Medievalism: Reimagining the Middle Ages in the Modern World

Timetable

Module aim (aims)

The course introduces students to medievalism—the many ways in which the Middle Ages have been imagined, reinvented, and used from the early modern period to the present. It equips students to understand how ideas about “the medieval” shape modern culture, politics, and identities, and how these ideas circulate across different media and global contexts.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain what medievalism is and distinguish it from historical study of the Middle Ages and from reception studies.
• Identify and analyse modern representations of the medieval past in literature, film, art, architecture, games, heritage sites, and political discourse.
• Recognise how medieval imagery and narratives are used to construct national identities, support political agendas, or express cultural values in Europe and beyond.
• Evaluate the ethical and ideological stakes of invoking the medieval past in contemporary debates, including issues of nationalism, colonialism, race, gender, and authenticity.
• Understand how medieval pasts are materialised in urban space, using Poznań as a case study for heritage-making, tourism, and civic identity.
• Reflect on the global dimensions of medievalism, including how different cultures imagine their own or others’ medieval pasts.

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

None. The course is designed to be  accessible without any prior knowledge.   

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction to the course, its aims, structure, and assessment.             

Week 2: What were Middle Age and what is Medievalism?                       

Week 3:            Medievalism versus Reception Studies     

Week 4:            Living with the Past – Medievalism in the Early Modern Period    

Week 5:            Collecting Middle Ages in the 18^th and 19^th century         

Week 6: Ghost stories, knights and castles – the Neogothic Middle Ages              

Week 7:            Medievalism and the idea of nations and their origins

Week 8:            The Dark Medievalism – politics, nationalism and the far right.   

Week 9:            Between El Cid (1961) and Games of Thrones (2019) via the Monty Python – medievalism in film   

Week 10: Digital Medievalism – games and the digital world        

Week 11: Medievalism in the global context – the colonial Medievalism    

Week 12: Medievalism in the global context – who owns medieval past now?       

Week 13: Medievalism in Poznań – a fieldtrip     

Week 14: Medievalism in Poznań and elsewhere -  assessed presentations

Week 15: Conclusion to the course: what did we learn and where to go from here.

Reading list

All required literature, in digital form, will be provided by the lecturer via Moodle.

Nadia R. Altschul, Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880–2020, ed. Hans Rudolf Velten and Joseph Imorde  transcript Verlag (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024).

David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015).

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014).

Paul B. Sturtevant, The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination: Memory Film and Medievalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Amsterdam: ARC Humanities Press, 2017).