Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism

This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism offers an account of the way three threads – music, medievalism and nostalgia – have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers in the period between the Second World War and the present. This book engages with an extraordinary post-war rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. In these genres, music has been essential to the evocation of a medieval fantasy. Over the same period of roughly seventy years, there has been an unprecedented interest in the revival, performance and invention of medieval music, an enterprise in which modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Together, these developments have placed music at the centre of a nostalgia for an imagined medieval, a longing for a lost past. In the nostalgia for a past known only in imagination, the listener may embrace a medieval fantasy accessible only by music. As such this past has become a kind of home – a place within. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema, and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home. In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.An electronic version of this book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press.