This course will explore how artists draw upon the past, focusing on creative appropriations of culture from the European Middle Ages. We will consider how the medieval, as a period outside of Western modernity, has become a resource for artists who are critical of modernity. Indeed, a main theme of our course will have to do with defining what, precisely, modernity means to the arts, and our theoretical concerns will raise questions about appropriation, artistic tradition, and art-historical periodization. We will critically investigate how popular medievalisms have tended toward the comic, corny, fantastic, or fascistic. But we will especially survey art works that arise from romantic, avante-garde, and activist sensibilities. Works may include: music by Blood Orange, Richard Wagner, and Bob Dylan; paintings by Kehinde Wiley; oral histories told by twenty-first century refugees; trans, queer, and feminist poetry; high fashion; public sculptures of Vikings; and architecture located throughout New York City.