In Received Medievalisms: A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women's Convents, published in 2013 in Bonnie Wheeler's The New Middle Ages series published by Palgrave, Cynthia Cyrus examines the complex cultural history of the reception of women's monastic communities from the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 through to the nineteenth century. Focusing mainly on Augustinian, Cistercian, Clarissan, Penitent, and Premonstratensian monastic houses, she investigates an extensive panoply of multimodal references (visual, as in cartographical plans and various pictorial representations; verbal, as in travel literature, topographies, anecdotes, and legends) and fully-fledged “foundation stories” (formal histories told to relate the origins of a specific community), to present readers with the urban–historical background for evolving attitudes towards the city's past. While the women's convents:

Cyrus's project is exceptional in several ways. Firstly, it focuses for the most part on early modernity, a period in which the concept of the medieval past was yet unsettled. Thus, unlike the majority of the existing academic work in medievalism studies, she explores forms of medievalism closer to the Middle Ages itself, when much of what we today identify as the medieval may have continued without notice. Secondly, Cyrus combines the theoretical and methodological areas of literary studies, urban history, monastic studies, gender history, and topographical and cognitive geography with some of the notions central to medievalism studies: authority, dis/continuity, genealogy, Gothic, heritage, identity, nostalgia, preservation, revival, ritual, and romanticism, coming very close to what Jonathan Hsy has described as medievalism's “co-disciplinarity.”