Candlelight contours and illuminates the deep reds of opalescent stained glass, the candle’s bearer traversing the vacuous shadows of the castle’s towering walls. Its gothic portals and stone arcades stand overgrown in twirling vinery and moss. Inside hangs a pastoral tapestry of enchanting animals: Unicorns, leopards, and quails. Dress fabric so sumptuous that one could get lost in its drapery as if traversing a tall meadow. The jewel-toned brocade, acanthus, floral, and vegetal pattern, accentuates its meticulous ornament with gilded needlework. An extension of the feminine face, the hennin, covers the hair, elongating the smooth forehead to new heights in its pointed, upward length. Metal clanging of chainmail helms, jewellery, and armour. Templar knights, serene maidens, glistening swords, flower crowns, a lute. The romance of the Middle Ages has been reborn once again, with the visual lexicon of Medievalism continuing to project its idyllic vision into the contemporary world.
In the past several months, Medieval Aestheticism has found its way into popular culture. Chappell Roan, the acclaimed singer and “Midwest Princess,” walked the VMAs red carpet in a loose-fitting, gauzy dress, faded green velvet robe with embroidered borders, and armoured leg plates. Carrying a sword and later donning full armour for her performance, she embodied the role of a medieval warrior. Earlier this year, she even wore a hennin—typical of the medieval feminine elite—to accept her award at the Grammys. Though not entirely Chappell’s doing, her historically situated fashion sense likely influenced Pinterest’s 2025 “Castlecore” trend forecast.
However, fashion aesthetics have not been the only modern utilization of the Medieval; there is clearly a widening interest in the overarching themes of this early past. In January, director Baz Luhrmann opened Monsieur, a medieval-themed bar in New York’s East Village, to great acclaim. This is a clear departure from more playfully adapted historical venues such as taverns with barrelled beer taps and suburban castle-restaurants for combinatory joust-eating. Instead, Luhrmann adapts a more sombre style—dramatic candlelight, ornamental tilework, and vaguely religious imagery.
In a whole new realm, the Swedish electronics company teenage engineering released the EP-1320 medieval, a sampler loaded with, according to the website, “magical melodies, sultry songs and bubonic beats.” With gothic script and a beige frame, as if a parchment transmitting melodies to its beholder, the EP-1320’s release indicates a monumentally diverse appropriation of the Middle Ages—one that fuses technological modernism with the sobriety of an illuminated manuscript.
In the essay collection, Whose Middle Ages?, academic medievalist David Perry writes, “We allow periods to take shape in our cultural imagination when they serve a purpose when we use them to define a present against its various pasts, whether through assertions of affinity or otherness.” The choice to embrace certain aspects of the Medieval past is indicative of the current state of the world, for society adopts—and thus adapts—the past as a way of imbuing cultural agency into its history. The notion of a revival can never reenact the full truth, for culture selects certain historical elements which aid it in understanding itself in its contemporary present. This can result in a serious abridging of the past, upholding its lexicon of historical inaccuracy resulting from romanticization, eclecticism, and systemic erasure. With limited documentation of the Middle Ages, the projections of its world as one of fantastical, pastoral, and even biblical proportions have altered its modern perceptions. The past as a venue for contemporary interpretation, though implemented on certain levels as a false construction of Europe’s “whiteness” and a self-aggrandizing myth of origin, is allowing the Middle Ages to be reclaimed as landscapes for feminine agency.
There has been a greater emphasis on the gloomy, more gothic aspects within the Popular Medieval. Dior exhibited their 2025 Cruise Collection in the garden of a Scottish medieval castle. With dark tartans and armoured bustiers, the collection retreats into the ruinous shadows of looming stonework, the muddy soles of handmade leather shoes, of a maiden, eternally condemned to a cloistered life in a tower. These garments are indicative of a growing resurgence of the aesthetics of warfare and the craft of chainmail. In putting feminine figures into structured garments, reminiscent of a soldier’s impenetrable armour, they rewrite the medieval history of masculine fortitude into a narrative of feminine authority.
Chainmail has entered popular culture as a status symbol of power, dominance, and resolve. The practice of its creation has even resumed, growing alongside the rising popularity of Joan of Arc’s status as a divine source of feminine agency. For multidisciplinary artist Amy Lang, her exploration of the chainmail medium has allowed a greater reflection on the history of the craft itself.
“It was about trying to figure out if the process of doing or making art can help us understand a little bit more about the art itself,” Lang stated in an interview with The Tribune.
Lang has searched the past, adopting this early blacksmith technique into modern styles, such as chokers, jewellery, and skirts. The craft acts both as a study and escape, as Lang weaves new meaning into its wire, centuries after its use in the Middle Ages. Her metalworks are astounding examples of this cyclical reconception of the Medieval, through reinterpretation, cultural reassertion, and a new imbuement of meaning.
“I think there is generally a turn towards escapism in whatever small ways you can get,” Lang said. “I tend to find there’s this Neo-Luddite return to simple crafts […] for the purpose of making ornament that makes you feel like you’re part of a slower time.”
In exploring these traditional crafts and adopting the aesthetics of the past, society seeks a desire to feel connected to one’s belongings, now considerably reproduced in our post-industrialist world. The Victorian revival of Medievalism came at a time directly following the Industrial Revolution. A sense of disenchantment with mass production and placelessness among the steel frames of the new world led artists to retreat into the past to placate these plain landscapes of modernism. Pre-Raphaelite artists explored through history painting the notion of the pastoral medieval identity—one at peace with the natural landscape, living amongst the opulent flora, engaging in chivalric love affairs. They interpreted medieval tales and conventions, like The Lady of Shalott—adapted from a Tennyson poem of the Arthurian story—and La belle dame sans merci, drawing from the eponymous Keats work. These pieces, almost otherworldly in their natural beauty, were perhaps a physical projection of the self into luscious nature, as the public longed for an escape from enforced modern identity.
Michael Van Dussen, professor in McGill’s English department, and a medieval scholar and specialist in manuscript studies, spoke with The Tribune about the production of medieval manuscript culture.
“There’s this connection with the people who produced it. You have no idea who they are, or necessarily were, but you know that a human being delicately did [this],” Van Dussen noted, describing a laid-out 15th-century Book of Hours.
Adorned with heaps of page-caressing marginalia, the vegetal motifs illuminate its gold leaf adornments, shifting with every stroke of light. It’s wonderfully powerful to witness up close, with its hundreds of pages hand-drawn by a workshop of artisans.
“When it’s all bespoke, like this—you could have 500 copies of the same text—every single one would be different. It would be utterly and numerically unique,” Van Dussen said. “That’s because every element is produced by hand. People make mistakes or they make different choices. They’re all going to be unique.”
The contemporary retreat into medievalism, I propose, is again, a direct product of the modern disenchantment with industrial practices that have rendered artisans powerless in the state of machine-reproduction. With the emergence of machine-based practices, such as AI art and fast fashion, our world feels an inexplicably lost chasm of the self, as we’ve drifted even further from pastoral connection since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps these aesthetic adoptions are symptomatic of the temporal resemblance to a post-plague reimagining of newness and hope; or perhaps it’s the way modern people oppressed by billionaires in the American political system mirror peasants’ suppression by feudal landowners with absolute control. This retreat into the medieval, while simultaneously an insertion of feminine and queer narratives into the past, is a cry for help.
To feel disillusioned with the world is to feel disillusioned with the self. This romanticization of underconsumption—a cyclical resurgence—is hypocritical in its capitalization on pre-industrial aesthetics. We wander imaginative open fields in loose-fitting costumes, with chivalric loves, because modern society’s shortcomings have made this a fantastical impossibility.
