Awards

• Commended for Lone Medievalist Prize for Scholarship 2025 (United States)

Overview

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

Full Product Details

9781802702651

Table of Contents

Reviews

Medieval Twitter offers a corrective to the idea that the cacophony of the internet is a contemporary invention. Medieval writers experimented with voice and reputation in ways similar to modern tweeters. More broadly, as Spencer-Hall points out, media forms such as Twitter share with medieval manuscript culture “the skilful recycling and reinterpretation of an existing narrative or trope”, where originality is less important than creative reiteration. Spencer-Hall’s engaging book shows, above all, how the medieval past and the digital present are unhappily fraught with each other. -- Anthony Bale * TLS 6369 (April 25, 2025): 25 *

Author Information

Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Their research interests include medieval hagiography, gender, film, and digital culture. Her first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, was published in 2018.

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