Defining Medievalism(s).

Book excerpt: "A sequel to its predecessor, this volume of Studies in Medievalism further explores definitions of the field. In essays by seven leading medievalists, it seeks to determine precisely how we should characterize the subjects of our study, their relationship to new and related fields, such as neomedievalism, and their relevance to the Middle Ages, whose definition is itself a matter of debate." "The observations and conclusions of the essayists are tested in the volume's second section, which comprises eight articles on: the notion of progress over the last eighty or ninety years in our perception of the Middle Ages; medievalism in Gustave Dore's mid-nineteenth-century engravings of the Divine Comedy; the role of music in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films; cinematic representations of the Holy Grail; the medieval courtly love tradition in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and The Powerbook; Eleanor of Aquitaine in twentieth-century histories; modern updates of the Seven Deadly Sins; and Victorian spins on Jacques de Voragine's Golden Legend."--Jacket.