Iberoamerican Neomedievalisms: The Middle Ages and Its Uses in Latin America

This is the first volume fully dedicated to Iberoamerican neomedievalisms. It examines 'The Middle Ages' and its uses in Iberoamerica: the Spanish and Portuguese American postcolonies. It is an especially timely topic as scholars in neomedievalism studies become increasingly conscious that the field has different trajectories outside Europe and beyond the English-speaking world.

The collection provides needed alternatives to the by-now standardized understanding of neomedievalism as allied to nationalism, nostalgia, xenophobia, origin stories, elitism, and white Christian identity. It dislocates the field from its established trends and finds generative, yet unexplored examples of neomedievalism: political, religious, literary, and gendered. The volume will be of interest to established scholars of neomedievalism studies, to scholars of Latin America, and to the new and growing generation of students and colleagues interested in truly global neomedievalist studies.

Introduction: Postcolonizing Neomedievalism, by Nadia R. Altschul Chapter 1: The Criollo Invention of the Middle Ages, by Hernán G. H. Taboada Chapter 2: Fanning the Spark of Hope: A Militant and Peasant-Based Medieval History in Brazil, by Mário Jorge da Motta Bastos Chapter 3: Neopentecostal Sanctification: Neomedievalism and the Hagiography of Valdemiro Santiago, by Clínio de Oliveira Amaral Chapter 4: The Left, the Right, and the Middle: The 'Middle Ages' in the Brazilian Presidential Elections of 2018, by Luiz Guerra Chapter 5: Averroes in a Midcolonial and Inter-Imperial Cordoba, by Maria Ruhlmann Chapter 6: Hypermedievalizing and de-medievalizing Dante: Leopoldo Lugones's and Jorge Luis Borges's Rewritings of Inferno V, by Heather Sottong Chapter 7: Borges and Kennings, by M. J. Toswell Chapter 8: Memory, Desire and Sexual Identity in El unicornio by Manuel Mujica Lainez, by Juan Manuel Lacalle Chapter 9: Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid: The Reconstruction of Medieval Gender and Race in Argentinian Graphic Novels, by Rebecca De Souza Index.