Neo-medievalism

Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship.

Neo-medievalism is a term used to describe modern situations that resemble certain aspects of the Middle Ages, especially when traditional political structures or cultural boundaries seem to break down or become less clear. The concept is often used to explain contemporary conditions—such as the weakening of nation-states, the rise of powerful non-state actors, or the blending of global cultures—that feel similar to the overlapping authorities and decentralized systems of medieval Europe. Outside of politics, the term also refers to the ways modern people reuse, reinterpret, or reinvent medieval ideas and imagery in literature, film, games, and other forms of popular culture. In this broader sense, neo-medievalism helps explain why medieval themes continue to thrive in the modern world and how they are reshaped to reflect today's concerns.

In political theory about modern international relations, the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull. Political theory sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, in which neither states, nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty. Instead, the institutions participated in complex, overlapping, and incomplete sovereignties.

In literary theory regarding the use and abuse of texts and tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, the term neomedieval was popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1983 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".

Political theory

The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world:It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.