With essays by Eileen A. Joy, Mary K. Ramsey, Edward Said, Claire Sponsler, Nicholas Howe, Allen J. Frantzen, John D. Niles, John Moreland, Alfred K. Siewers, James W. Earl, Janet Thormann, John M. Hill, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Carol J. Clover, Clare A. Lees, Mary Dockray-Miller, Shari Horner, Michel Foucault, Carol Braun Pasternack, Gillian Overing, Seth Lerer, Susan Kim, and Michelle R. Warren

This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.