This chapter explores the medieval interests of two twenty-first century pieces of art: Elizabeth Price’s immersive video installation, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive (2013). Both of these works turn to medieval culture in order to examine the untimeliness of the body and this chapter traces their sources and explores how their work speaks with, and to, medieval representations of the body. It contextualises Price and Landy’s work with explorations of medieval effigies and the Middle English poem St Erkenwald. The methodology of this chapter is informed by Aby Warburg’s work on gesture in early modern art and interrogates moments of contact and communication across time.

This chapter interrogates the relationship between medievalist cultural memory and nationalism in Britain and Europe. Exploring work by the English poet Thomas Gray, the Welsh poet and critic Evan Evans, the Hungarian poet Janos Arany, the Icelandic scholar Grímur Jonsson Thorkelín and the Danish poet, historian and educator Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, this chapter explores how ideas of the medieval past are used to generate ideas of community and exclude some people, ideas and traditions from the future.

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.

The Old English poem known as The Ruin meditates on the material remains of a long-passed civilisation and has often been read as typical of the nostalgic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, but its reception history reveals how cultural memories of the Anglo-Saxons have been rewritten in the modern world and the importance of the idea of ruination to modern conceptions of the Middle Ages. This chapter constitutes the first extended study of the disciplinary and translation histories of The Ruin, traces the history of the poem from 1826 to the twenty-first century and explores the meanings of ruins in the Middle Ages and modernity.

This chapter examines the debate over the relationship between the church building and its community in orthodox and Lollard texts. The chapter begins with the allegorical reading of church architecture in William of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum and the Middle English What the Church Betokeneth, in which every member of the community has a designated place in the church. The chapter then discusses Lollard attempts to divorce the building from the people by critiquing costly material churches and their decorations in The Lanterne of Liȝt, Lollard sermons, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. The chapter concludes by examining Dives and Pauper in the context of fifteenth-century investment in the church, both financial and spiritual, and argues that in practice church buildings were at the devotional heart of their communities.