In recent years the general disregard of our field toward medievalisms outside Europe and the Anglophone world has changed noticeably. Volumes such as the 2009 Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, which Kathleen Davis and I co-edited, as well as Michelle Warren's 2011 Creole Medievalism, have been fully dedicated to the topic. Others have had at least a section on medievalism outside Europe, such as the papers devoted to “countries without a Middle Ages” in Revista de poética medieval's special 2008 issue on medievalisms, which was edited by César Domínguez, and the project Le Moyen Âge vu d'ailleurs, which included four international conferences, several interim publications, and a recent volume by the same name, edited by Eliana Magnani in 2010. These last examples are of particular interest to my current concerns because they include position essays about the meaning and scope of Ibero-American medievalism and were written by local medievalists. The ideas of medievalists regarding the meaning of the Middle Ages in their local context, and especially the persistence of “the medieval” in post-independence nineteenth-century Brazil, will be the main topics of this essay. My discussion of the medieval in nineteenth-century Brazil will note similarities between, on the one hand, current academic medievalism as it appears in the recent critical literature and, on the other hand, the main text I will discuss, Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), Brazil's national- foundational text. I will conclude by submitting that Brazilian medievalisms can point to a more spacious and ethically alert meaning for our field, urging the contemporary medievalism collective to a desirable expansion out of our current comfort zones.

Postcolonial Medievalism and Marginality

Not surprisingly, Ibero-American essays like those published in the Revista de poética medieval and Le Moyen Âge vu d'ailleurs take medieval studies as a field established in the metropolitan centers of the European world.

In this paper I would like to address a question that is absolutely central to the definition of “medievalism”: namely, should this term be used for everything that derives from the Middle Ages, or should it be reserved for post-medieval interest in the revival of phenomena belonging to the period or notion of the Middle Ages? The importance of this question has been underscored by its great relevance to many of the conferences and publications sponsored by Studies in Medievalism over the years. Moreover, I am convinced that in limiting the possibility of conclusively theorizing about or mapping medievalism, the ambiguity addressed by this question has significantly hampered scholarly interest in the field. I therefore believe we must tackle this question directly and stake our position(s) in relationship to it.

Of course, I have no illusion that I can give anything near a definitive answer to it, but I would like to contribute to the debate on it by taking up Leslie Workman's classic position that medievalism is the continued construction of the Middle Ages. In one of his editorial introductions, which also observes that the term “The Middle Ages” was a Renaissance humanist creation that has “been elaborated and reinforced from different perspectives from the sixteenth century to the present,” Workman wrote: “[…] medieval historiography, the study of the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different generations, is the Middle Ages. And this of course is medievalism.”