Medium Aevum in fabula: The novel and the Middle Ages fascination

Abstract

May a novel help us to understand Middle Ages and History? Which is the most useful literary genre to understand this age? These are the questions behind my speech - which focuses on the middle ages - and which can also be extended to history as a whole. There is a particular issue about Middle Ages: the historical novel that narrates this period looks for verisimilitude with quite different results but loses both the medieval atmosphere and the epos. However, the fantastic narrative is perhaps the only to fully restore the epic of this period. As Wu Ming said, the narrative feeds on folklore and epic which, for genre fiction, are the main emotional engine of the story. The question needs a composite answer.

Keywords

• middle ages
• epic
• novel
• speculative fiction
• history