Affective Medievalism

The book argues that the temporal privilege of the medieval masks the extent to which the medieval and medievalistic are mutually constitutive and ultimately dependent not on absolutist epistemological claims but on how feelings and temperaments affect the way we approach the Middle Ages. -- .

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This book investigates the troubled relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. Acknowledging that the medieval and medievalism are mutually constitutive, and that their texts can be read using similar strategies, it argues that medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect readers in the present with the lost history of what may be called the ‘medievalism of the medievals’. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. -- .