Nostalgia & Medievalism

Participated in Saturday's spring 2026 meeting of the Georgia Medieval Group, expertly hosted by Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge and Leah Haught at the University of West Georgia. It included contributions by professors and students.

My own presentation sought to challenge the dominant tendency in medievalism studies to treat all nostalgic engagements with the Middle Ages as inherently complicit in colonial, supremacist, or ethnonationalist ideologies. Engaging Scott Riley’s 2025 binary distinction between ethnonationalist and subversive medievalisms in his book New World Medievalisms, I argued for a neglected middle ground inhabited by “benign” or reflective medievalisms. Drawing on Jan Ziolkowski’s diachronic analysis of nostalgia in the medieval Latin Waltharius (Nostalgia and the German/ic Past, 2024), I showed that nostalgia can function as a critical, comparative, and forward-looking mode rather than a reactionary one. A similar via media is visible in inclusive Viking revival practices in Norway and the historically faithful restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire. Together, these examples suggest that nostalgic medievalism need not reproduce exclusionary politics. Instead, reflective nostalgia can foster historical understanding, cultural continuity, resilience, and shared human identity, inviting a recalibration of medievalism studies beyond its current focus on extremist appropriations.

The full program:

Session 1: Hybrid Paper Panel, 10:45am-12:00pm EST

Creating and Circulating Medieval Texts

• “A Dominican Bestseller in Monastic Practice: The Legenda Aurea in Cistercian and

  Premonstratensian Manuscripts” Constanze Albers, University of Freiburg

• “Portable Cloister: Writing the Medieval Sonnet in the Twenty-First Century,” Scott Ennis, Independent Scholar and Poet

• “Poetry as Praxis: Critical Engagement with Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur through Creative Medievalism,” Sarah Angstadt, Agnes Scott College

Session Two: In-Person Panel, 12:15-1:30 EST

The Future of the Field: Medieval Scholarship from Undergraduate and Graduate Classrooms

• “‘Onything that might be contrary therunto’: The Endemic Dissonance of Julian of Norwich’s Divine Shewings” Caleb Morse, UWG

• “Chrétien de Troyes’ and Sir Thomas Malory’s Lancelot: The Perpetual Mounting and

  Unhorsing of Chivalry and Love” Daniel Jackson, UWG and Oak Mountain Academy

• “Competing Power Structures in Chrétien de Troyes ‘The Knight of the Cart” Ireland McCage, Agnes Scott College

Session 3: Hybrid Paper Panel: Theorizing the Medieval Past, 1:45-3:00pm EST

• “Is All Medievalist Nostalgia Problematic?” Richard Utz, Georgia Tech

• “The Wife of Bath and the Theory of Literary Character: A Work In Progress,” Robert MeyerLee, Agnes Scott College

• “Gendered Justice: Women’s Legal Personhood in Athelston and Dobbs” Leah Haught, UWG

Session 4: Hybrid Roundtable. Teaching Medieval Content in Georgia: Reports from Grades 9-12 and Higher Education, 3:15-4:30

Participants: Lainie Pomerleau (College of Coastal Georgia), Wendy Turner (Augusta

University), Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge (UWG), Laura Wolfe (UWG), Damon Sharff (Mason Creek Middle School), Victoria Bryant (Spalding High School)