"A Closeness to God, to Nature, and to Community” : Medical Medievalism in Contemporary Society.

For several decades now, medical practices referred to as traditional or natural have been increasingly popular in Western society. These practices are often perceived, defined, and con- noted as medieval, regardless of their characteristics and his- toricity. Attributing traditional medicine to a generic medieval time reflects one of the most relevant contemporary cultural phenomena: the pervasiveness of images, narratives, and ref- erences to the Middle Ages in popular culture. However, this Middle Ages is not the historical period interpreted through the sources; it is a dreamed, imagined, meta-historical time, represented according to the dual model of the Dark Ages and the ‘good’ Middle Ages of fantasy, fairytale, nature not yet subject to modernity and techno-science. The imagined Middle Ages is the field of study of a specific disciplinary area, medievalism. This paper aims to identify the representations of medieval medicine that this reshaped and imagined medieval world produces and disseminates in society.