New World Medievalisms: The Middle Ages in the American Cultural Imaginary

Examines how the European Middle Ages has been used and received in a variety of American cultural contexts.


There is a deep-seated preoccupation in North America with the cultures of the European Middle Ages, but despite the insightful conversations that have developed between medieval and postcolonial studies, this phenomenon remains underexplored. This book considers these New World medievalisms, from the links between New World colonization and Christian crusades to the medievalisms endemic to contemporary cultural productions, such as Game of Thrones, demonstrating how European figures and narratives have functioned to rationalize Euro-American colonial efforts.

Each of the chapters takes up a period of British colonial or U.S. cultural history, with an eye to how authors of that period depict, refer to and imagine the medieval. Topics range from the remarkable popularity throughout American literary history of Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote to the role the Norman Conquest of Britain played in the British-American colonial cultural imaginary. It also showcases subversive counter-narratives from Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ursula K. Le Guin; these authors challenge the use of anachronistic and geographically displaced medieval figures and narratives to define a modern nation-state such as the United States. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medievalism studies, medieval studies and American studies, this book shows how the "medieval/modern divide" continues to inform U.S. national identity and American historiography more generally.