Preface - Karl Fugelso

I: (En)gendering Medievalism
The Peacock Television Network's Mrs. Davis, Sister Simone, and Messing Up the Quest for the Holy Grail - Kevin J. Harty
Bitches Be Crazy: Patriarchal Weaponization of Mental Distress in Game of Thrones - Lauryn Mayer
Capital One's Condemnation, Conversion, and Eventual Celebration of Mythical Medieval Northern European Males through Allegorical Commercials - Carol L. Robinson
The Northman and the Link between Past and Present Masculinities - H. Peter Johnsson

II: Other Responses to Medievalism
Maternal Games in The Green Knight: Launching Gawain - Carol Jamison
Seaxy Beast: Grendel's Mother and Responses to Third-Wave Feminism in Beowulf Adaptations - Alison Elizabeth Killilea
Artoria Pendragon: Anachronism, Gender and Self-Acceptance in the Fate Anime Series of Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi - Lisa Myers
Exalted by Honour: Women's Medievalist History Plays in the Late-Eighteenth Century - Kirsten Ogilby
A Violent Medium for a Violent Era: Brutal Medievalist Combat in Dragon Age: Origins and Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Robert Houghton
The "Old Frisian" Tescklaow as Invented Tradition: Forging Friesland's Rural Past in the Early Nineteenth Century - Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. and Philippus Breuker
Neither Brutes, Nor Sissies: Re-imagining the Vikings on a Swedish Online Forum - Christine Ekholst
Avatar Creation and White Masculinity in Wolfram van Eschenbach's Parzival and Ernest Cline's Ready Player One - Chelsea Keane
Intersectionality in Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife - Mareike Huber
The Smith, the Devil, and Jim Crow: Medieval Hagiography, Victorian Popular Culture, and the Legacy
of Slavery in Edward G. Flight's The Horse Shoe: The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil - Christina M. Heckman

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages.


Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme.


The first part features four short essays that directly address manifestations of sexism in postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages: gender substitutions in a Grail Quest episode of the 2023 television series Mrs. Davis, repurposed misogyny in the last two episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-19), traditional gender stereotypes in Capital One's credit card commercials from 2000 to 2013, and "shaggy" medievalism in Robert Eggers' 2022 film The Northman.


The second part contains ten longer essays, which collectively continue to demonstrate the ubiquity of gender issues and the extraordinary flexibility of approaches to them. The authors discuss the misogynistic sexualization of Grendel's mother in Parke Godwin's 1995 fantasy novel The Tower of Beowulf, in Graham Baker's 1999 film Beowulf, in three episodes from the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, and in Robert Zemeckis's 2007 film Beowulf; gender substitution in David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight and in Kinoku Nasu's and Takashi Takeuchi's anime series Fate (2004-); female authorship of three early-nineteenth-century plays about court ladies' medieval empowerment; extraordinary violence in medievalist video games; nationalism in fake nineteenth-century medievalist documents and in contemporary online fora; racial discrimination in video gaming and in Jim Crow literature; and the condemnation of racism in Maria Dahvana Headley's 2018 novel The Mere Wife.

CHRISTINA M. HECKMAN is Professor of English at Augusta University, Georgia.