New Zealand Medievalism: Reframing the Medieval

This volume maps the phenomenon of medievalism in Aotearoa, initially as an import by the early white settler society, and as a form of nation building that would reinforce Britishness and ancestral belonging. This colonial narrative underpins the volume’s focus on the imperial relationship in chapters on the academic study of the Middle Ages, on medievalism in film and music, in manuscript and book collections, and colonial stained glass and architecture. Through the alternative 21st-century frameworks of a global Middle Ages and Aotearoa’s bicultural nationalism, the volume also introduces Maori understandings of the ancestral past that parallel the European epoch and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the phenomenon of global right-wing medievalism, as evidenced in the Alt-right extremism underpinning the Christchurch mosque attack of 2019.

The 11 chapters trace the transcultural moves and networks that comprise the shift from the 20th-century study of the Middle Ages as an historical period to manifestations of medievalism as the reception and interpretation of the medieval past in postmedieval times. Collectively these are viewed as indications of the changing public perception about the meaning and practice of the European heritage from the colonial to contemporary era.

The volume will appeal to educationists, scholars, and students interested in the academic history of the Middle Ages in New Zealand; enthusiasts of film, music, and performance of the medieval; members of the public interested in Aotearoa’s history and popular culture; and all who enjoy the colourful reinventions of medievalism.

Anna Czarnowus is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia, Katowice (Poland). She has published on Middle English literature and medievalisms, co-editing (with M.J. Toswell) Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood (2020), and (with Carolyne Larrington) Memory and Medievalism in George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones: The Keeper of All Our Memories (2022). She is also the co-editor (with Laurel Ryan) of Medievalism and Slavic Popular Culture (forthcoming).

Janet M. Wilson is professor emerita in English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. She formerly taught medieval studies at universities in New Zealand and the UK. Her research now focuses on the postcolonial and diaspora writing of the white settler societies of Australia and New Zealand, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism, and transculturalism. Katherine Mansfield is a special subject of interest. She is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the series Studies in World Literature.