Offering 14 essays, this book examines how different groups, individuals or eras use and shape the image of the Middle Ages, differentiating between historical knowledge of the Middle Ages and what we have made the period out to be. It also discusses the effect of medievalism on the more traditional subject of medieval studies.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments      Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture      1. Chaucer for a New Millennium: The BBC Canterbury Tales      2. “If I Lay My Hands on the Grail”: Arthurianism and Progressive Rock      3. The Sound of Silents: Aurality and Medievalism in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan      4. Antichrist Superstars: The Vikings in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal      5. The Future Is What It Used to Be: Medieval Prophecy and Popular Culture      6. Idealized Images of Wales in the Fiction of Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters      7. Places Don’t Have to Be True to Be True: The Appropriation of King Arthur and the Cultural Value of Tourist Sites      8. “Accident My Codlings”: Sitcom, Cinema and the Re-writing of History in The Blackadder      9. Medieval History and Cultural Forgetting: Oppositional Ethnography in The Templar Revelation      10. Teaching the Middle Ages      11. Virtually Medieval: The Age of Kings Interprets the Middle Ages      12. A World unto Itself: Autopoietic Systems and Secondary Worlds in Dungeons & Dragons      13. Anything Different Is Good: Incremental Repetition, Courtly Love, and Purgatory in Groundhog Day      About the Contributors      Index