Mass Mediævalisms: The Middle Ages of Popular Culture

Welcome to home page of the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, a community of scholars and enthusiasts organized to promote and foster research and discussion of representations of the medieval in post-medieval popular culture and mass media. Encompassing material produced from the close of the Middle Ages to today, these medievalisms can be categorized as survivals, revivals, or re-creations of the medieval in post-medieval eras.

Sunday, August 3, 2025

Recent Book - Fantasy Aesthetics - Open-Access

transcript Verlag has recently published the open-access collection Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020. Full details and access link at https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-7058-5/fantasy-aesthetics/.

Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020

Hans Rudolf Velten / Joseph Imorde (Eds.)

4 July 2024, 264 pages

ISBN: 978-3-8376-7058-5

Fantasy novels are products of popular culture. They owe their popularity also to the visualization of medievalist artifacts on book covers and designs, illustrations, maps, and marketing: Castles on towering cliffs, cathedral-like architecture, armored heroes and enchanting fairies, fierce dragons and mages follow mythical archetypes and develop pictorial aesthetics of fantasy, completed by gothic fonts, maps and page layout that refer to medieval manuscripts and chronicles. The contributors to this volume explore the patterns and paradigms of a specific medievalist iconography and book design of fantasy which can be traced from the 19th century to the present.