Review of Riley, New World Medievalisms

Published in The Medieval Review, 3/16/2026

Riley, Scott Corbett. New World Medievalisms. The Middle Ages in the American Cultural Imaginary. Medievalism, 31. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025. Pp. vi, 181. £85.00. ISBN: 978-1-84384-678-9. 

   Reviewed by Richard Utz 

   Georgia Institute of Technology 

   richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu 

According to Scott Riley, U.S. medievalisms “tend to resemble European colonial rather than anti-colonial discourses,” invoking the European past “as a means of buttressing the racial and ethnic hierarchies endemic to European colonialism and Euro-American settler colonialism” (6). With this postcolonial credo as ideological foundation, Riley determines that any recourse to European medieval heritage and traditions in the New World must not be seen as harmless nostalgia or aesthetic revival, but as a widespread archive of narratives, symbols, and temporal structures that legitimizes domination in American cultural history. More specifically, Riley intends to help his colleagues in American Studies, who have been hesitant to engage in book-length investigations of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times, understand the “crucial difference between ethnonationalist medievalisms and subversive medievalisms” in New World cultural production. He asserts: “While U.S. ethnonationalist medievalisms strive for historical continuity with an imagined medieval past, U.S. subversive medievalisms revel in anachronism and displacement, foregrounding the arbitrary and often comical American preoccupation with medieval Europe” (15).    

Riley reveals how medieval narrative can function as a usable past that facilitates colonial and national projects to displace violence backwards onto an earlier European history. By framing colonization as a “new crusade” or frontier expansion as chivalric adventure, American culture constructs anachronistic authority: power justified through inherited, allegedly premodern constructions of order. One of Riley’s most convincing examples of this process is the link he establishes between the British captivity narrative and the early modern Barbary captivity narrative. The early modern captivity stories offered post-hoc justification to the Christian crusades against the Ottoman Empire by telling stories in which Mediterranean Muslim corsairs abduct Christian travelers. The British colonial captivity narratives, similarly, utilize Native American abductions of white settlers to justify their own colonization of the New World.    

Riley also offers helpful observations on other forms of New World discursive medievalist inheritance and mimicry: various literary and cultural genres from British colonial charters (James I, “First Charter of Virginia,” 1606) through the Western novel (Owen Wister, The Virginian, 1902) replicate Old World medieval structures--crusade, feudal hierarchy, romance quest, place-naming (“California”)--while adapting them to American conditions. Such linkages are often problematic because the “borrowed” structures and themes tend to obscure asymmetries between colonizers and colonized, settlers and indigenous peoples. Their goal is to anchor continuities between and among ethnicities and nation states to create relatively simplistic pro-colonial grand narratives, for example by establishing “Anglo-Saxonism” as the essential foundation of true American identity in the nineteenth century (James Fenimore Cooper, Leatherstocking Tales, 1823-1841), or by creating a globalized fantasy show like Game of Thrones (2011-2019), which detaches hierarchy and violence from historical accountability. In Game of Thrones, the Middle Ages becomes an exportable aesthetic (an example of spectacular medievalism) rather than a contested past.   

Against this ethnonationalist (ab)use of medieval culture in the American history of medieval reception Riley pitches examples of “subversive” medievalisms. Writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ursula K. Le Guin, he explicates, do not simply reuse medieval forms and ideas, but rather expose their limitations and incongruous fit for the plurivocality necessitated by the plurivocal conditions in the New World. These writers’ medievalisms destabilize teleological narratives of progress and empire, revealing what colonial discourses (and their medievalisms) silence--absence, fragmentation, and ethical failure, and the potential for future change.   

Riley’s blend of medievalism studies with American studies yields original results, revealing the tensions between writers who look backward and continually invent origins the nation does not possess and those who express doubts, satirize, and subvert dominant continuist narratives. He is cognizant of the sizeable body of scholarship in medievalism studies, including those published outside the Anglo-American world, and finds reliable theoretical footing in the works of Walter Benjamin (Illuminations), Leslie Fiedler (The Return of the Vanishing American), and Kathleen Davis (Periodization and Sovereignty). Final editorial attention could have caught some minor issues: John Ganim’s Medievalism and Orientalism was published in 2005, not 2016 (99); the correct title of Jan Ziolkowski’s 2018 reception history is The Juggler [of Notre Dame] and the Medievalizing of Modernity (176); the index has incorrect paginations (“Eilmer” does not appear on 88) and omits names mentioned in the study (William of Ockham: 94; 142); and some of the transitions between chapters could have profited from additional connective tissue to make for more cohesive reading.  

The comparative nature of medievalism studies demands that critics be prudent about claiming various degrees of continuity/similarity or discontinuity/dissimilarity between certain features of the medieval past and their reception in early modern, modern, and contemporary culture. Riley indicates his awareness of the importance of this issue by using nuanced terms (for example: “echo” and “corollaries”) to distinguish between different degrees of such connectivity. In some cases, he even seems to reveal doubts about having offered sufficient evidence for certain views, ending section summaries with a formulaic “In any case...” (29; 141). The only case in which such doubts might be appropriate is the claim that “the subversive tradition” of U.S. authors “shares a good deal with medieval apothatic theology” (94), a tradition of thought that seeks to define the divine not by what is, but by what is not (via negativa). Riley writes this connectivity into existence by attesting to Twain an “apothatic hermeneutics” (95). Without traceable evidence, however, this feels more like an associative hunch.  

Finally, Riley’s distinction between subversive (transhistorical, decolonial, indigenous) and continuist (ethnonationalist, colonialist) medievalisms left me with two questions:  

First: What makes certain writers choose one path over another when “borrowing” features of the medieval past for their narratives. What was it that led Faulkner to interrogate the myth of southern chivalric masculinity, and Wister to erase the Spanish and Moorish roots of the Cowboy figure by linking it to “Anglo-Saxon” knight-errantry? A recent study, Sarah Weaver’s Tennyson’s Philological Medievalism (2024), offers such answers about what motivated one of the most influential modern medievalism-ists, and having such answers about motivation--social and individual--is important to understand how education and various cultural contexts may impact writers, artists, and other individuals and groups as they incorporate medievalist elements in their practices. To do justice to Riley’s project: Weaver had the space of an entire monograph with a focus on one author to deliberate Tennyson’s motivations and sources while Riley is dealing with at least a dozen authors.

My second, perhaps more important question: Are all continuist (non-subversive) medievalisms reprehensible because they could be said to contribute--consciously or unconsciously--to national(ist), conservative Christian, and traditionalist agendas? Although the overall tenor and focus of Riley’s New World Medievalisms could suggest his answer might be a resounding “yes,” his response at the end of his book demonstrates he understands the need for nuance. While he champions those American authors who expose recourse to the medieval as “a fantasy that, to this day, buttresses imperial and ethnonationalist ideologies, including American Anglo-Saxonism, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy” (119), at the end of his study, he offers a more levelheaded summary: “The polarity between ethnonationalist and subversive literatures can...be rethought not as oppositional so much as a difference in imagination (154).” The subversive medievalisms Riley sees employed in the works of Poe, Twain, Faulkner, and Le Guin imagine a conclusion to America’s preoccupation with the (imagined) sedentary space of the Middle Ages, the potential collapse of “fixed notions of identity and the birth of reimagined, polyvocal identities” (154). Meanwhile, the medievalisms that sustain and reaffirm traditional identity constructions do not imagine such a conclusion. It is clear where Riley’s preference lies.