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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2023
Uncle Julian rubbed his hands together. “I am going to begin the chapter with a slight fabrication, and then proceed to an outright lie.”
In Passus Eight of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Will sets off to discover Dowel, convinced that he is on a quest for a single correct answer. Many years, paths, and interpretive mires later, he (and the reader) finally grasp the hard truth: Dowel is a reflexive and reflective process that must be continually repeated in a postlapsarian world. If there is one aspect of neomedievalism that critics can agree upon, it is that it resists any easy definition, and the problem may lie in the questions we are asking. To ask “what is neomedievalism?” or even “what are neomedievalisms?” is to treat a continuously unfolding and changing phenomenon as if it were a finished and static entity; any answer given will by default be “a slight fabrication.” With this in mind, I want to explore four patterns within the “continuing process of creating the Middle Ages” with the aim of providing interpretive models while avoiding the problems of strict taxonomy.
The Neo/medieval
The Neo/medieval model I would like to propose builds on the foundation that Carol Robinson, Pam Clements, and MEMO offer: “a medievalism that seems to be a direct and unromantic response to the general matrix of medievalisms from which people are partially ‘unplugged’.” The reference here is from the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which the hacker Neo learns that his destiny is to free a populace enslaved by their belief in and dependence upon projections of “reality” from an enormously complex computer system, the matrix of the title. However, the programming is not foolproof, and the system itself betrays its constructed nature at times:
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure. […]
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
The Neo/medieval text occurs when its creators play Morpheus, deliberately disrupting medievalist programming by the insertion of “red pills,” blatantly anachronistic elements.
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