But we are all medievalists now.

What a curious choice of words, I thought at the time; and as Friedman’s pronouncement quickly became an organizing metaphor for that pervasive metonymy known as the “War on Terror,” the single term “medievalist” continued to nag at my apprehension of September 11 and its aftermath. That my own professional identity coincided precisely with Friedman’s designation for bin Laden became the starting point for an investigation that has led me in a direction I did not expect: an investigation in which my own academic expertise has more often than not seemed frustratingly beside the point. This frustration, in fact, has remained central to my thinking about all that follows here. In standard academic parlance, a medievalist is a scholar of the history and civilization of what we commonly call the Middle Ages, a period stretching roughly from the fifth century of the Common Era through the fifteenth; an era that embraces the final fall of the Roman Empire, the rise and triumph of Islam, and the Crusades fought over Jerusalem and the Holy Land; a millennium that gave us Mohammed, Charlemagne, the Koran, the Book of Kells, courtly love, Ghengis Khan, feudalism, the Jin dynasty, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis of Assisi, Dante, Marco Polo, Petrarch, Chaucer, the Aztec Empire, the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the English kings Shakespeare would immortalize in plays such as Richard III and Henry V.