Contested Spaces in Global Medievalisms

This volume considers how Global Medievalisms engage with space—real, cartographic, imagined—through a variety of forms of contestation, whether literal, such as battles, wars, or the displacement of peoples, or discursive. It applies a global lens to Medievalism Studies, which is essentially a methodology for understanding the making of the past in the present.

In this illuminating study scholarly paradigms from the fields of Human Geography, Post-colonial, and Global Studies are brought to bear on medievalist texts and practices. Readers are challenged to reevaluate the focus of Medievalism Studies on the products of the West in isolation from African, Asian, and Oceanian re-imaginings of the pre-modern past. The book examines how different cultural regions articulate and use their own pasts differently; drawing on experiential medievalisms and on media from novels to films, from television shows and streaming video to board and electronic games, and analyzes responses to colonialism’s disruption of continuities with the pre-modern past and its dissemination of images of the European Middle Ages around the world. Robert Squillace and Angela Jane Weisl further argue that the global landscape of contemporary media, in which multinational companies distribute both professional and user-made medievalisms (unequally) across the globe, itself constitutes a space of global contestation in which formally marginalized cultures can sometimes challenge the hegemony of Western medievalisms.

This study provides thought-provoking reading for students and scholars interested in Medievalisms, Post-Colonial studies, literatures of the Global South, and mass culture, as well as offering prompts for further research.