Based on my thoughts in the previous chapters, here are my recommendations for the future of our engagement with medieval culture:

Manifesto One

Medievalism is the ongoing and broad cultural phenomenon of reinventing, remembering, recreating, and reenacting the Middle Ages. Medieval Studies, the academic study of medieval culture focused on establishing the “real” Middle Ages, is one essential contributor to the cultural phenomenon of Medievalism. As Kathleen Verduin once stated: “[I]f ‘medievalism’ […] denotes the whole range of postmedieval engagement with the Middle Ages, then ‘medieval studies’ themselves must be considered a facet of medievalism rather than the other way around.” Most academic medievalists distinguish themselves from extra academic lovers of medieval culture only by the degree to which they depersonalize their desire for the past, sublimate that desire into scientific and science-like practices, and share their activities with others.

Manifesto Two

The most exciting new forms of engagement with medievalia in the last three decades have originated from the confluence of reception studies, feminism, women's studies, and medievalism studies. They have managed to challenge the pastism of Medieval Studies, whose practitioners still prefer to see an insurmountable otherness in medieval culture. One of the most successful examples of a critical corrective to the alterity in traditional Medieval Studies is Juanita Feros Ruys and Louise D’Arcens's essay collection, “Maistresse of My Wit”: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (2004). Openly playful, the contributors to this volume combine presentist empathy, memory, subjectivity, resonance, affection, desire, passion, speculation, fiction, imagination, and positionality with the existing body of modern scholarship and its practices. In their experimental combination of enthusiastic presentism and scholarship, they equal the collaborative spirit of Guédelon-builder Michel Guyot and his academic advisory board.