It is often assumed that those outside of academia know very little about the Middle Ages. But the truth is not so simple. Non-specialists in fact learn a great deal from the myriad medievalisms - post-medieval imaginings of the medieval world - that pervade our everyday culture. These, like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, offer compelling, if not necessarily accurate, visions of the medieval world. And more, they have an impact on the popular imagination, particularly since there are new medievalisms constantly being developed, synthesised and remade.
But what does the public really know? How do the conflicting medievalisms they consume contribute to their knowledge? And why is this important?
In this book, the first evidence-based exploration of the wider public's understanding of the Middle Ages, Paul B. Sturtevant adapts sociological methods to answer these important questions. Based on extensive focus groups, the book details the ways - both formal and informal - that people learn about the medieval past and the many other ways that this informs, and even distorts, our present. In the process, Sturtevant also sheds light, in more general terms, onto the ways non-specialists learn about the past, and why understanding this is so important. The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination will be of interest to anyone working on medieval studies, medievalism, memory studies, medieval film studies, informal learning or public history.

About the Authors

Paul B. Sturtevant is an audience research specialist at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.

Andrew B.R. Elliott is an independent scholar and has published a range of articles and essays on historical film, television and video games from the classical world to the present. He is the author of Remaking the Middle Ages (2010), which analyses medieval cinema, and he is the editor of Playing with the Past (2013; co-edited with Matthew Wilhelm Kapell), which examines the depiction of the past in video games, and The Return of the Epic Film (2014), which examines the return of the sword and sandals epic in the cinema. His latest book, Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media (2017), explores the uses of the past in social media and mainstream news reporting.

Adrienne Merritt is Assistant Professor of German Studies at University of Colorado Boulder, USA.

Helen Young is Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. She is the author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2015) and Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones (2015).

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