Medieval Fans: Reading, Affect, and Queer Community

An exploration of medieval literature and modern fanfiction through the lens of their fandoms, past and present

Medieval Fans explores how theories of reading and writing that emerge from modern fan communities can illuminate the literary practices of late medieval authors. Reading the early Renaissance poet Petrarch’s letters, the famous medieval autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales alongside fanfiction and other modern adaptations, Anna Wilson shows how medieval authors wove together concepts from Christian devotional practices and classical pedagogy with cultural ideas about gender and sexuality to develop a distinctively “fannish” way of reading texts from earlier centuries. Long before the rise of the novel, such readers developed profound imaginative relationships with ancient texts and authors, from the Bible to ancient Roman philosophers and politicians; they understood such relationships as allowing them access to deep knowledge and wells of creativity, but also understood them as troublingly excessive, even queer.

These medieval fans, Wilson argues, experimented in their writings with new visions of identity and community, built around the books they loved, in ways that spanned religious and secular forms. The intellectual legacies of these medieval authors have fostered vivid imaginative relationships with readers in subsequent centuries. These readers form affective communities—fandoms—around such imagined friendships, which in turn have shaped both modern adaptations of medieval texts, such as Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, as well as the development of medieval studies itself as an academic discipline.

Drawing together conceptual tools from queer theory and the study of popular culture, as well as offering innovative readings of medieval texts, Medieval Fans offers new theoretical tools and conceptual possibilities for those researching, teaching, and studying across medieval literature, “medievalism” (the adaptation and reimagining of medieval forms and narratives in the modern world), modern popular culture, and fanfiction.