The discipline of medievalism has produced scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Because these approaches often lack an overarching critical framework, Richard Utz and co-editor Elizabeth Emery solicited contributions by leading scholars to define and exemplify the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture.

Included among the terms are the following: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour.

Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ, USA), and Utz is Chair and Professor of Medievalism Studies in LMC.