The So What
A public-facing, digital publication focusing on the ‘whys’ and ‘so whats’ of medieval studies and pedagogy.
Winner of The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) 2025 Best Public Outreach Award
One of the hardest questions for academics to answer is why your argument, your writing, your interests matter. A question made harder still when your interests lie several centuries in the past. But, the Middle Ages continue to haunt our now, lingering in films and comics, beer names, the rise of the alt-right, and the search for the ever-elusive ‘holy grail’ of skincare. To explore that difficult “so what” question, the project asks why what medievalists do matters, what we can learn (for good or ill) from the Middle Ages, and why the study of what was remains so important for what is and for what can be. The definite article in our title signals our dedication to the ‘so what question,’ asking scholars and creatives to consider their work in a broader context for today’s public.
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What does The So What (TSW) publish?
TSW pieces are peer-reviewed, open access works geared toward a broad audience. While our emphasis is on Arthurian material, we believe that more explicitly discussing the ‘so whats’ of medieval studies, including its connections to and appearances in more ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ culture is of great value to the field, to public discourse, and for promoting inquiry, equity, and justice. As such, we welcome proposals for pieces exploring the ‘so whats’ of medieval studies and medievalisms, as well as short, pedagogical and/or creative pieces.
Who can submit?
Both authors appearing in Arthuriana and those who do not have a forthcoming piece in the journal are welcome to submit to TSW. Types of submissions might include: short, accessible articles; detailed lesson or unit plans; annotated assignment sheets; and/or creative pieces in a variety of media, including audio/visual. The selection process will differ slightly, depending on whether the piece did or did not originate with an Arthuriana article (see our Submission Guide for more). Selection and editing will be anonymized, with review duties spread across members of our editorial team.
Reach out to us! Question? Comment? Correction? Please email our editors at thesowhatpub@gmail.com.
“I don't think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them.”
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Editorial Team
Our Editorial Team is comprised of a sizeable group of established scholars, early career researchers (ECRs), contingent faculty, and independent scholars. All TSW submissions receive reports from two readers from our team, as well as proofs.
Editorial Team Rationale
Our team is large, allowing us to disperse duties, so that no one ends up overwhelmed. In addition, the mix of readers—including established scholars, ECRs, independent scholars, and contingent academics—provides a range of perspectives, as well as protected opportunities to and for those who are building careers and/or experiencing precarity.
Equity, Accessibility, Diversity, and Inclusion are deeply important to us; we welcome your feedback about ways we can improve or strengthen our efforts, particularly (though not exclusively) in those respects (you can contact us at thesowhatpub@gmail.com).
Editorial Team Members
Tarren Andrews, Roland Betancourt, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Seeta Chaganti, Brittany Claytor, Jonathan F. Correa-Reyes, Steffi Delcourt, Brenna Duperron, Denva Gallant, Nahir Otaño Gracia, Alison Gulley, Kevin Harty, Mairi Stirling Hill, Jonathan Hsy, Alex Kaufman, Tzu-Yu Liu, Sierra Lomuto, Molly Martin, Christy McCarter, Maud McInerney, Arielle C. McKee, Mariah Min, Clint Morrison, Rachel Moss, Ryan Naughton, Tory V. Pearman, Sara Petrosillo, Bradley Phillis, Christopher Queen, Logan Quigley, Lynneth Miller Renberg, Christopher T. Richards, Robert Rouse, Sarah Salih, Richard Sévère, Margaret Sheble, Gale Sigal, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Matthew Vernon, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Kevin Whetter, Adrian Whitacre, Clara Wild.
NB: to respect privacy, not all members are listed here, we are only providing the names of team members who wished to appear on our site.
Recent Issues & Articles
A Further Note about Unexpected Dislodgers of the Sword from the Stone; or, But What about Bob?
Happily, there is yet another hero in present day London who actually dislodges the real sword from the real stone in which it has been wedged, sitting unnoticed, presumably for a very long time, in an obscure urban churchyard. Upon doing so, this hero is quickly acclaimed the rightful monarch of Britain. Elizabeth II abdicates in his favor. In the real world, such an abdication would precipitate a constitutional crisis, as it did in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated to marry the divorced woman he loved, but not in this case. So Liz is out, and our hero is in—no questions asked. Adoring crowds line up the hundreds, if not by the thousands, deep, surrounding Buckingham Palace to hear King Bob’s inaugural address.
The Cross of St George: Isolation and its Discontents in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later
It begins with the Teletubbies, dancing and singing. The camera pulls back. A group of children are crowded around the TV set, but they aren’t watching the inane antics of the Tubbies. They are terrified. A plague is sweeping Britain, turning people into cannibals crazed with bloodlust. Within minutes, the door is broken down. Fathers murder mothers and children, blood sprays across the screen where the Teletubbies still dance and sing. One boy escapes to the church across the road where his father, the pastor, kneels in prayer. But his father has accepted the epidemic as evidence of the End of Days; he hides his son beneath a grate, pressing a crucifix into his hand, and opens his arms to the creatures that devour him. The child sees everything and is spattered with his father’s blood.
Grendel and Indigenous Readings
This four-day lesson plan, inspired by a lesson plan by Erik Wade, draws together Beowulf, the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest, the movie Outlander, and Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s ‘Seven Theses’ to discuss monstrosity in Beowulf. Cohen’s theses argue that monsters are a metaphor for cultural fears, especially fears about minority groups. This gives students the opportunity to discuss complex metaphors and how the idea of monstrosity is weaponized against racial and gendered minorities. Specifically, the lesson plan asks students to consider how Grendel and his relationship with the land is sympathetic toward the modern day experiences of Indigenous Peoples in the United States.
A Many-Headed Hydra: Early Modern Monstrosities and Demonstrations in Rare Books and Special Collections Outreach
Monstrosities and Demonstrations. The parallel makes for more than simply a catchy title (though I can never resist a catchy title): the two words are closely related to one another. Monster was likely born from the Latin monstrare, ‘to show, reveal, or teach’ (though some sources also suggest monere, ‘to foretell, warn, admonish or presage’), the same root as ‘demonstrate.’ In the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era, people commonly thought of monsters as warnings of divine intent, as a demonstration of God’s will, and even as a manifestation of the playfulness of nature itself. Monsters were about showing and demonstrating morals and divine instructions, with all humans as the learning audience. If libraries with premodern collections embrace the very meanings of monstrosity and demonstration embodied by these books, we can transform ourselves, our authority, and our connections with the public through outreach that fosters dialogue and connects people directly with primary sources.
The Knight of the Pentangle and the Simulacrum of Chivalry: Arthuriana and the Hyperreal
When more efficient ways of doing things come along, returning to the inefficient is rebellious. It requires taking the time to learn a dead skill or find an out-of-production device. This pull to ‘embrace the old’ can also be traced in literary styles across the centuries. The Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) regularly used medieval archaisms in his poems, like ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,’ which not only reflects this practice but also shows the power of adopting an older voice. It adds an air of authority, like the poem is speaking to the reader from far in the past—even if was written just last year.
From Round Table Tournaments to Renaissance Festivals: Arthuriana and the Hyperreal
As a jaded adult, I had given up on Truth long ago, so much so that ‘being duped’ no longer hurt my feelings. It was exactly what I had paid $25 to experience. Reality is too distressingly banal, so, like many of the courtly characters in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (as we will see), I would much rather make it a ‘Cristmas gomen’ [Christmas game] than think about it too much.
Chappell, Chaucer, and the Structural Instability of Fame
In September of 2024, global pop icon Chappell Roan performed her hit song ‘Good Luck, Babe’ at the MTV Video Music Awards. Before this performance, Roan walked the black carpet, dressed in her first of three medieval-inspired looks for the night: standing on an antique rug unfurled by her own knight-attendant, she wore a sheer, maroon dress with a green velvet robe, armored fingernails, and a sword as her accessory of choice. While posing for photos, the popstar was caught in a tense exchange with paparazzi who were heckling her. After growing frustrated with Roan’s poses on the carpet, one photographer shouted ‘I’m not gonna shut the f**k up, she needs to stop’ while the popstar’s back was turned away from the cameras. With one armor-adorned finger pointed directly at the paparazzo, Chappell whipped around, retorting, ‘You shut the f**k up. Don’t. Not me, bitch.’ Her response on the carpet is, I argue, one demonstration of the reclamatory power found in medieval imagery: emboldened by the medieval-inspired garb adorning her body, Roan accessed a kind of knightly persona to protect herself from the dangers of public spectacle.
Medieval Murder: Blurring the Lines between History, True Crime, and Social Media
Social media comes in many forms: tweets, posts, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and more. Over the course of the last decade, the lines between certain elements of social media and public history have begun to blur. Medieval history, in particular, could be considered a rather niche interest, but through the use of social media, historians and history enthusiasts have begun to widen their circle and expand the reach of their research, while also making it more accessible to a non-academic audience. One of the ways to make this leap from academic history to public history is through the rising public interest in true crime. For example, my master’s dissertation was entitled ‘Crime and Punishment: Homicide in Early Anglo-Saxon England.’ In order to stay involved with historical research, while also being on the fringe of academia as an academic librarian, I began a blog and Instagram account extrapolating on that dissertation called Medieval Murder.
Never a Frown, With Golden Brown: The Medieval Revival of TikTok
In December 2024, TikTok user @snapdrag.n uploaded a twenty-second video with the caption ‘reject minimalism, medieval revival 2025.’ The video has images of fair maidens, gallant knights, castles, and medieval-inspired fashion all set to the song ‘Golden Brown’ by the Stranglers. The video calls for a rejection of minimalism, itself a trend linked to the rising political conservatism and regression of the 2020s, and an embrace of the aesthetically colourful, gaudy, and fantastical medieval.
Good for What Eels Ya: Eels, History, and Social Media
Like most people, I never meant to be an eel historian. In fact, until about halfway through my graduate work, I didn’t know anything about eels at all. I intended to write my doctoral dissertation on medieval maps and early modern spatial stories. But somewhere along the way I got distracted by eels on maps, and before I knew it, I was trying to piece together the long and complicated history of eels in pre-modern England. As I researched and wrote, and then began to share my work on social media, eels and eel history began to form a part of my identity in ways I never would have imagined.
The Life of Merlin: A Trauma Narrative from Twelfth-Century England
A man goes off to war. He sees his comrades, including his best friends, killed on the battlefield. He falls apart, weeping uncontrollably, refusing food for days. He returns home alive, but life has lost its meaning. His work, his pastimes, and his relationships bring him no pleasure. He can tolerate, just barely, his closest friends and family members, but crowds repel him. Music soothes him somewhat, allowing him moments of lucidity, but he is subject to violent mood swings. Once kind and generous, he now takes malicious delight in the misfortunes of others. He abandons his responsibilities, his friends, and his family for a hermit’s life, as far from the bother and business of the world as he can get. His wife, his brother-in-law, and, above all, his sister, try their best to call him back to his former life, but their efforts are counterproductive. They cannot help him because they cannot fathom the darkness that has enveloped him.
Welcome to MONTERO : The Devil and his Inability to Disappear from Popular Culture
The Devil’s status as a cultural icon is so widely accepted that he doesn’t just have a place in folklore and religion: he has his own Wikipedia page. His list of names alone are extensive — the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub — and while academic studies focusing on the history of the Devil are substantial, with works like Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition, and Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World offering detailed analyses of the Devil’s historical and literary development, these works rarely address why the Devil remains so popular in contemporary pop culture. In Devilish Consumption: Popular Culture in Satanic Socialization, Asbjørn Dyrendal explores how popular culture contributes to satanic identity formation, but there is still much to be investigated about how personal perceptions and the media shape modern representations of Lucifer.
Perception is a Spike Turned Inward: Reflecting on Contemporary Events through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has increasingly become an obsession of my art practice and academic research, its imagery and themes providing inspiration and posing difficult questions. This interest prompted one friend and mentor, upon seeing a painting of mine that depicted Gawain, to comment, ‘careful, you look like a medievalist there’ as if to be that would represent a retreat into a world of romance and nostalgia, away from the contemporary realities that should concern a credible artist (see fig.1). I took no offence at this concern, but I hope to demonstrate here that the exact opposite is true, that while the poem is decorative and beautifully written, we can, as medieval scholar Justine Breton has suggested ‘puncture the fantasy,’1 drawing out the transformative horror at the poem’s core and consider the challenges offered by the late medieval poem to our own moment (see fig. 2).
Exploring Medieval & Modern Experiences of Migration, and Why it Matters Now More than Ever
Community is essential to human experience in medieval romance texts of the fourteenth century. Women in Emaré, the Man of Law’s Tale, Octavian, and Sir Eglamour of Artois (to name but a few) are set adrift in rudderless boats and find sanctuary in foreign lands; their survival is dependent on the community that they find. In thinking about connections between medieval and modern experiences of identity and belonging, there is much to explore in the ethos of mutuality that refugee communities are bringing back to a modern British culture that has moved so far away from medieval concepts of social responsibility. Our specialism in medieval literature led us to draw connections between medieval and modern experiences of and mindsets concerning migration.
Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the Return of King Arthur
In 2021, I published an article in Arthuriana that mapped this facet of the QAnon conspiracy back to JKF’s assassination and discovered a distinctly medievalist bent to the discourse surrounding the Kennedys. I found that the myth of JFK faking his death and/or his return had been bolstered by framing JFK’s presidency as an idealistic ‘Camelot,’ drawing on the mythmaking around King Arthur as an imminently-returning saviour figure, traceable to the medieval works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troye, Layamon, Thomas Malory, and most overtly, Étienne de Rouen’s 12th century Draco Normannicus. The myth of JFK’s return, tied up with idealistic mythmaking around his presidency, flourished from the 1960s onwards and was buoyed by the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics…. It is clear that this medievalist myth continues to affect American politics, arising in the presidential bid of another Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.). Throughout his campaign for president, RFK Jr. often took up the Camelot myth to present himself as the second coming of his much-revered uncle. He then suspended his presidential bid in August 2024, simultaneously throwing his support behind Trump, who in kind flagged his intention to nominate RFK Jr. as a member of his administration. Trump undoubtedly sought out RFK Jr.’s endorsement to amalgamate RFK Jr.’s voting base with his, but Trump’s desire to align himself with RFK Jr. was also perhaps driven by his desire to play into the QAnon myth of Trump’s powerful, at times supernatural, association with the Kennedy dynasty. Trump could not count on the ghost of JFK, but he could get the next best thing: an unprincipled and mercenary conspiracy theorist with the Kennedy name.
Sirocco
There are two contexts for this story. The immediate context was the 2009 Yuletide Fanfiction Exchange, where I had been given a prompt focused on the character of Palomides in the Arthurian legend: Any kind of Palomides fic would be spectacular—I like a good, plotty gen fic, but I’m also both slash-friendly and het-friendly. Include whichever other characters you like. I am a SUCKER for good humor fic, but I also like well-constructed and nuanced character studies. Feel free to choose whatever source material suits you best; if you’d rather write T.H. White’s Palomides calling himself ‘yours truly’ and dressing up as a Questing Beast, that would be a joy, but if you’d prefer the version who shows up in the Tristan-and-Iseult legend as the perpetual also-ran, that’s cool, too. If you want to play with his religious affiliation, though, I do ask that you be respectful to his identity as [...] a Muslim—in some versions, he converts to Christianity, and I’m cool with it if you include that aspect, but I’d prefer that it be respectfully treated…
A House Turned Upside Down: Popular Medievalism, Queerness, and Deconstruction in Netflix’s The Decameron
There’s no doubt of it: this is not your college professor’s Boccaccio. In fact, the 2024 Netflix series sets out to create a TV version of The Decameron only in the loosest possible sense, borrowing some (but not all) of the character names, the basic conceit of ten young men and women taking refuge from the Black Death in a fourteenth-century Florence countryside estate, and a few throwaway references to the original tales, but not much else. Instead, like much other medieval-themed media, its primary intent is to pointedly satirize the present through a pop-culture version of the past, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its dislocations and displacements. While our own lockdown might not have been (quite) as traumatic as its premodern predecessor, the series is well aware of this context and the way in which it offers renewed relevance to a mordantly funny story of social struggle and class conflict in the middle of a deadly plague which nobody in power seems able—or willing—to do anything about. The result, as New York Times film critic James Poniewozik puts it, is an ‘apocalyptic medieval soap-com: “Succession” crossed with “The Walking Dead”.’
Licisca(s) and the Transgressive Medieval in Adaptation
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked creativity in many people stuck at home, and this creativity brought people in the twenty-first century closer to people in the fourteenth century. Beginning in 2020, a number of interesting adaptations of Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron emerged. These adaptations were a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Boccacio’s text, written between 1348 and 1352—in the wake of the Black Death in Florence—follows ten Florentine elites as they flee to countryside villas in order to escape the plague. For ten days, they tell each other stories to pass the time. Several adaptations of the Decameron, such as The New York Times’s Decameron Project (2020) and Harper Collins Italia’s Nuovo Decameron (2021), were collections of stories meant to mimic the ten elites’ stories in the source text. However, Netflix’s 2024 television series adaptation, The Decameron, focuses entirely on the frame narrative—the interpersonal relationships between the elites and their servants—rather than on the stories they are telling.
Memes and Medievalism: Reimagining Boccaccio’s Fourteenth Century
Boccaccio’s Decameron has been called “the privileged text of the contradictory, rich, and unpredictable experiences of life.” Netflix’s Decameron, while it is interested in the contradictions of how we experience life in the twenty-first century, is perhaps even more interested in how we mediate those rich, unpredictable experiences through memes, screens, and filters. The show is clearly designed as a wry commentary on our own pandemic era, its inequities, and its instabilities. But in providing this commentary, rather than using the fourteenth century, it relies on what Megan L. Cook has called dirtbag medievalism. Rather than seeking “some type of connection with the medieval past that is both intimate and authentic,” Cook argues, “dirtbag medievalism is a vibe.” This definition neatly encapsulates, in my view, the strategies embraced by Netflix’s Decameron. In watching it as a medievalist, I was often struck by how historical accuracies were snuck in: references to Boccaccio’s tales are frequent, and many of the show’s jokes—about medical theory, about relics, about sexual desire—are layered in ways apparently designed to be appreciated by viewers who know a considerable amount about the fourteenth century. Far more often, however, the show expects a range of pop culture literacies from its audience, gleefully concocting a vibes-based version of the premodern past, where baroque music, nineteenth-century ideas about sexuality, and decidedly contemporary ideas about gender and social inequalities coexist.
Shouting at the Air: Plague Medievalisms for the Covid Era in Netflix’s The Decameron
Countless novels, comics, shows, movies, and video games present fictional retellings of the Black Death. From cinematic masterpieces like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and haunting narrative games like Plague Tale: Innocence (2019), to Monty Python’s comedic ‘Bring out yer dead!‘ (1975) and Hollywood bottom feeders like Season of the Witch (2012), popular culture has returned again and again to stories of disease and suffering in the Middle Ages. Each of these works is not about the Middle Ages as such, but rather employs medievalism, a term from literary and historical criticism for the borrowing and reframing of medieval themes in modern genres, often with little concern for historical accuracy. The Black Death occurs in so many instances of medievalism that ‘plague medievalism,’ the study of how medieval plagues are represented today, deserves to be examined in its own right, understood through the lenses of cultural studies and the history of medicine.
Materials published in The So What can be distributed, remixed, adapted, and built upon for noncommercial purposes, so long as attribution is given to the creator.