CHS lecture - LOUISE D'ARCENS (Macquarie University, Sydney): "World Medievalism"

This is a guest lecture in the Centre for Historical Studies.

Abstract

Medieval studies has witnessed an increasing interest in exploring the Middle Ages as an epoch of exchanges, migrations, and cross-race and interfaith encounters, so that it is now understood under the auspices of a deeper historical reconceptualisation of ‘the global’.

This swing toward the ‘global Middle Ages’ is inseparable from interest in medievalism. A parallel body of work has demonstrated how medieval European legacies have been adapted by modern cultures around the world. The idea of ‘world medievalism’ offers particular challenges to a discipline whose very name, medievalism studies, takes European geo-temporality as its starting point. But, as I will show in this lecture, this also offers exciting opportunities precisely because the compass of medievalism expands, temporally and geographically, far beyond its starting point in the European Middle Ages.