thN Lng folk 2go: Investigating Future Premoderns™

Neomedievalisms are cultural practices that breathe a bouquet of premoderns as permanent rehearsals of coming events. Where medievalists may be prone to police the post-medieval weald for inauthentic medievalisms, neomedievalists embrace the articulation and mobilisation of metahistorical anachronisms. To the medievalist, medievalisms provide powerful indexes that reveal how post-medieval societies have variously imagined ‘little middle ages’ to suit modern agendas. To the neomedievalist, medievalisms are theory-fictions that facilitate ludic speculation on non-modern futurities.

While neomedievalist theories have emerged in a variety of fields since the early 1970s — notably in cultural studies of medievalisms, international relations and literary theory — there are few applications that synthesise and put the methodologies of these diverse fields into practice. thN Lng folk 2go applies this extant scholarship as an extradisciplinary practice, dramatising the neomedieval turn in (quasi)objects, persons, work, education, travel, food, ethnicity, media, art, hypereconomics and technology. This speculative journey is ghost authored by a trinity of neomedievalist narrators — Journeyman, Anchorite and Host — each relic-ing their own curious neomedieval futurities.

Drawing its heterogeneous approaches from studies in medievalisms, international relations, literary theory, actor-network theory, anthropology, hypereconomics, art history, aesthetics, ecology, cultural theory, cultural geography, ambience, speculative realism and future studies — thN Lng folk 2go is both an investigation of and a benefaction to a murmuration of neomedievalisms.

thN lng flk 2go iz an boke in fif bokes:

I. L’Amérique Souterraine

Dis earste dale speketh iter pro peregrinis ad metro. Dis boc iz todealet in fif leasse bokes ov journie-men Gambini’s 2 doze hu Lng 2 g0. Iz earste riwle ant ov swucche thinges az duble homo-feaste, drunch ant werke, ant iz ov othre (dug-heids) ant quazi-thinges.

II. Imperium et Sacerdotium

Dis other dale speketh ov nuncii ant procuratores, ov assemblies ant crusades.

III. The Journeyman’s Guide to Anchoritism

Dis thridde dale iz’ov translatione corporis. Dis dale iz ov customz, liturgica, blak noiz, ant self-discipline ov d post-homo man-thinge. Dis boc iz todealet in thri leasse bokes ov ancre’s wittes.

IV. xyzzy: Contemporary Art Before and After Britain

Dis feorthe dale iz’ov beatific ant ov swucche thinges az doth come from the eye’s arrows. Ad te levavi.

V. When Transfiguration Became Commonplace

Dis fifte dale speketh ov host. Dis dale is al of the thridde riwle, wen translatione bcAM hyper-economicus.

*Dis boke is supported by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland