Medievalism and Reception

Medievalism and Reception provides a welcome bridge between the methodological realms of medievalism and reception studies, demonstrating their mutual utility for each other and a broad range of scholarly uses. Drawing on the past decade’s work, including Richard Utz’s Medievalism: A Manifesto (2017) and Ika Willis’s Reception (2018), the collection sets out to “draw out the breadth, nuance, and variety of the connection between reception and medievalism and to highlight the multifarious potential for this work in the future” (7). “Multifarious” is a fitting word for the project: one of the collection’s strengths is its diversity of topics and methodologies, which demonstrate the two fields’ productive intersections across a variety of approaches as well as geography and time period—from nineteenth-century England to late-twentieth-century Turkey to modern Jamaica.While the volume is not divided into themed sections, perhaps motivated by a reluctance to limit or compartmentalize the range of topics, it nevertheless contains some throughlines. The collection wisely places at its beginning a number of essays on the history of medievalism and reception studies. In their introduction, Crookes and Willis provide the clear rationale that “. . . the concept of reception and its inextricability from medievalism and medievalismist studies has been taken for granted. The time is then ripe . . . for the opening up of a genuine dialogue between medievalism and reception” (5). The introduction follows through on this goal in a lucid history of medievalism, reception, and their complex relationship over the past forty-five years. David Matthews’s essay reinforces this introduction and widens its scope, comparing the parallel histories of medievalism and medieval studies (alongside the particularly useful example of classical studies and classical reception) and reflecting upon the difficult and important work of studying a scholarly field’s history. Like Crookes and Willis, Matthews also overviews major studies in medievalism and reception and key organizations in the fields, both useful for specialists and newcomers alike. Candace Barrington conducts similar field-tracing work on the history of Chaucerian reception and adaptation, from their proliferation before the mid- eighteenth century, through their lull in the long nineteenth century, to their vibrant use from the twentieth century to today. Of the lack of Chaucerian medievalism in the otherwise medieval-obsessed nineteenth century Barrington suggests, provocatively, that for nineteenth-century writers Chaucer was not “medieval” enough for their explorations of the Gothic or pseudo-folkloric aspects of the Middle Ages. In this essay and throughout the collection, careful definitions and contextualization of what “medieval” means to different writers and audiences, at different times and in different locations, demonstrate the reorientations revealed by reception and medievalismist thinking.A number of essays examine Victorian culture and literature through the lens of persona studies. Clare Broome Saunders describes Queen Victoria’s use of medievalized imagery, both in her own self-fashioning and in her attempts to improve Prince Albert’s public image. Similarly, Ellie Crookes’s essay examines the erasure of the person of Elizabeth Siddall—largely by her lover and eventual husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti—in favor of a beatified persona of Lizzie Siddal. The essay traces the progression of Rossetti’s depictions of Siddall and argues that he constructed similarities between her and Dante Alighieri’s muse, Beatrice, in order to reinforce his own claimed affinity to the medieval poet. In her essay, Stephanie Russo analyzes the constructed “medieval” figure of Anne Boleyn in Victorian histories, novels, and plays to argue that for Victorian writers, she served as the turning point between the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant early modern period. Contemporary book reviews of two Victorian histories of the Crusades, Charles Mills’s History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land (1820) and Joseph François Michaud’s Histoire de croisades (1811–22; translated by William Robson as History of the Crusades in 1852–53), give Mike Horswell and Elizabeth Siberry purchase on the multilayered process of medievalizing, from histories to reviews to readers.Fan studies is also a strength of this collection. Kavita Mudan Finn traces the influence of literary medieval women who were “created in order to die”—from Beatrice to Elaine of Astolat—on modern medievalist fantasy and its fan communities (69). Fan efforts to rehabilitate the many dead women of A Song of Ice and Fire, she argues, reveal fandom both as a site of resistance to misogynistic, racist, and ableist aspects of a text and as an engine for replicating those very stereotypes. Likewise, Usha Vishnuvajjala’s essay explores the dangers of fan interpretation, analyzing the “conspiracist textual interpretation” that produces one-to-one mappings of a nebulously defined Arthurian mythos onto the third Star Wars film trilogy (146). For Vishnuvajjala, the desire to find concrete and objectively correct meanings encoded in a text can yield conspiracy thinking, thereby leading fans astray. Both essays’ authors strike a balance between affirming the validity of fandom engagement and criticizing the harmful (or simply unfounded) forms of reading and discourse it can produce. As Vishnuvajjala puts it, “All acts of reception are ‘valid’; that does not mean that all readings of a text are equally useful” (159).A final throughline in the collection is that of global medievalism—especially global reception and adaptation of material traditionally claimed as uniquely “British.” Nazmi Ağil’s contribution reflects upon his 1994 translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into Turkish: Canterbury Hikâyeleri. His essay provides a valuable perspective on the first complete translation of the Canterbury Tales into Turkish, as well as on the process of translation across language and culture, arguing for the Tales’s ability to identify common ground across linguistic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. Sabina Rahman’s essay highlights the 2019 Australian television series Robbie Hood, a loose modern adaptation of the Robin Hood legend that subverts the colonialist, white-centric narrative of Australian medievalism by focusing on an Indigenous protagonist—who himself interrupts racist speech throughout the series’ episodes. In Richard Utz’s essay, Robin Hood is similarly front and center as Utz pursues a series of loose but compelling associations with the outlaw, from the prevalence of the surname “Greenwood” in Jamaica, to Maurice Keen’s decidedly English “Matter of the Greenwood,” to the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma where Black businesses thrived before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Medievalism’s potential to decenter white- and British-focused colonial perspectives is at the forefront of these essays, highlighting the strong claims that global people of color have on “medieval” figures and stories.As Crookes and Willis point out in their introduction, medievalism and reception studies already owe much to each other. Their collection demonstrates the multifaceted advantages of considering these two fields in more intentional conversation. The result is a cross section of research in medievalism and reception, unified by a broad methodological lens rather than by a specific time period or archive, and which can be read productively both in selections and as a whole. Medievalism and Reception provides a valuable addition to the field for specialists in medievalism and/or in reception studies, as well as a clear introduction for scholars new to these intertwined fields.