This book guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages. This book is the first to present fictions about the medieval world to serious students of history. Instead of merely listing myths and stating they are wrong, this volume promotes critical historical analysis of those myths and how they came to be. Each of the ten chapters outlines a pervasive modern myth about medieval European history, describing "What People Think Happened" and "What Really Happened," and illustrating both trends with primary source documents. The book demonstrates that historical fictions also have a history, and that while we need to replace those fictions with facts about the medieval past, we can also benefit from understanding how a fiction about the Middle Ages developed and what that says about our modern perspectives on the past. Through this innovative presentation, readers are introduced to a wide range of sources, from Roman imperial perspectives on the "Fall of Rome" to songs of chivalry and chronicles of the Crusades, scientific treatises on the shape of the Earth and the creation of the universe and early modern stories and textbooks that developed or perpetuated historical myths.

Studies of the influence of the middle ages on aspects of European and American life and culture from 16c to the present day.

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkers Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience. Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country’s commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism. American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

In the far future, a nuclear war forces the population of Los Angeles to retreat underground. Thinking life on the surface to be impossible, the survivors batten down for a longor possibly indefinitestay. They name their new home Low Angeles and begin to build lives underground. After over a century of work, they have created a city that even the Los Angeles of yore could not hope to emulate. Jensen Stewart is an underachieving Low Angeles teenager from a supportive family. His average life is shaken to its core when he is accused of murder, a rare crime in modern day Low Angeles. When he is sentenced to death for a crime that he did not commit, he pleads exile in a last-ditch effort to save his life. He is sent out into the unknown with nothing more than a HAZMAT suit and a small supply of food and water. Believing that he will die in a world made lifeless by war, he is surprised to find that life still survives on the surface as if it were thousands of years agoliterally. Knights on horseback keep order, while peasants work for the lords who, in turn, serve the all powerful king. When they said nuclear war would send us back to the Dark Ages, they were not kidding. How will Jensen survive this strange new world, and will he live long enough to find justice?

The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from questions of language and representation to issues of moral, theological and cultural value. Monsters embody cultural tensions that go far beyond the idea of the monster as simply an unintelligible and abject other. This text looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writing and mystical texts, to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gendered and racial identities, religious symbolism and social prejudice in the Middle Ages. Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. It should be of interest in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for medieval cultural production.