Kim Moreland's The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature is a first-rate book which represents a great leap forward in the study of medievalism in the New World. It also makes no mention of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow except as co-founder of the Dante Society in 1881. One ought not to reproach Moreland for this; she cannot discuss everyone. Longfellow's absence from The Medievalist Impulse can be attributed primarily to his non-presence in today's canon of American literature. In his case, absence is a trace of low status in the institution of literature, an institution which creates presence and absence. Also, Tales of a Wayside Inn differs from what we can call primary medievalism, as manifest in such works as Sidney Lanier's The Boy's Froissart (1879) and The Boy's King Arthur (1880). Although Longfellow did contribute to primary medievalism in other works, the most notable of which is The Golden Legend (1851), Part Two of Christus: A Mystery, with Tales of a Wayside Inn he writes a text of “secondary medievalism” by taking the Chaucerian structure – the idea of the Canterbury Tales – and recasting it, intertextually, in his own nineteenth-century Massachusetts. He does this by having six friends – the Poet, the Musician, the Sicilian, the Spanish Jew, the Student, and the Theologian – plus the Landlord, while away their time at the Red Horse Tavern in Sudbury by telling stories.

Moreland provides a valuable insight into Longfellow as into so much of nineteenth-century medievalism. Her thesis – that medievalism functioned as a response to and reaction against modernity, capitalism, the cult of progress, optimism, and the growing materialism of life in America after the Civil War – can be applied, at least in part, to Longfellow. Scholars have commented on how the father of American poetry ignored all contemporary American issues except for slavery; how, in large measure, he rejected contemporary American reality for the past, a past which existed in his mind as a timeless never-never land, an icon of veiled beauty, the subject of melancholy and reverie. Like so many others in the century of progress, Longfellow lived and grounded much of his work in nostalgia for a doomed, unrecoverable past.