Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl define “medievalism” as reference “to the art, literature, scholarship, avocational pastimes, and sundry forms of entertainment and culture that turn to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration, and in doing so, explicitly or implicitly, by comparison or by contrast, comment on the artist’s contemporary sociocultural milieu” (1). Medievalism is the act of reconstructing a past that no longer exists in the present in order to address modern concerns or desires. Medievalisms create referential truths in the present, despite their origins no longer existing. Not many other series seem as apt to turn towards the Middle Ages for inspiration as the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. Set in a magical world hidden within the “Muggle” world, Rowling continuously utilizes medieval imagery and tropes, and refers to her own invented wizarding medieval history. One way she points to that history is through her companion text, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of children’s fairy tales for young witches and wizards that often relate some kind of magical moral to them. By physically creating this text in the real world, Rowling provides Harry Potter fans with a kind of relic from her invented history. Potter fans desire a printed copy of the text because Rowling’s history then becomes referentially true. Through her stories and medieval allusions to texts like Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” and historical witch-hunts, Rowling highlights the importance of physical as well as literary medievalisms to modern readers, and therefore plays three different roles: poet, pilgrim, and pardoner.
About the presenterRebecca Lee Stokem
I am a current second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University. I have a background in literature, having received both my B.A. and M.A. in English from Seton Hall University, where I focused on epistemology and genre conventions. My current research interests surround U.S. Cold War cultural politics, transnational studies and U.S. empire, and 20th-21st century American fiction, with a particular interest in war narratives and science-fiction.