JUST AS Austen’s 1816 revision of Northanger Abbey was completed in a time of political uncertainty in Britain and a transitional time for the role of medievalism in British art forms, the period with which this chapter is concerned—the late 1930s—was a time of much wider political uncertainty and eventually horror. It was also a period in which medievalism had become prominent and self-conscious in the poetry, novels, drama, and political discourse of western Europe and the United States. This was a period that saw slowly expanding rights for women in many parts of the world, and it was also one in which new forms of critique of gendered discrimination appeared. The feminist medievalisms in this period came after a century of medievalist novels and poetry that depicted women in various relationships to power, nationalist medievalist novels like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, anti-war medievalisms like David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, as well as medievalist films like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Kid Galahad (1937). With the exception of the films, most of these texts contain few women, and the ones that do appear are usually peripheral characters. Although some of these texts have a passing concern with vulnerability (such as that of hobbits in Tolkien’s novels), they are still primarily concerned with power: achieving it, disrupting it, critiquing it, or dismantling it.

On the surface, Virginia Woolf seems like an odd writer to juxtapose with these others: while much of their work can be described as nostalgic, locating the solution to present concerns in the deep (and often fictional) past, Woolf much more often criticized the past as the source of present-day problems. Woolf’s overt engagement with gender, sexuality, bodily pain, and contemporary political events would likely not have appealed to many readers of Tolkien, Twain, or Jones. And yet, as I argue here, she engages with the idea of the medieval past and with layered or nested medievalisms in important ways in her final works, Three Guineas and Between the Acts.

THE ROLE of medievalism in ideas about gendered experiences of embodied vulnerability is complex, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate by looking at a careful selection of feminist engagements with medievalism over the past three centuries. This medievalism, even when it seems incidental to texts (as in Austen’s and Woolf’s novels) and even when those texts are popular and rarely given serious scholarly attention (as in Madonna’s and Lambert’s video and Ardolino’s film), is worthy of consideration alongside studies of intellectual engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages. As Austen’s Catherine Morland attempts to argue in Northanger Abbey, “real solemn history” is not only doing a disservice to women by leaving out their stories, but is also incomplete and doing a disservice to understandings of history. In her depiction of Catherine, Austen was engaging with philosophical debates circulating during her life about sensory experience and judgement and putting those debates in conversation with her lifelong interest in the women’s histories that history-writing leaves out. Woolf, similarly, puts the history of women’s exclusion from much of public life in conversation with narratives about national and martial history, pairing her scathing critique of institutions that shore up nationalism and misogyny in Three Guineas with a depiction of the much richer history of lived experiences repeatedly breaking through a pageant-play that attempts to tell a familiar story of national origins in Between the Acts. Like Austen, she shows us that the exclusion of women’s stories and practices does not only harm women; it harms everyone.

Austen and Woolf rarely enter conversations about medi evalism, and especially complex medi evalism—the kind that deals with the subtlety of ideas about the Middle Ages in texts not set in the Middle Ages or adapting medi eval texts—despite the frequency with which their male contempo-raries do. Part of my goal in this book has been to challenge the hierarchies with which we treat medi evalisms and which, I hope I have shown here, are also tied up in the hierarchies with which we treat medi eval texts; those in turn are often tied up in gender and how we treat women’s stories, women’s writing, and forms of affinity, affect, and affiliation associated with the feminine.

MEDIEVALISM STUDIES, the study of the reception of and engagement with medieval culture, has grown enormously in recent decades despite its frequent exclusion from the wider field of medieval studies until very recently. Although this has enabled medievalism studies to be interdisciplinary, to welcome non-traditional academics, to study right-wing appropriations of medieval culture before it was popular in medieval studies, and to embrace practitioners alongside scholars, it has also meant, at times, that it has been slower to adopt methodological developments in fields like literary and media studies, particularly when it comes to gender and recuperating women’s voices. Despite some notable exceptions, the field of medievalism studies has tended to focus more on representations of institutional history, martial culture, or men’s writing, and on post-medieval engagements that are produced or enacted primarily by men. When work on medievalism focuses on women, it has tended to focus on misogyny and violence against women, on exceptionally powerful women, or on women as exceptions in otherwise masculinist texts or spaces.

This book initially aimed to intervene in existing theories of embodied or participatory medievalism to ask what such a medievalism might look like with a focus on women doing the participating, and then looking for representation of such medievalism in literary and cinematic texts. Medievalism, as Louise D’Arcens has recently written, is difficult to define because it “embraces a range of cultural practices, discourses, and material artifacts with a daunting breadth of scope, temporally, geographically, and culturally” and it “has had a ubiquitous but often under-recognised presence in…cultural memory.” My interest is in bringing out that presence in texts and media that we might consider feminist but might not consider overtly medievalist—work by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Madonna’s music video for “Like a Prayer,” the 1992 film Sister Act, recent political discourse around misogyny and sexual harassment—and considering how it can help to define feminist medievalism in a way that adds to our understanding of texts we do consider overtly medievalist and our understanding of how medievalism shapes our cultures and experiences today.

THE MEDIEVALISM in Jane Austen’s novels has not been a major concern for either medi evalism scholars or Jane Austen scholars. But scholarly work on Austen has become increasingly interested in her politics and in how she situated her novels among prevailing ideas of history. The idea that Austen was not politically engaged has gradually given way to the current near-consensus that she was aware of and possibly interested in abolitionist politics, and recent scholarship has revisited her portrayal of Northanger Abbey heroine Catherine Morland as uninterested in history to suggest that it is documented history, not Catherine, at whom Austen is poking fun.

Austen was writing before the word “medieval” was in popular use, and very shortly before Walter Scott and others made overtly medievalist novels a popular mode of nineteenth-century fiction, but she was also engaged with different writing traditions that had ideas about the Middle Ages and their reception at their centre. Most notably, of course, she read, was influenced by, and critiqued Gothic fiction, especially the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and Northanger Abbey does often come up in conversations about medievalism because of its focus on the Gothic. The medievalism that interests me in Northanger Abbey is therefore not a direct one—rather than engaging explicitly with medieval culture, Austen most often engages with novels that themselves depict a sort of haunting of early modern culture by medieval culture. That might seem to make the medievalism of this novel tenuous. But I will argue in this chapter that Austen is not merely commenting on uses of the medieval, she is situating her narrative, especially the second half of the novel, within what I call a nested medievalism, which requires the peeling back of multiple layers to find what is or isn’t present at their centre. She does so after establishing, in the first half of the novel, that appeals to the medieval serve very different purposes for the novel’s hero, Catherine Morland, than they do for the predatory male characters whose nefarious motives are eventually uncovered. This bifurcation in the ways the novel’s characters participate in or use medievalism establishes that the value of medievalism has more than one register in the novel, and that, for Austen, these different registers are also ethically divergent.

FROM WOOLF’S Second World War-era representation of an embodied feminist history alongside more conventional narratives of institutional and national history, I turn to a very different representation of embodying history: that of women seeking sanctuary from violence in houses of religion after witnessing murders and practicing forms of affect, affinity, and compassion that draw on late medieval ideas. This chapter will argue for reading a particular type of feminist embodied medievalism in American audio-visual texts that might be read as casually medievalist for their representations of Catholicism in the United States. I go further here, examining them in their dual contexts as artifacts of the period between 1989 and 1993 (the years of the George H. W. Bush administration and, as we will see in this chapter and the next, a watershed period for discourses about women’s bodies, violence against women, and feminist thought in the United States) and as engagements with late medieval forms of women’s religious and affective practice, religious communities, and legal culture. This chapter considers Mary Lambert’s 1989 music video for Madonna’s song “Like A Prayer” and Emile Ardolino’s 1992 film Sister Act, and argues for adding them to the “canon” of 1980s/90s medievalism alongside works like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, Donald Barthelme’s The King, John Boorman’s Excalibur, and Stephen Weeks’s Sword of the Valiant, even though, unlike those texts, neither of these is set in the Middle Ages. Considering them as works of medievalism allows us to expand our definitions of medievalism to those representing women’s practices and affective links across time in modes that draw on medieval forms of affect, community, and sanctuary, but it also requires us to engage substantively with the complex ways these texts are representing medievalism, rather than relying on the Anglo-centric association of Catholicism—a religion practiced by over a billion people today—with the Middle Ages. Furthermore, these two cinematic texts demonstrate that engagements with medievalism can be an important vehicle for expanding the possibilities for women’s communities and feminist affective identifications to comment on contemporary issues surrounding racism, and for modelling feminist sympathies that embrace racial difference while also acknowledging the unequal treatment of different groups of Americans.

IN THIS final chapter, I turn from examining feminist narrative engagements with medievalist embodied vulnerability to considering how the idea of embodied vulnerability has carried dual negative and redemptive connotations—both gendered—since the late Middle Ages. I argue that these connotations, especially the negative ones, have become particularly entrenched in certain English-speaking contexts and have shown up in surprising places in the last few decades. This chapter will look at the effects of this in US political discourse of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, picking up where Chapter 3 ended, and then at its history in political thought and philosophy. In order to do so, I begin in the fourteenth century with a notable example of a text treating truth as gendered, demonstrating that we have long been inclined, particularly in English, to determine whether something is “true” or not by who it comes from rather than on its own merits. By re-examining one specific literary instance of embodied vulnerability functioning in a gendered way that has both negative implications and redemptive possibilities—that of Dorigen in Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale,” who makes a rash promise to a squire named Aurelius to be “his”—and then tracing the reemergence of those negative and redemptive possibilities in recent decades, I demonstrate that the specific misogyny around the idea of “truth” in recent US politics, as well as the resistance to that misogyny, are continuing a debate that dates back to the fourteenth century.

Scholarly debate on the morality, legality, and enforceability of Dorigen’s rash promise to Aurelius has long been contentious, especially with respect to the word and concept of trouthe. I argue that this is in part because our reading of Dorigen’s conflicting trouthes in the tale depends on our reading of her embodied vulnerability and the way other characters respond to it; what seems like a legal or contractual debate is actually one about bodies, affects, and emotions. If her embodied vulnerability—what some might see as her weak feminine body, incapable of fidelity to oaths—is merely a liability, this reinforces the legalistic imperative that she keep her promise to Aurelius, even though she made it “in pley.”

WHAT DOES IT mean to speak of friendship between a reader and a fictional charac-ter? How does one feel a sense of friendship with someone who doesn’t exist? “Friend” has a wide range of meanings in modern English, and many of them have persisted not only since Chaucer’s time but since the Old English period. Meanings of “friend” range from someone not hostile or an enemy (as in warfare) or someone we know well enough to say hi in public without feeling embarrassed (according to anthropo logist Robin Dunbar) to a close relative to a patron (as with “the Friends of the British Library”) to someone who enhances or betters someone’s lifestyle (as in some social science approaches that informed a recent controversial New York Times article) to a romantic partner. But the definition that most interests me is that of a close and informal—as in not requiring validation by shared profession, kinship, social class, etc.—relationship of trust and intimacy. And of course this sense can be indicated by a variety of other terms too, including the Old (and Early Middle) English wine, the Middle English fellaw, the Middle Scots cummar (more on this term below), figurative uses of “brother” and “sister” across Middle and modern English, and more recent terms like “squad,” “bestie,” and “ride or die.” In this essay, I consider how Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings cre-ates a sense of intimacy between the text’s narrator(s) and readers that we can read as akin to women’s friendship. I argue that Bergvall builds on the sense of intimacy created by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Alisoun, who addresses not only her fellow pilgrims but also Chaucer’s female readers, by having her multiple narrators speak to each other and to their readers. This creates a sense of a community of women who share secrets, fears, pain, pleasures, and hopes for the future.

Scholars of medieval and medievalism studies know intellectually that the only past we can access is one that we have reconstructed, imperfectly, with the limited artifacts we can piece together of what came before us. But the idea of a medieval past that is whole, authentic, and completely knowable remains as irresistible to many of us as it does to non-medievalists. The fantasy of scholars traveling back to the past they study appears repeatedly in fiction, perhaps most famously in Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, in which historians travel back to the fourteenth century, and perhaps most recently in Kathleen A. Flynn's The Jane Austen Project, in which a scholar and a doctor travel to 1815 to diagnose Jane Austen's fatal illness. Both of these texts depict the time-traveling scholars meeting surprises in the material culture of the societies they study, reinforcing the limits of what we know about the past. As Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman write, the time machine might be “the ultimate fantasy for historians,” because “finally, we would be able to say with absolute certainty ‘what really happened’ in the past.” Time travel is imagined to allow scholars to participate in something like what Daniel T. Kline calls “participatory medievalism,” which is “a spectrum of active, embodied encounter” currently only possible through role-playing and gaming. As Finke and Shichtman note, though, even such fantasies as Willis's demonstrate that the quest to travel to the past and appear authentic involves a great deal of modern artifice, which ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the “real” past. Patricia Clare Ingham has argued that in the Doomsday Book, “Willis creates a fictionalized temporality that twins the passions underlying hardnosed historical fact-checking with other ways of [Umberto Eco’s] ‘dreaming the Middle Ages,’” using protagonist Kivrin's experience of fourteenth-century Oxford to demonstrate the limitations of intellectual engagement with the past.

Despite these limits to the fantasy of time-traveling scholarly research, time-travel narratives continue to be a useful and interesting way to think through the relationship between the subjective experience of the past – both for those who lived in it and for those of us researching it or playing in it – and so-called objective histories.

The Middle English poem Ywain and Gawain, a fairly close adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain ou le chevalier au lion, has been relatively little studied compared to its source and compared to other Middle English Arthurian poetry. The few studies of the poem demonstrate that it raises important questions about adaptation, late medieval legal culture and gendered experiences of friendship. The poem depicts a variety of friendships, including those between men, between women, between men and women and between humans and animals, and many of these friendships intersect in complicated ways with the various types of obligation built into the social and political structures in which the narrative operates. Other Middle English Arthurian texts interrogate the relationship between gender and chivalric friendships primarily through the role of women in the homosocial world of Arthurian knights, but Ywain and Gawain does so differently, by juxtaposing the friendships between knights with the friendship between two women, the lady Alundyne and her advisor or lady-in-waiting Lunet. Public or political friendship is often coded as masculine in studies of the Middle Ages and later periods, while private or affective friendship is often coded as feminine and described as a development of later periods. But the friendship between Lunet and Alundyne is a political alliance at some moments in the text and a private affection at others; much of the poem's conflict comes from the points at which these two aspects to their friendship exist in tension with each other, even as the poem's male characters also negotiate between these two types of friendship. Ywain and Gawain therefore reveals that the interplay between gender, affective friendship and obligation in medieval romance is more complicated than it seems. By examining the complicated dynamics of the friendship between the poem's main female characters, including a manuscript image that reinforces the affective dimension of their central disagreement, we can better understand the anxiety about friendship that is central to Arthurian romance and how that anxiety is easily overlooked by theories of friendship that map gender onto a mind/body and public/ private dualism.