Emily Voneman | 2025 I.S. Symposium

Name: Emily Voneman
Title: Positively Medieval: Constructing the Middle Ages in Literature and the Museum
Majors: Anthropology; English
Minor: Museum Studies
Advisors: Beth Derderian; Claire Eager

Why do the Middle Ages occupy both a realm of magic and fantasy and a coarse, barbaric past in our imaginations? The Middle Ages are simultaneously virtuous and squalid, religious and vulgar, chivalrous and gruesome. These opposing perceptions create a dichotomy between a grotesque “medieval” characterized by vulgarity, suffering, and violence, and a romantic “medieval” characterized by piety, luxury, and passion. Such stereotypes are part of a broader, collective cultural memory, a realm in which communities make sense of their present by constructing narratives about the past. This independent study explores the various modes and tools by which art museums and literature construct and represent the Middle Ages as a cultural memory and how these constructions of the past reinforce narratives about modern cultural concepts and expectations. My textual analysis of two literary case studies reveals a shared use of the grotesque to criticize contemporary social and political issues by complicating temporal boundaries between the medieval and the modern. Using visual analysis and ethnographic interviews, I find that my museum case study constructs a monolithically European, Christian, patriarchal, and heteronormative Middle Ages, but also challenges this hegemonic depiction with a special exhibition that takes a more multicultural and holistic approach to representing the medieval.

Posted in Symposium 2025 on May 1, 2025.