Medieval Spaces in Comics

“Woock's vital work is essential not only for medieval studies scholars but for all readers interested in the adaptation of the Middle Ages and their political relevance today -- it speaks to the potential of comics to foreground profound new ways of understanding history, spatiality, and affect.” - Dragos Manea, Director of the Center for American Studies and Lecturer, University of Bucharest, Romania “Wading through the misty hyperreal swamps of popular nostalgia, Woock slays some pretty big canonical medievalist dragons that have made their hoards in some unexpected places. This book cuts through the scales of interlinked mythology and the pseudo-academic armour of contemporary historical determinism with a sharp and timely urgency.” - Geraint D'Arcy, Head of Media and Lecturer in Media Practice, University of East Anglia, UK This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text. Elizabeth Allyn Woock is an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her work focuses on medieval history and medievalisms, as well as comics studies and comics-based research. She is interested in exploring how the comics format can be harnessed for academic writing and takes every opportunity to explore this methodology.