“Who put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?” asks the famous pop song. Well, then, who put the neo in neomedievalism? Some usages, many of them Continental – Eco’s for instance – imply essentially the same thing that most American and British scholars mean by medievalism: the matter of the Middle Ages renewed in more modern works of literature and art. Other academic volleys have suggested the new move appears in shifting the old matter of medievalism to new technologies: high-tech, effects-heavy films, personal video games, multiple-player online role-playing games. That usage seems to me both near the common mark and a useful deployment of the term. New may also imply a new audience rather than new approaches or subject matters: medievalism tuned to the tastes of readers enamored of Harry Potter or steampunk rather than Beowulf and Dante, who dress goth whether or not they read Stoker, who enjoy alternativeworld films and computer games full of “barbaric,” whiz-bang violence and highly visualized adventure quests, and who take Dungeons & Dragons-type role-playing games into other media such as highly competitive card games.

To acquire and disseminate its dominant metaphors neomedievalism exploits not only technology, but also urban fantasy and dark science fiction more than it does traditional medievalism or anything a medievalist would recognize as authentically of the Middle Ages. Neomedievalism does not so much contribute new matter to the growing body of creative and scholarly endeavor of medievalism as it borrows creatively from the old matter; almost inevitably it reshapes the metaphors and conventions of medievalism for new means of conveyance and for audiences more savvy with and interested in alternative media than in the Middle Ages and its more scholarly offshoots. Medieval elements seed alternative neomedieval worlds, functioning, as Tolkien would say, mythopoeically, to provide atmosphere and variety and add completeness and verisimilitude to stories, but those worlds bear little resemblance to the Middle Ages or to “first generation” medievalism. Lots of novels and movies that ride the post-wave of medievalism, that fall within what I feel comfortable distinguishing as neomedieval, have, for instance, an “underground”; they explore the “heart of darkness,” their own peculiar universes or multiverses of gothic inferni; they tend to truncate the “heart of light,” the celestial element, which often in medieval aesthetic embodies the end or goal of adventure quests.