, nationalisms claim exceptionalism. By juxtaposing countries greatly differing in size, (geopolitical) history, and cultural traditions, I can put such claims to uniqueness into perspective when dealing with negotiations of national identity.

Secondly, both Hastings and Morgarten have traditionally been accorded comparable status as a founding event of the respective nation. They therefore offer a means to interrogate the medievalist foundations of some recent forms of British (or, more properly, English) and Swiss nationalisms. The strong nexus of medievalism, war, and nationalism is well-established. As Linas Eriksonas has pointed out, European national histories have stressed military conflict at least since Walter Scott popularized the idea of “national history narrated as a series of key battles” with his Tales of a Grandfather: Being Stories Taken from Scottish History. In battle narratives, truth and clarity emerge from moments that are, quite literally, on a knife edge. Whether recounting glorious triumph or tragic defeat, such narratives have both underpinned claims to national destiny and, since the nineteenth century, fulfilled the need of different nationalisms (including British and Swiss nationalisms) for “authentic” cultural and political roots in the Middle Ages. Andrew Lynch has described the affinity of this quest for national origins with what he calls the “ideology of war” and noted that “the medieval” has become more strongly identified with war than any other period.

History authenticates subjects. But history is culturally constructed and authenticates some people while marginalizing others. In fact, The Public Medievalist has had no shortage of material for its extensive and ongoing series titled “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages,” which addresses the “[r]acist and white supremacist ideas about the past [that] have lingered in our culture.” One reason for that unfortunate abundance, as noted by The Public Medievalist, is that representations of the Middle Ages, “can seem natural and normal[, which] makes them a fundamental part of institutionalized racism as it exists today, since the past forms and informs the foundations of the present.” Yet, even when these narratives lack historical foundations, they are still capable of generating a mythology that incites people to act, as suggested by white supremacists donning medieval paraphernalia in 2017 while protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. These outliers’ image of an all-white European Middle Ages is false, but in their eyes as well as those of many people outside the group, including many of the supremacists’ opponents, that image has gained authenticity from widespread concordant representations in mainstream media. Though medievalisms do not need to be authentic to be influential, that perception can, in turn, help authenticate narratives that inform cultural memory, and as part of that power, pervasive historical fictions and inaccuracies among them can misauthenticate subjects and ideologies to the detriment of historical evidence and social justice. Inauthentic depictions can become believable through repetition, and even playful medievalisms intended for children, like those produced by Disney, can have deep and long-lasting political consequences. Indeed, through their very appearance of innocence, Disney's medievalisms may be particularly influential on cultural values, apparent norms, and collective expectations.

In light of that power, this essay argues that Disney's recent television productions Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor are two of the many historical fictions that create a false sense of authenticity through repetition and exposure via mainstream media, and that this authenticity is dangerous insofar as it reifies historical inaccuracies and apparatuses of oppression in cultural memory. These two shows are particularly problematic in their disparity between a white princess who maintains notions of a predominantly white Middle Ages, and a princess of color who challenges these inaccuracies.

The uses and representations of early music in the context of popular culture have, until recently, received relatively little attention in academic contexts. In a forthcoming collection, Recomposing the Past: Early Music on Stage and Screen (2018), the REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen) Study Group has sought to redress this lack by bringing together a wide range of perspectives to examine the impact of early music beyond its traditional academic audiences. Contemporary popular culture offers a highly stylized and eclectic – often contradictory – view of history that, crucially, is of increasing importance to the popular understanding, reception, and experience of history, and of early music. Indeed, early music – that is, musics predating the common-practice period and typically associated with the European Middle Ages and Renaissance – finds its biggest audience in our popular film, television, video-game, and new-media landscape. That landscape is, with likely few exceptions, from where the future performers, researchers, and advocates of these traditions will emerge.

It is unsurprising, then, that we would be drawn to the work of Studies in Medievalism and its community of scholars working on medievalist and neomedievalist subject matter. After all, Studies in Medievalism responds to many of the same animating questions and issues: the recognition, for example, of history as artifice, of its legacies for our popular and public imaginations, and of the way that these legacies intersect our understanding of past and present alike all seem highly salient. The contested concept of authenticity, as this volume will attest, also presents problems and possibilities for those who want to understand how the past functions today. To this extent, the REMOSS group has been particularly interested in the examination of the temporally discontinuous (or out of place) – anachronisms, for example – that have pervasive traditions in the vocabulary of historical film or television. Early-music scholars have strong opinions, unsurprisingly, about the supposed inaccuracies that litter our medieval cinematic canons. It is at authenticity's outer reaches, however, that the past speaks most effectively to the present.

The Black Death, the first and most severe plague of a global pandemic lasting from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, was one of the most terrifying moments in European history. Great swathes of the population were killed by this unrelenting pestilence, with estimates suggesting that between 62% and 75% of the population died from the disease in some regions of Tuscany, for example. Such a profound event had well-documented social and political consequences that shaped the foundations of the burgeoning early-modern world, and helped bring about significant changes in the social strata underpinning societal functions. It also equipped the modern world with the original outbreak narrative, which has continued to haunt the European consciousness for the centuries that have followed.

This undoubtedly terrifying period, dominated by the Black Death and immortalized in historical documents and filmic media, has become the backdrop for countless depictions, both factual and fictional across a range of media. In short, the Black Death symbolizes one of the most important medievalist tropes over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating an image of the medieval world as one that is preoccupied with the apocalypse, prone to descending into superstitious and ritual acts, and preoccupied with death itself, all in fear of God. It is a bleak site with great potential for narrative expediency, and is a furrow that continues to be ploughed in a range of films and, most strikingly, in recent video-game series reliant on the outbreak narrative. Music plays an integral role in these depictions, acting as a key device in the medievalization of filmic and media spaces and offering some interesting insights into our modern perceptions of the sound of the past, especially that associated with the end times.

This essay examines approaches toward the scoring of the musical past in two films set during the first wave of the Black Death – taken in this article as the fourteenth-century bubonic plague epidemic – and considers the wider function of sound in these filmic narratives, their uses of pre-existent or period-style newly composed pastiche music, and the layering of medievalism at play in their atmospheric soundscapes.

Individualism and the Middle Ages

When was the “individual” born? To be just a little more precise: when did the concept emerge of an autonomous free agent whose identity is primarily grounded in being a rational human rather than in communal groups? Responding to this question can reveal its twin: the birth of modernity itself, when the individual became free of all-consuming communities and selfconscious of oneself as an individual rather than merely a member of larger social groups.

It is no surprise that the medieval period has been central to attempts to locate the origins of the individual. In the last century and a half, there have been two prevailing narratives about the individual and the medieval. Put simply, the first narrative is that the modern conception of the individual is rooted in the medieval period: that medieval Christianity fostered the ideal of the individual soul and thus prioritized individual relationships with God. The second narrative (also put simply) is that in the Middle Ages the autonomous individual was either a totally unknown concept or at best a very hazy one. The first narrative offers a theological conception of the individual, and the second narrative constructs its conception along social and political lines.

An example of the first narrative can be characterized by the turn-ofthe- century progressive education reformer John Dewey, who spoke of the “spiritual roots” of the modern ideology of individualism as being derived from medieval religion, which “asserted the ultimate nature of the individual soul and centered the drama of life about the destiny of that soul.” Even if it appears as if the individual was obscured and subsumed beneath layers of entrenched communal institutions, Dewey argues that the Church ultimately desired the salvation of every individual's soul, and thus the notion of the value of every individual was born. An example of the second narrative – that no conception of the individual was known or even possible in the medieval period – can be characterized by Robert Nisbet, a leading figure of twentiethcentury conservative sociology. Following Jacob Burckhardt, Nisbet argues that the autonomous individual in the Middle Ages was an “indistinct” notion that was filtered and mediated through layers of larger communities. For Nisbet, “[T]he group was primary. It was the irreducible unit of the social system at large.

HBO's Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin's cult book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is currently the world's most popular television show. It mediates a medieval world – more correctly, a constellation of imagined medieval societies – in a “utilitarian bricolage.” The show focuses, particularly in its final seasons, on the western-style cultures of the continent of Westeros. Here, as many online commentators note, a familiar type of medievalism, the “life is filthy, brutal, and short” version, intimates that the show is “realistic,” clearly setting itself in opposition to the idealized “Merrye Olde Englande version” of many early twentieth-century medievalist imaginings – for example, Tolkien's Shire. Game of Thrones also offers, in some respects, a highly orientalized version of eastern societies – both Middle and Far Eastern – with its depictions of the Dothraki (a nomadic society of horsemen based on the Mongols) and the slaving cultures at Slavers’ Bay, who owe much to medieval notions of Saracens. The show depicts a range of different emotions within its complex, interweaving storylines; by deploying emotions strongly associated with the medieval period in the popular imagination it claims, at an implicit level, to authenticate the alterity of the realization of Martin's world created by showrunners David Benioff and Daniel Weiss, foregrounding alternative and challenging aspects of human experience. In so doing, the show elicits powerful emotional reactions both within its fan community and among more casual audiences. The concomitants of “medieval” emotion in the show are frequently shocking, characterized by (often sexual) violence, or explicit nudity and sexual activity (a noted hallmark of HBO programming). “The ‘un-modern’ setting of these films [sc. medieval movies] is used as a licence to project taboo images and actions – particularly around the body and what might be done to it or done with it, or how it might be displayed,” notes Andrew Higson of films set in the medieval past. So, too, with the TV show. Notwithstanding these sensationalizing impulses, other historically attested medieval emotions or emotion-related behaviors are eschewed or downplayed as just too alien and unsympathetic. The world of Game of Thrones instantiates a medievalism that may, at times, be misleading about the past, but also one that both invites and integrates critique of its imagined emotional systems.

As rigged elections, identity theft, and pirated products fill newspaper headlines, which, we are often told, may themselves be fake, authenticity would seem to be in particularly short supply these days. And there are indeed many contemporary challenges to and manipulations of it, especially by politicians and media outlets that, often through those very machinations, have recently moved to the center of public consciousness. But debates about what constitutes authenticity and where it is to be found are nothing new to medievalism. Indeed, they have always been central to it.

The distance implicit in any response to the past represents a space for doubt as to the identity of that past, but that ambiguity may be particularly acute in medievalism. Though there are enough medieval artifacts to suggest the period's contours and to give it an enduring presence in contemporary culture, there are so many lacunae in its historical record, and often such large ones, as to leave extraordinary room for interpretation. Nor are those responses delimited by the kind and degree of self-consciousness that is endemic in later and, often, earlier periods. Indeed, the very erraticness with which that and many other traits apply to the Middle Ages indicates the elusiveness of an era that, as conventionally defined, spans all of Europe from at least the middle of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth.

And it is precisely this slipperiness that makes medievalism extraordinarily informative and important. In creating their own particular middle ages, each interpreter reveals much about not only the malleability of the Middle Ages, but also themselves and their circumstances. As they flesh out, adapt, and/ or depart from the medieval record, they at least indicate, and sometimes outright declare, their own values, experiences, and expectations. They open large, clear windows to the very real contexts from which they often produce fuzzy, limited constructs.

Moreover, the elusiveness of their material frequently creates a secondary space in which scholars of medievalism may reveal themselves and their own circumstances. In examining responses to the Middle Ages, and particularly in discussing the authenticity of a medievalist's middle ages, researchers often reveal at least as much about their own biases and those of the moment in which they are working as about the medievalists, much less the Middle Ages.

In the 1990s, the so-called chant craze provoked a number of thoughtful responses in scholarship. Reacting to the recent releases of plainchant albums by Ensemble Organum and the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos (the famous Chant album, the cover of which featured hooded monks staggered in mid-air against a bright blue, cloud-swirled sky), Katherine Bergeron observed that they provided a good opportunity to examine “the whole phenomenon of chant as music in the modern imagination; and the various guises in which it appears; and the contexts in which it has acquired value and meaning.” A few years later, Linda Schubert looked at film as one such context, focusing on the use of the well-known “Dies irae” chant within modern cinema. She concluded by saying that:

Since these articles were written, the presence and functions of plainchant (and related musics) within film has continued to be analyzed. James Deaville and K. J. Donnelly, for example, have built upon Schubert's work to further explore the use of chant as a symbol of evil, violence, fear, and death, while more recently John Haines treats chant as one of several key signifiers of the medieval. While there is much more still to be said about the intersections of chant and cinema, at some twenty years later, there is yet another modern context to consider for plainchant: video games.

Little has been articulated to date about plainchant in video games. This is due to any of several reasons, all of which strike at the heart of what plainchant is thought to be. If plainchant demands vocality, then a large swath of game music is eliminated from scrutiny owing to technological constraints or preferences in orchestration.

Where is the study of medievalism going? Grand statements about disciplinary directions have a way of rebounding on those who pronounce them. But I am emboldened by the fact of writing this just a few days after hosting the third “Middle Ages in the Modern wOrld” (MAMO) conference, when more than a hundred scholars from around the world converged on Manchester, all professing in their different ways the study of medievalism. It is a striking feature of MAMO that it is now as autonomous as can be imagined from the discipline of medieval studies. Although, this year, 2017, it was hosted by an English department that still offers medieval literature at all levels, the bulk of participants are not medievalists in any traditional sense. Many of them would not claim to be; they profess medievalism, and they do so with a confidence that I do not think would have been seen just fifteen years ago.

There was relatively little discussion at MAMO, consequently, of whether medievalism's artifacts were defining an authentic Middle Ages. There was, instead, a broad assumption that, from fantasy novels to computer games, from eighteenth-century drama to present-day museums, there is a vast range of ideological investment at work in representations of the Middle Ages. There was also relatively little meta-reflection on this. The question of what medievalism studies actually is – a discipline of its own, a subdiscipline, a version of cultural studies? – was largely left alone. Is that a sign of a field in rude good health? Or one that is not confronting certain intractable problems? I think there are in fact elements of both, and I want to approach this via a long, historical route.

So far as I have been able to determine, it was exactly two hundred years ago, in 1817, that the minor antiquarian Thomas Fosbroke accidentally coined the adjective “medieval.” This occurred in a larger context in which, in the post-Napoleonic period, a new phase was opening up in the European study of medieval culture.

With this, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) described his painting, Portrait of Eugène Boch (Plate I), as the expression of his ideal Artist/Poet: “this young man with the Dante-like face.” Central to his plans for the community of painters he wished to found at the Yellow House in Arles in 1888, the Dante-like Artist/Poet was to be joined, in Vincent's utopian vision for his “Studio of the South,” by modern-day equivalents of Dante's compatriots Petrarch and Boccaccio, hence completing the triumvirate commonly known then, as now, as the Tre Corone.

Perhaps the most prolific period of his life as an artist, source of many of his best-known works, site of his ill-fated collaboration with Paul Gauguin and infamous episode of self-mutilation, Vincent's Studio of the South has been the subject of several studies and exhibitions. And while the Portrait of Eugène Boch and other paintings originating from Vincent's Studio of the South endeavor – including The Bedroom and the Poet's Garden series – have been analyzed extensively in art historical literature, their relationship, and that of the utopian artists’ community they embodied, to Vincent's conception of Dante and the Tre Corone have not been explored within the context of the layered meanings brought by their historical origins and their larger nineteenth-century reception.

John Keats's 1820 poem “The Eve of Saint Agnes” is a medievalist's dream, not the product of the Middle Ages but a Romantic-era vision filtered through readings of Spenser and Shakespeare – the very version of the past that seems most patently inauthentic. Multiple scholars of medievalism have pointed out that each age recreates the Middle Ages in response to its own concerns and preoccupations, and the British Romantic era is no exception. Yet, selfevidently, people did live in that time later designated the Middle Ages, and they too must have had their own hopes, fears, and interests. As the countless works published yearly based on research into a more accurate picture of the Middle Ages testify, the authentic – the “real” – still has an allure. Even in an artificially medieval poem, the reader is tempted to identify some germ of the actual Middle Ages. If there is an authentic medieval element in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” it would appear to be the Saint Agnes ritual, which suggests that the poem recalls pre-Reformation times and beliefs passed down through oral tradition. The kinds of evidence used to establish authenticity, however, such as contemporary written records and artifacts, do not help much in the case of a practice transmitted from person to person.

From the English perspective any rituals associated with Saint Agnes must date back at least to medieval times. Saint Agnes's feast day prompted no official celebration by the English Church in Keats's time. Early versions of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer omitted St. Agnes entirely, although she and other saints were reinserted in the calendar in the 1600s. This would seem to be a fragment of something authentically medieval, yet problems immediately arise. Where and when is Keats's poem set? The easy answer is that St. Agnes's feast day is January 21, and the poem takes place the preceding day and night, but which January 21, and where, are harder to determine.