Canada has a deep layer of medievalism embedded in its architecture, governance structures, and sociocultural bedrock. This volume distinguishes between Canadian medievalism and its closest neighbours, British and American medievalism, and argues that the ignored or unnoticed medievalism of English Canada derives from its foundation by United Empire Loyalists escaping to the north in the late eighteenth century.

The book considers particular literary and cultural expressions of medievalism—including Gothic architecture, heraldry, ice hockey, and Samuel de Champlain’s lost astrolabe; and the work of Guy Gavriel Kay, Earle Birney, Robertson Davies, Louise Penny, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and George Longmore—arguing that medievalism remains a potent force in Canadian national identity.

Just how medieval is the modern university? From their medieval beginnings in Western Europe, universities have remained monolithic and static entities, renovating themselves just enough to avoid massive interventions by the state or the church. Like parliamentary democracies, they function just well enough that while feelings of despair are frequent, and anticipation of imminent collapse constant, they continue. In the modern era, as universities face a new set of challenges, this book asks if there is not some value in pondering the medieval university, and the continuities that exist as much as do the fractures.