Looks at how political "references to Crusades, Templars and Vikings affect the way we understand our world."

"This book is called a manifesto because it has an unapologetically political objective. Richard Utz wants to help reform the way we think about and practise our academic engagement with medieval culture, and he uses his own observations as a medievalist and medievalism-ist over the last twenty-five years to offer ways in which we might reconnect with the general public."

"Most of the seven million people who visit the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris each year probably do not realize that the legendary gargoyles adorning this medieval masterpiece were not constructed until the nineteenth century. The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument."

"Medievalism - the creative interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages - has had a major presence in the cultural memory of the modern West, and has grown in scale to become a global phenomenon. Countless examples across aesthetic, material and political domains reveal that the medieval period has long provided a fund of images and ideas..."

Great overview of medievalist studies!

--The influence of medieval cultural concepts on literature and film, including key authors such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Mark Twain
--The continued appeal of medieval cultural figures such as Dante, King Arthur, and Robin Hood
--The influence of the medieval on such varied disciplines such as politics, music, children's literature, and art.
--Contemporary efforts to relive the Middle Ages.

One of the most difficult and complex ethical and cultural codes to define, chivalry has proved a flexible, ever-changing phenomenon, constantly adapted in the hands of medieval knights, Renaissance princes, early modern antiquarians, Enlightenment scholars, modern civic authorities, authors, historians and re-enactors. Using chivalry as a lens through which to examine concepts and uses of the medieval, it provides a critical assessment of the ways in which medieval chivalry became a shorthand to express contemporary ideals, powerfully demonstrating the ways in which history could be appropriated."

"In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period."

Traces the study of the Middle Ages through several centuries.

"Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also about modernity."