If medievalism remains, as Gwendolyn A. Morgan says, “somewhat slippery,” then neomedievalism is outright ephemeral. If a survey of recent scholarship on the topic is any indication, neomedievalism manages all at once to create a “hyperreality” more real than reality itself and to carve out its living in the furtive and ravenous consumption of mass-produced commodities, yet also floats disembodied above a sea of already constituted academic disciplines waiting to be formed into something solid and publishable/ten(ur)able.

This ephemerality is perhaps most evident in the contradicting conclusions that recent scholarship has forwarded in regards to the relationship of neomedievalism to medievalism proper. In “Living with Neomedievalism” Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements locate their concept of neo-medievalism among contrasting tropes such as postmodernism and fantasy, and inevitably produce part of their definition in relation to medievalism. They write:

Cory Lowell Grewell, in responding to Robinson and Clements, credits them with hitting upon some useful approaches in defining neomedievalism but disagrees with them “when they assert that neomedievalism is something other than medievalism.” While M. J. Toswell differentiates the two by means of their object of study, Amy S. Kaufman calls neomedievalism a “functional subset” of medievalism and sees medievalism as a necessary precondition of neomedievalism. She writes, “Neomedievalism is one way of doing medievalism, one that requires certain philosophical and technological shifts in order to exist at all. Yet while medievalism can exist perfectly independently at any point in time, neomedievalism despite its seeming ahistoricity, is historically contingent upon both medievalism itself and the postmodern condition.” In the very same collection of essays where Kaufman firmly anchors neomedievalism to medievalism, Lesley Coote makes the ontological claim that “neo-medievalism, by its nature, cannot be fully contained within ‘medievalism,’ or any other, similar, terminology.”