Thanks to the patience and encouragement of the editors, Ika Willis and Ellie Crookes, my essay ("Global Robins, Global Greenwoods") for this new volume on Medievalism and Reception became something I thought I could never achieve. Here is the editors' summary in their intro (cited from the final draft version):
Richard Utz’s ‘Global Greenwoods, Global Robins,’ taking up an onomastic study of the surname ‘Greenwood’ as a springboard, sets out to “trace some of the less often travelled tracks left by the modern reception of the Robin Hood narrative and its cultural impact.” Utz circuitously tracks popular and academic discourse around the name ‘Greenwood’ and its connection to the legend of Robin Hood, spanning topics as wide-ranging as the genealogy of the surname of a famous Jamaican-British footballer, to the proliferation of the myth of Robin Hood within outlaw legends of Asia and the Middle East. The crux of Utz’s paper is that these and other examples of the post-medieval reception of the Robin Hood myth exist synchronously within past and contemporary imaginaries, but that the complexity of this phenomenon can only be fully understood when scholars erase the boundaries that isolate factions of academic endeavour from one another. Utz describes the type of scholarship mapped in his paper as “like a pointillist painting,” in that it is “invisible to those standing too close, or not close enough, to its various instantiations.” He asserts that this more inclusive and digressive method could function as a catalyst for medievalismists looking for ways “to reassess other more or less accepted and no longer challenged pathways for approaching medieval and other pasts in our evolving presents.”
Heartfelt thanks to Ellie and Ika, to Boydell & Brewer, the series editors, and everyone involved in creating this fantastic collection of articles. Medievalism Studies and Reception Studies at their best.
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