Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history^[1] that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship:

1. Political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull. It sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties.^[2]
2. Literary theory about the use and abuse of texts and tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, first popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1986 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".^[3]

Despite these partly separate traditions, some work sees the two conceptions of neomedievalism as overlapping in illuminating ways.^[4][5][6]

The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalised world.^[7] Bull suggested society was moving towards a form of "neomedievalism" in which individual notions of rights and a growing sense of a "world common good" were undermining national sovereignty. He saw a complex layering of international, national and subnational organizations which might help "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government."

In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.

Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" published in 1998 in the Journal of International Affairs,^[2] argues that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.

More recently, Anthony Clark Arend argues in his 1999 book, Legal Rules and International Society, that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claims that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.

Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends."^[8] Similarly, Philip G. Cerny in "Neomedievalism Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds,"^[9] calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy.

An early use of the term neo-medievalism in a sense like Umberto Eco's was in Isaiah Berlin's 1953 "The Hedgehog and the Fox":

There is no kinship between him [ Joseph de Maistre] and those who really did believe in the possibility of some kind of return – neo-medievalists from Wackenroder and Görres and Cobbett to G. K. Chesterton, and Slavophils and Distributists and Pre-Raphaelites and other nostalgic romantics; for he believed, as Tolstoy also did, in the exact opposite: in the "inexorable" power of the present moment: in our inability to do away with the sum of conditions which cumulatively determine our basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.^[10]

Then, in 1986, Umberto Eco said "we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination".^[3] Recently, the term has been used by various writers such as medieval historians who see it as the intersection between popular fantasy and medieval history^[11] as a term describing the post-modern study of medieval history.^[12]

The widespread interest in medieval themes in popular culture, especially computer games such as MMORPGs, films and television, neo-medieval music, and popular literature, has been called neomedieval. Critics have discussed why medieval themes continue to fascinate audiences in a modern, heavily technological world. A possible explanation is the need for a romanticized historical narrative to clarify the confusing panorama of current political and cultural events.^[13]

Academics have paid increasing attention to neomedievalism, in what some see as a burgeoning field of study. Important works include Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements 2009 paper “Living with Neomedievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism,^[14] Robinson and Clements’ anthology The Medieval in Motion: Neomedievalism in Film, Television and Electronic Games (forthcoming), a collection of papers from MEMS (Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization),^[15] the academic journal Studies in Medievalism: Defining Neomedievalism(s),^[16] panels at the 2009 Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan included “Neomedievalist Communities” and “Gaming Neomedievally”, and it was the official focus of the entire 22nd Annual International Conference on Medievalism, “Neomedievalisms” (2007).

• Westphalian sovereignty
• Neo-feudalism
• Neoliberalism
• English school of international relations theory
• Refeudalization

• NeoMedievalism, a collection of links and a general evaluation
• Pulling Back from Neo-Medievalism, a discussion of neo-medievalism in relation to the Hungarian Status Law
• NeoMedievalism, academic look at the study of medievalism through a literary criticism lens
• http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/why-history-matters-and-why-medieval-history-also-matters
• Sutch, P and J Elias, International Relations: The Basics, Routledge, New York, 2007, pp. 102–104
• Towards a new Middle Ages? by Roberto Rotondo
• Legal Rules and International Society by Anthony Clark Arend