This book* is called a manifesto because it has an unapolo-getically political objective. I want to help reform the way we think about and practise our academic engagement with medieval culture, and I will use my observations as a medievalist and medievalism-ist over the last twenty-five years to offer ways in which we might reconnect with the general public that has allowed us to become, since the late nineteenth century, a rather exclusive clan of specialists communicating mostly with each other.

Many considerations have played a role in my decision to address this subject: most importantly, my experience of going back and forth across the Atlantic and living, teaching, and writing within different cultural and educational con-texts for the study of the Middle Ages. As a result, much of my scholarship shows traces of an identity anchored both in places, traditions, and rituals dating back to medieval culture and also in manifestations spatially, temporally, and politically removed from medieval culture. In addition, I believe my ideas relate to a larger set of questions currently asked by students, parents, journalists, politicians, and academic advisory boards about the relevance and value of the humanities and social sciences in radically new contexts for knowledge production and reception.

I wanted to write a volume for Past Imperfect because this new series allows for a concise monograph written in a somewhat “edgy” style. In my last monograph, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology (2002), I managed to include as many paratextual features (footnotes, annotated bibliography, general bibliography, and so on) as actual scholarly narrative. It was the fruit of nine years of reading and research, and its audience, while appreciative, was rather small and comprised a few handfuls of colleagues worldwide also working in the reception history of Geoffrey Chaucer. Like Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology, this new monograph also wants to speak to my colleagues, but to many more of them, and it wants to entice them to look beyond our traditional academic audiences in a variety of ways. I am grateful to Simon Forde and Ruth Kennedy, for launching Past Imperfect and for curating my volume into shape.