Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme. In part, that may be owing to the difficulty of knowing when the optimal moment would be for such a collective summation, intervention, and/or foreshadowing. Perhaps no other area of research has expanded as widely, quickly, or fluidly as gender studies, both within and outside of medievalism. Not only scholars but also popularists, journalists, pundits, bloggers, and countless others in medievalism studies and beyond have surpassed the traditional taxonomies of gender to question its very possibility, not to mention its utility.

While there may be widespread, if not universal, agreement that gender is at least in part, and perhaps entirely, a construct, its possible sources are often in dispute, sometimes violently so. The ethics and history of a subject that has for millennia formed the foundation of persecution invite an overtly biased tone and subjective approach that depart from traditional academia's (pretense of) objectivity. Perhaps more than in any other area of the humanities, except perhaps studies of racism, authors assign and assess the motives as well as the nature and intention of sources.

Of course, this approach is also open to such assessments of it, as are those assessments, and as are those assessments, and so forth. In effect, a perception of gender in a medieval source can inaugurate a virtual mise en abyme of layered revelations as to how that instance, and perhaps larger dimensions of gender, have been perceived and operated since the Middle Ages. And since few areas within history and, by extension, academia are more saturated with gender assumptions than the Middle Ages, the invitation to adopt, adapt, question, resist, or reject those assumptions could hardly be richer than it is in medievalism, as suggested by this volume's call for papers:

As all children and many adults know, play is serious business. Whether diversion, exploration, simulation, manipulation, or some combination thereof, it is at the very heart of how one learns about and navigates through the world. Indeed, it often amounts to a trial run or strategy for fulfilling one's most basic needs or desires. And though it may take such simple forms as throwing a ball or holding a doll, it often springs from imaginary realms built on complex blends of hope, experience, values, and beliefs, such as winning the Super Bowl with a last-second pass or raising the woman who catches it.

One extraordinarily fertile source for those constructs has long been the Middle Ages. Sufficiently documented and near enough to provide some guideposts, they are nevertheless so distant and amorphous as to facilitate a wide range of interpretations. Moreover, they have benefited from an accretion of responses that have softened their edges, diminished their banalities, and romanticized their singularities. Rather than struggling farmers who supplemented their income through infrequent raids, the Vikings have become fabulously rich warriors who lived to terrorize bookish monks, drink mead, and go a-wenching. Rather than spending long hours managing extensive bureaucracies and discontented subjects, not to mention spoiled, incompetent, and/or treacherous heirs, medieval monarchs have become full-time battle-managers with heroic sons who do nothing but slay monsters and rescue damsels in distress. And when women are not those beautiful damsels or Viking victims, they are warrior princesses and/or clones of, say, an impossibly feminist Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Play therefore offers insights on not only how the Middle Ages have been perceived but also how their interpreters have seen themselves, their surroundings, and perhaps (other) aspects of the intervening period. By examining how the past is treated in, say, a video game set amid the Crusades, one may not discover anything new about the Middle Ages, but one may learn a great deal about the designers’ knowledge of that era, their anticipation of such knowledge in their audience, and, particularly in their play on and supplementing of that knowledge, their own values and beliefs.