The aims of this collection of essays are, as its editors Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis make clear in their introduction, to “reflect upon the relationship between medievalism and reception in theory and in practice,” to establish “the usefulness of reception as a critical term,” and to demonstrate “the powerful potential of medievalism and reception for literary, historical, and cultural studies more broadly” (3). To contextualize the collection’s approach, Crookes and Willis trace the origins of both titular approaches to the late 1970s and assess recent work in both fields before suggesting that a “more explicit and self-reflective engagement” between the two would benefit the “overlapping fields,” both of which are deeply interested in “the interrelation of past and present” (5).
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the eleven included essays span a broad range of time periods, themes, and geographical perspectives, including medieval through modern receptions of medievalism, analyses of particular historical and literary personas alongside broader cultural phenomena, and global as well as local approaches to understanding “medieval” originality. The contributors, it should be noted, reflect a variety of academic positions, from independent scholars and lecturers, to tenured, tenure-track, or senior faculty and deans. And the academic institutions with which they are affiliated, if they are indeed affiliated with such an institution, are likewise varied, representing four continents and reflecting a mixture of regional and flagship universities. This expansiveness of approach is at once a great strength and a potential limitation for the volume. On the one hand, the breadth of topics covered helps ensure that there are chapters that might appeal to diverse readers from diverse fields interested in medievalism. On the other hand, given the book’s price point, that same breadth of scope might make it a hard sell to individual book buyers over, say, institutional libraries, which could limit its accessibility to some of the very same groups of scholars who contributed to its existence in the first place.
The collection seems to arrange its contributions from the heavily theorized to the more personally self-reflective, though all the essays blend the two even if they skew more heavily in one direction over the other. Consequently, some of chapters that seem to be most directly in conversation with one another, like Candace Barrington’s and Nazmi Ağil’s different approaches to fostering meaningful relationships with Chaucer’s texts or Richard Utz’s and Sabina Rahman’s distinct yet related explorations of the racialized reception of Robin Hood, are not as clear as they might be until after one has read the whole volume.
David Matthews’s essay opens the collection by drawing on several of the threads from the introduction proper to offer a historical overview of the discipline of medievalism and its relationship to medieval studies and reception theory. Returning repeatedly to editions of “The Battle of Maldon,” both real and imagined, Matthews traces the role of reception in producing and endorsing “disciplinary authority” as the opposite of medievalism when, in fact, the two are deeply interconnected (23). Candace Barrington’s subsequent chapter is also interested in the tension between creative and critical reception, specifically as it relates to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Early adaptations of Chaucer’s work were numerous but drop off, ironically, as Barrington shows, during the so-called Medieval Revival, where his perception as the “Father of English Literature,” who connected the classical past to the medieval origins of the present “ultimately encased Chaucer’s works in the amber of academic prestige and relegated them to the creative imagination’s outskirts” until the twentieth century (26), when authors who are not concerned with recovering or preserving the past once again find inspiration in his works in ways that align with Chaucer’s own instructions for receiving his work.
Chapter 3 focuses on “the memory and legacy of the crusades” in nineteenth-century Britain (40). In it, Mike Horswell and Elizabeth Siberry examine book reviews of two very different but frequently cited pieces of crusade historiography to illustrate the extent to which complex models of reading have always contributed to how crusading has been understood. Richard Utz turns our attention to “some of the less often travelled tracks” associated with modern reception of the Robin Hood legend to explore its ties to “Englishness” as well as its “conflicting “white” and “black” racial associations (55) in chapter 4. Through a study of the name Greenwood, Utz tracks references to and appropriations of Robin Hood across multiple cultures that would not be apparent from any single temporal or disciplinary perspective.
Kavita Mudan Finn’s chapter 5 focuses on the interpretative strategies within fan communities for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones for “filling in the gaps in Martin’s narrative that he has no interest in exploring further” (76), especially regarding women. Focusing on two prominent dead women within Westerosi lore, Mudan Finn explores how their fandoms negotiate complex issues like agency, racism, and ableism in medievalist worldbuilding. In chapter 6, Clare Broome Saunders returns us to nineteenth-century Britain to explore how Queen Victoria used popular medievalisms to counter the difficulties associated with being a woman ruler married to a foreign prince. Broome Saunders demonstrates how Victoria carefully evoked chivalric rhetoric and costume to curate a “convincing popular persona for herself, and a curated persona for her husband using positive medieval iconography” (89). Stephanie Russo’s chapter 7 keeps us in the nineteenth century and focused on a queen: Anne Boleyn. Surveying perceptions of Anne in literature and history, Russo demonstrates how these texts “repeatedly try to pinpoint the exact moment when the medieval gave way to the modern,” thereby creating “myths about each period” (117).
Sabina Rahman’s chapter 8 once again asks us to consider the historical reception of Robin Hood, this time in Australia specifically. Rahman traces the use of medievalism in settler narratives “as a tool to erase Indigenous identity...and install and Anglo-European identity” (118-119), before turning her attention to the ways in which Robbie Hood, a televisions series written and directed by Kaytetye man Dylan River engages with the Robin Hood tradition as a form of resistance against such narratives. In chapter 9, Ellie Crookes brings us back to the nineteenth-century and the topic of public personas, this time through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “transformation” of his wife and muse, Elizabeth Siddall into “Lizzie Siddal,” a public figure closely associated with his artistic representations of Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice. Crookes coins the term “embodied medievalism” to explore this form of reception, “which blurs the boundaries between past and present, art and life” (130).
Usha Vishnuvajjala examines the relationship between medievalism and conspiracist fan interpretations of recent Star Wars films in chapter 10 to think through “how medievalism scholars may approach the ever-vexing question of ‘legitimate’ acts of reception” (146). Although she deconstructs many of binaries frequently employed in discussions of “serious/academic” and “frivolous/amateur” medievalism, Vishnuvajjala ultimately concludes that the ability to recognize a “reading’s subjectivity and limitations” remains an important distinction between the two (160). Nazmi Ağil’s final chapter draws on his experiences translating The Canterbury Tales for a general audience to reflect on the relationship between medieval reception and translation. Contextualizing his motives for undertaking the translation within twentieth and twenty-first century Turkish history and aesthetic preferences, Ağil connects the success of his translation—now in its ninth edition—to the ways in which Chaucer’s work invites readers to “wake up, look around more carefully and listen to others’ stories” (173).
Taken together, these essays effectively speak to the many ways in which medievalism and reception are interconnected fields that complicate and complement one another. It is easy to imagine some of the chapters as useful teaching tools for courses covering topics as diverse as Chaucer, Robin Hood, the Pre-Raphaelites, the crusades, colonization, periodization, translation, and fantasy. Moreover, the intentional and visible engagement with reception methodologies in each chapter reminds all of us who study and teach literature professionally of the complex and ever shifting networks by and through which any act of interpretation is made, potentially enabling both our teaching and our scholarship to be more accessible to their target audiences.