At the end of a fruitful conference on Neomedievalisms in London, Ontario, in October 2007, I found myself in the audience of a Dante panel in which participants launched into an unexpected debate over the title of the conference itself. Why, some wondered, do we even need the word neomedievalism? After all, we have a perfectly sound word, medievalism, that encompasses all manner of interaction with the Middle Ages. Strong arguments have been raised before, during, and after the conference against the use of the new term, including the objections of LeslieWorkman, the founder of medievalism as a field of study.

Defenses of neomedievalism at the 2007 conference revolved tentatively around technology, refraction, theory, postmodernism, and Umberto Eco, but more compelling cases for distinguishing medievalism from neomedievalism have been evolving since then. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements deliver the most comprehensive explanation in their 2009 essay “Living with Neomedievalism,” in which they argue that “neomedievalism is further independent, further detached, and thus consciously, purposefully, and perhaps even laughingly reshaping itself into an alternate universe of medievalisms, a fantasy of medievalisms, a meta-medievalism.” This corresponds to the definition posted on the website for the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO), which adds that “this vision lacks the nostalgia of earlier medievalisms in that it denies history.”

Robinson, Clements, and MEMO provide a definition of neomedievalism that is giddy and joyful, one that implies growth and progress along with the wisdom of self-conscious irony. As a result, it is an extremely attractive definition, although perhaps not to everyone. The implicit progress narrative that seems to lurk in such an account, one in which neomedievalism abandons its stodgy old parent, is sure to raise eyebrows, for though neomedievalism may do a fine job of abandoning the Middle Ages as a historical period, it fails to leave medievalism itself entirely behind. In other words, neomedievalists may deny history, but that certainly does not stop them from repeating it.

It is what continues to link neomedievalism to medievalism that concerns this essay, not with the intention of conflating the two, but with the hopes of complicating the notion of neomedievalism as progress while still relying on the diligent and, on the whole, I think, valid definition provided by Robinson and Clements.