In his 2015 study, Medievalism: A Critical History, David Matthews proposes that, after a period of modernity during which medievalism appeared in some of the central cultural practices in the western world, much of the medievalist energy and excitement visible in canonical texts, architecture, and the arts gradually diminished from this general domain and concentrated around the various institutionalized forms of inquiry of medievalia at the modern university. As a result, medievalism was displaced from the central cultural position it held during Britain's Victorian or America's pre-and post-Civil War periods to an increasingly marginal one. Matthews declares that this move to the margin ironically rendered medievalism almost omnipresent, albeit in smaller doses and with lesser consequence. Matthews terms this kind of medievalism “residual,” remarking how medievalism now left its mark no longer with the lead genres, authors, and texts of its time as in the works of Alfred Tennyson, Walter Scott, William Morris, and Thomas Carlyle, but as mere substrates, implications, and references as in James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound, or as mere tropes in twentieth-century genre fiction by Umberto Eco, John Fuller, and Barry Unsworth. Similarly, Matthews expounds, there are no English-language medievalist movies that have achieved both popularity and won sufficient cultural capital to be thought of as canonical.

Matthews has a point: it is during the nineteenth century (peaking between the 1850s and the 1870s) that the study of medieval texts and art progressively passes from the hands of antiquarians, bibliomaniacs, dilettantes, and enthusiasts into those of university-educated specialists; and it is during the nineteenth century that movements like the English Medieval Revival or the French Catholic Revival dominate certain subsections of cultural production; and it is also during the nineteenth century that terms such as “medieval,” “Middle Ages,” and “medievalism” enter into the vocabulary of those numerous scholars who would now historicize the past. However, as I was reading Matthews's chapter, I could not rid myself of the impression that the distinction between “central” and “residual” medievalism he is writing into existence is mostly a function of his tacit agreement with the theory that, at least by the end of the “Great War,” the acceptance and adaptation of medieval ideas and teleologies became too complex, if not downright impossible.