Recreating the Medieval Past through Neomedievalism: Knights, Tournaments and Fangirls in Popular Romance
Recreating the Medieval Past through Neomedievalism: Knights, Tournaments and Fangirls in Popular Romance

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradigm of neomedievalism in historical popular romance novels as the process of recreating the medieval past through a combination of character types and medievalist tropes accepted by the readership as iconic. Considering that the typical readers of popular romance novels set in the Middle Ages are less preoccupied with historical accuracy, and neomedievalism does not prescribe specific gender tropes (Ford 2015), we shall explore the ways in which knights are developed as male characters, and whether the cultural assumption about the medieval past as “a time of unrelieved misogyny” (Ford 2015: 31) is subverted in heteronormative popular romance contexts. While popular romance novels are usually heroine-centric, the selected novels by author Alice Coldbreath feature the knight archetype repeatedly and prominently, with slight variations related to background, thus suggesting that the readers are particularly interested in a certain type of rugged, military manliness associated with a warrior physique, prowess in battle and honour. Unlike other novels typical of the popular romance genre, Coldbreath’s novels do not take interest in war but in tournaments attended by the knights, predominantly war veterans with romantic interests, frequently as part of the audience, and sometimes as knowledgeable and invested supporters. Throughout this paper, our focus will be on the representation of the knight and its two ideals – chivalry and prowess –on display during tournaments, as well as on the dichotomy knight/lady (and implicitly, man/woman), and their manifestations in the medieval popular romance genre.

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