13 - Re-creating the Middle Ages

Summary

The re-creation, re-envisioning, and reinterpretation of the Middle Ages, or medievalism, may be more than the imitation of artistic style, often implying a desire for the authentic or imagined values and way of life of the medieval era. Both conservatives anxious to preserve traditional values and those seeking radical change have invoked the Middle Ages in support of their social ideals. From the nation's beginnings, medievalism has also proved a powerful influence on cultural conceptions in the United States of America. The idea of the Middle Ages has served as an inspiration both to high culture and to popular culture in a variety of artistic media and social forms.

English medievalism is largely a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the word “medievalism” was only coined in the mid-nineteenth century – but it has some significant precursors in earlier times. For example, when Sir Thomas Malory remarks in the Morte d'Arthur that he cannot tell what Launcelot and Gwenyver might have been doing in private because “love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadays,” he is making a conscious distinction between his own time and that of the Arthurian stories. Even a fifteenth-century text, then, may have a medievalist consciousness of a difference between “then” and “now” that allows for points of comparison between the two time periods and real or imagined ways of life.