POSTCOLONIZING NEOMEDIEVALISM: AN INTRODUCTION

FOUNDATIONS CAN BECOME so entrenched in the disciplinary histories we tell ourselves that we forget to revisit and modify them. This introductory essay aims to revisit the foundations of what is commonly defined as the field studying the redeployment of the Middle Ages in post-medieval times, named “Medievalism,” by Leslie J. Workman, the founder of the field’s first academic journal Studies in Medievalism and of its institutional life through the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. A first point to make in seeking to postcolonize neomedievalism is to note that the main problem consistently identified for the field is