Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II

Description

Articles which survey and map out the increasingly significant discipline of medievalism; and explore its numerous aspects. 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 Doré'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 Passion' and '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'.