When imagining the Middle Ages, jousting arenas, turkey legs, and knights in shining armor often come to mind. However, this masculine, Westernized view of the medieval period excludes a wealth of diverse narratives and perspectives. Suzanne Edwards is changing that with a volume of essays on women’s medievalism that she’s co-editing with Matthew X. Vernon. 

“Medievalism includes representations of the Middle Ages in any moment after the Middle Ages from Spenser’s sixteenth-century The Faerie Queene to the movie Camelot or even Games of Thrones,” Edwards, professor of English, explains, naming a few popular examples. Historically, scholarship on medievalism has often focused on the works of white male authors like Tennyson, T.H. White, and Tolkien.

“In attending to the history of medievalism, we’ve largely overlooked the contributions of women writers in particular,” Edwards says. “What we found in writing the book is often those contributions by women writers have not been recognized as medievalism or they have remained hidden in the archive.” 

In ten essays and an introduction, Women’s Restorative Medievalisms: Forgotten Pasts and Unimagined Futures sheds light on these unrecognized medievalisms by women writers from the 20- and 21st-centuries.

“Women writers in their medievalisms call attention to histories of oppression as well as imagine alternative possibilities for the past that might lead us toward a different kind of future,” Edwards notes.

For instance, Tracy Deonn’s young adult novel Legendborn is a popular contemporary example that Edwards and Vernon, professor of English at the University of California-Davis, discuss in their introduction. Featuring an African American teenage girl as Arthur’s heir, “[Legendborn] lays bare the intimacies between Arthurian legend and racially gendered histories of enslavement in the United States, gesturing toward new possibilities for social coalition.”

The first section of essays grapple with canonical European literary works through the lenses of race, language, and place. The second section broadens the scope beyond Europe, while the third section addresses what historically has been silenced, reproducing historical absences. The final section bridges the gap between academic and creative writing.