Medievalism and Orientalism at the World's Fairs‪.‬

ABSTRACT From the middle of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the great European powers mounted enormous international exhibitions, displaying both their technological and economic power and their newly acquired colonial possessions. Curiously, amid the pavilions and exhibition halls were reconstructions of their own medieval past. What was the significance of these medieval installations, which present the Middle Ages as both domestic and foreign, as native and native? This paper traces this dual interpretation of the Middle Ages from World's Fairs to Victorian Anthropology and then further back to the strangely intertwined histories of medievalism and orientalism in architecture, linguistics and literature.