Overview

This book offers the first comprehensive history of how Americans-living in a nation with no medieval past of its own-built one of the world's most influential centers for medieval scholarship. Spanning four centuries, the book follows the field from its scattered colonial beginnings to its twenty-first-century reinventions, showing how intellectual curiosity, cultural trends, and institutional forces shaped the discipline at every stage. The story begins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Puritan educators, early political thinkers, and transatlantic scholars drew on medieval texts without yet imagining a formal field of study. It then traces the nineteenth-century rise of philology, the influence of German universities, and the establishment of the first American medievalists who laid the groundwork for professional research and teaching. As the narrative moves into the twentieth century, it charts the rapid expansion of Medieval Studies through the founding of the Medieval Academy of America, the creation of Speculum, and the influx of European scholars fleeing war. The post-WWII boom transformed the field again, fueled by new funding, growing universities, and the emergence of manuscript studies, paleography, and interdisciplinary research. The book also explores the tensions and transformations that reshaped the field from the 1960s onward: the rise of popular medievalism in American culture, the challenges of the 1970s academic crisis, the impact of feminist scholarship and critical theory, and the emergence of race studies, digital humanities, and global medieval frameworks. Throughout, it shows how debates over identity, relevance, and methodology continually pushed the field to redefine itself. Balancing narrative history with cultural insight, this work reveals how Medieval Studies evolved alongside broader American concerns-from nationalism and reform movements to counterculture and digital innovation. Accessible, engaging, and grounded in archival research, the book appeals to scholars, students, and general readers interested in how academic fields take shape and why the medieval past continues to matter today.

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