Contemporary consumptions of History

As medieval-inspired aesthetics re-emerge within contemporary visual culture, they oscillate between nostalgic escapism and the risk of reproducing exclusionary, patriarchal imaginaries inherited from 
nineteenth-century medievalism

Now circulating through social media, much of what is understood as ‘medieval’ originates not from the Middle Ages themselves, but from a Victorian social reform: a romanticized reconstruction that used The Romance of the Rose (c.1200s) - a deeply mysognistic chivalric text - 
as a model for social and moral order

This naturalised patriarchal values as historical truth and moral virtue

Today, the same ideals of feminine passivity, containment and meekness persist within the algorithmic imaginaries of ‘Medievalcore’ - TikTok’s own form of medievalism - and are performed by young women as a form of escape from contemporary norms of self-presentation

Using The Book of the City of Ladies (c.1405) by Christine de Pizan - a proto-feminist response to The Romance of the Rose - as a design method, This Book of Ours presents a vanity drawn from laia of Cyzicus’s gestures of self-portraiture, linking them to the way medievalcore users portray themselves.

Reframing gestures of the self

This Book of Ours questions the invisible audience for which Medievalcore performs its canons: from museum to social media, canonised femininity has always been performed under the joint gaze of audience and self-surveillance. This internalisation extends the stage of self-presentation past the fixed image into lived reality.

As it is consumed through the same structure of reflective gaze as its predecessors, This Book of Ours takes on the museum’s habits of display and presents femininity as something curated rather than passed down.

Contemporary gestures of self-presentation - the mirror selfie, the costumed body, the practised downward glance - are thus framed within the museum’s grammar of historical presentation, where they stop reading as fleeting personal choices and begin to read as a collection, a set of poses acquired, catalogued and held up for study.