Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar stories, objects, symbols, and myths.
Whose Middle Ages? gives nonspecialists access to the richness of our historical knowledge while debunking damaging misconceptions about the medieval past. Myths about the medieval period are especially beloved among the globally resurgent far right, from crusading emblems on the shields borne by alt-right demonstrators to the on-screen image of a purely white European populace defended from actors of color by Internet trolls. This collection attacks these myths directly by insisting that readers encounter the relics of the Middle Ages on their own terms.
Each essay uses its author’s academic research as a point of entry and takes care to explain how the author knows what she or he knows and what kinds of tools, bodies of evidence, and theoretical lenses allow scholars to write with certainty about elements of the past to a level of detail that might seem unattainable. By demystifying the methods of scholarly inquiry, Whose Middle Ages? serves as an antidote not only to the far right’s errors of fact and interpretation but also to its assault on scholarship and expertise as valid means for the acquisition of knowledge.

Andrew Albin is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Fordham University. His scholarship in the fi eld of historical sound studies examines embodied listening practices, sound’s meaningful contexts, and the lived aural experiences of historical hearers—in a word, the sonorous past—as an object of critical inquiry. His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He is the author of Richard Rolle’s Melody of Love: A Study and Translation with Manuscript and Musical Contexts (PIMS, 2018).

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Mary C. Erler is Distinguished Professor of English at Fordham University and a member of the faculty of Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies.

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Thomas O'Donnell is Co-Chair, Comparative Literature, Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies, and a member of the faculty of Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies.

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Nicholas L. Paul is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University. He received his MPhil in Medieval History and PhD in History from Cambridge University. His previous publications include To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Cornell, 2017) and the coedited collections Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity (Johns Hopkins, 2012), and, with Laura K. Morreale, The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean (Fordham, 2018).

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Nina Rowe is Associate Professor of Art History and a member of the faculty of Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies.

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David Perry—Professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006–2017—is a columnist for Pacific Standard Magazine and a freelance journalist covering politics, history, education, and disability rights. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He is the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.

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Geraldine Heng is Perceval Professor in English and Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies and Women’s Studies, at the University of Texas in Austin. The author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia, 2003, 2004, 2012), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018), and England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge, 2018). She is also the founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project
(www.globalmiddleages.org). She is currently researching and writing Early Globalisms: The Interconnected World, 500– 1500 CE.

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Sandy Bardsley is Professor of Medieval History at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on women and gender in late medieval England.

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Adam M. Bishop obtained his PhD in medieval studies from the University of Toronto in 2011. He is currently an independent scholar researching the legal system of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

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Marian Bleeke received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago. She has taught at Beloit College, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and the State University of New York at Fredonia, and is currently Associate Professor of Art History and Director of General Education at Cleveland State University. Her first book, Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Representations from France, c. 1100– 1500, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2017.

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Will Cerbone holds an MA from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. He is a writer and an editor of scholarly books in New York.

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William J. Diebold is the Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College. He has published extensively on early medieval topics, including his book Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art (Routledge, 2001). He has taught these areas at Reed since 1987, and participates in the College’s humanities program, teaching both ancient Mediterranean and modern European courses.

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Fred M. Donner is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1975 and has researched and written mainly on early Islamic history, Islamic historiography, and the Qur’an.

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Sarah M. Guérin is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines medieval ivory carving and has focused on the inter-regional trade networks that enabled exchange, work that has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Medieval History, al-Masaq, and The Medieval Globe. She is presently working on a monograph treating the first century of Gothic ivory carving called Ivory Palaces: Material, Belief, and Desire in Gothic Sculpture.

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J. Patrick Hornbeck II is Chair and Professor of Theology at Fordham University. He is author of What Is a Lollard? (Oxford University Press, 2010), A Companion to Lollardy (Brill, 2016), and Remembering Wolsey (Fordham, 2019), as well as coeditor of More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church (Fordham, 2014) and Europe After Wyclif (Fordham, 2016).

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Lauren Mancia is Assistant Professor of History at Brooklyn College. She is a professor of history and a scholar of the Western European Middle Ages, with specialties in medieval Christianity, the history of emotions, and medieval monasticism. She has published on her scholarly interests both in peer-reviewed academic journals and in publications for wider, more general audiences.

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Stephennie Mulder is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a specialist in Islamic art, architectural history, and archaeology. Her research interests include the art and architecture of Shi’ism, the intersections between art, spatiality, and sectarian relationships in Islam, anthropological theories of art, material culture studies, theories of ornament and mimesis, and place and landscape studies. Dr. Mulder works on the conservation of antiquities and cultural heritage sites endangered by war and illegal trafficking.

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W. Mark Ormrod, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of York, is the author of many books and articles on the politics and political culture of later medieval England, including Political Life in Medieval England, 1300-1450 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) and Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). He has collaborated extensively with The National Archives of the United Kingdom on the cataloguing and editing of medieval document collections. He was Principal Investigator of the major project “England’s Immigrants, 1330-1550,” funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom (2012-15), and (with Bart Lambert and Jonathan Mackman) has co-authored Immigrant England, 1300-1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

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Pamela A. Patton is Director of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. Her publications include two monographs, Pictorial Narrative in the Romanesque Cloister (Peter Lang, 2004) and Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (Penn State, 2012), and the edited volume Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America (Brill, 2016). She serves as coeditor of the journal Studies in Iconography and as an area editor for the Oxford Bibliographies in Art History. Her current research and forthcoming publications concern the depiction and meanings of skin color in medieval Iberia against the backdrop of a multi ethnic, multicultural Mediterranean. Before joining the Index in 2015, she was Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University.

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Andrew Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies in 2009 and is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Middle Georgia State University. His research covers how laypeople and lowerranked clergy interacted in the later Middle Ages. His 2015 book, Religious Education in Thirteenth- Century England: The Creed and Articles of Faith (Brill, 2015), shows how clergy taught the basics of Christian doctrine to laypeople.

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Ryan Szpiech is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He teaches and researches on medieval religious history, conversion, and polemical literature from the Iberian Peninsula. He is the author of numerous articles and Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Pennsylvania, 2013).

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Magda Teter is the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of History at Fordham University. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University in 2000. She specializes in early modern religious and cultural history, with emphasis on Jewish– Christian relations, the politics of religion, and transmission of culture among Jews and Christians across Europe in the early modern period. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011).

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Elizabeth M. Tyler is Professor of Medieval Literature. Her research and teaching focuses on the literary culture of England from the ninth to the twelfth century, that is from the time of Alfred the Great to the time of William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Situated at the intersection of literary study with intellectual, social, and political history, her work stresses the international nature of English literature and draws attention to the key role England plays in the flourishing of European literary culture across the early and high Middle Ages.

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David A. Wacks is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 La corónica award, and Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture. He is co-editor, with Michelle Hamilton, of The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe (ILEX Foundation, 2018). His most recent monograph, Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World, is forthcoming in 2019 from University of Toronto Press. He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu.

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Cord J. Whitaker is Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College where he researches and teaches late medieval English literature, especially Chaucer and romance. His research also focuses on medieval religious conflict and the history of race. He received his MA and PhD from Duke University.

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Maggie M. Williams teaches at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She is a co-founder and Core Committee member of the Material Collective, and Series Editor of the Collective’s imprint from punctum books, Tiny Collections. In the past, she has worked on medieval stone crosses in Ireland, and her 2012 book Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) deals with the use of such imagery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently, she has been researching the white supremacist uses of the so-called “Celtic” cross.

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Katherine Anne Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Chester. Her research interests lie in understanding the relationship between social and cultural change, and shifting patterns in the use of material culture in the later Middle Ages. She works and publishes on the biographies of producers and consumers of objects in medieval courts and urban centres as well as on the circulation of objects across medieval Europe.

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Helen Young is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Deakin University, Australia. Her current research interests are in medievalism and critical whiteness studies. She is most recently the author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (Routledge, 2016).

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Whose Middle Ages? offers an ethical and accessible introduction to a historical period often implicated in racist narratives of nationalism and imperialism. A valuable teaching resource, Whose Middle Ages? will inspire necessary discussions about the politics of engaging the past in the present, as it also recovers a Middle Ages that is complex, messy, and belongs to us all.---Sierra Lomuto, Assistant Professor of English, Macalester College,

Cross-disciplinary, classroom-ready, and super-timely meditations on medievalisms in our midst, benign and malign, and on medieval self-understanding. Recommended.---David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor, University of Pennsylvania,

...Whose Middle Ages? is... charting an iteration of the Middle Ages that is just beginning.

TMR: The Medieval Review

This is an important book, filled with brief, accessible essays by a who’s who of experts in medieval studies. As a whole, it demonstrates how scholars can open up their field to a wider audience and why those conversations matter, particularly in our own historical moment when history in general—and the medieval past in particular—is weaponized in the service of hate. Whose Middle Ages? should be on every medievalist’s bookshelf and on every class’ reading list.---Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech,

This book is timely in a way that won’t get old. It has something for everyone, from professional educators seeking to enliven their classrooms to anyone curious about the origins of popular symbols and phrases. With a plethora of compelling case studies from contemporary culture, religion, art, and politics, there are vital lessons on almost every page. In example after example, the authors show how people shape the Middle Ages to reflect their fears and dreams for themselves and for society. The results range from the amusing to the horrifying, from video games to genocide. Whose Middle Ages? Everyone’s, but not everyone’s in the same way.---Michelle R. Warren, author of Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages,

This is a significant contribution to medieval studies and has already generated discussion among medievalists debating disciplinary politics.

Journal of Medieval Worlds