Megan Cook Lecture

Dirtbag Medievalism, or the Middle Ages at the Mall: This talk will explore the intersection of medievalism and popular culture through the lens of what I call “dirtbag medievalism.” I use this term to refer to popular culture that treats the medieval first and foremost as an aesthetic category rather than a historic one. What does it mean to “get medieval” when the medieval is not a particular time or place, but rather a vibe?

Megan L. Cook is the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts professor of English at Colby College. A former teenaged mall goth turned medievalist, she is the author of The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History (Penn, 2019) and co-editor of John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works (Medieval Institute, 2019). She is currently at work on a book about dirtbag medievalism, another about the history of Geoffrey Chaucer’s readers, and a new edition of the shorter works of the fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund

Community event in Roanoke, Roanoke city County, VA 24020.