Second Possible Session for Kalamazoo 2019

Here is a second session proposal I have been working on.

Again, please post feedback in the comments and/or attend our buisness meeting next Saturday at Kalamazoo.

Michael Torregrossa
Founder, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Quondam et Futurus?

Reflections on Medieval-Themed Science Fiction

For most of us, the Middle Ages exists in the past. We can connect to it through histories, literary texts, and post-medieval re-creations of the medieval, but we cannot envision a future for the Middle Ages. However, the science fiction genre does allow the possibility of imagining new versions of the medieval in futuristic settings. The Star Wars saga, begun in 1977 and having celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2017, represents one such attempt to create a medieval world of knights and wizards within a science-fictional setting filled—despite its promise that it exists “a long time ago”—with advanced technology, such as robots, spacecraft, world destroyers, and laser swords. Star Wars is not the only work that gives us a glimpse into a future for the Middle Ages; other texts have also offered updated examples of the Middle Ages, and still more of them have brought medieval figures and artifacts forward to engage with the humans and aliens of future ages. Furthermore, science fiction also allows reconsiderations of the origins of familiar medieval figures, beliefs, and practices to offer innovative beginnings to these elements through science-fictional tropes. However, despite the possibility for engaging with the medieval in these ways and the popularity of these works by fans, medievalists, in general, have been slow to catalogue such representations of medievalism, preferring, it seems, more familiar versions of the Middle Ages grounded in either the mundane or the fantastic rather than the speculative. Through this session, we hope to advance the dialogue between Medieval Studies and Science Fiction Studies by looking anew at how the creators of science fiction have engaged with medieval motifs and to begin to explore the value of these works in our classrooms and research.