Literary and artistic manifestations of the Romantic ‘goût du Moyen Âge’ (p. 1) are well-known features of the cultural landscape of early nineteenth-century France. Similarly, nineteenth-century academic medievalism is a familiar presence in studies of the construction of national identity during the Troisième République. The history of the transformation of the earlier, Romantic medievalism of figures like Victor Hugo or Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc, into the later, scholarly medievalism of romance philologists such as Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier, however, remains a ‘nébuleuse encore relativement mal cartographiée’ (p. 10). Of course, the gradual institutionalization of medievalism in nineteenth-century France has long been acknowledged in general terms as a prolonged response to the upheavals of the revolutionary period. However, little attention has been paid to date to pioneering activity in French medieval studies which preceded the formation of the École nationale des chartes (est. 1821, reformed in 1846) and the academic institutionalization of history as a social science in the École pratique des hautes études (est. 1868). Nor has sufficient work been done to bridge the divide between the antiquarian erudition of the Ancien Régime (epitomized in the works of figures such as Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye) and the medievalisms of the nineteenth century. It is in the work of little-known figures such as the Breton historian and anthologist Louise de Kéralio (1758–1822, studied in a contribution to this volume by Bernard Ribémont), for example, that scholarship connects the medievalism of Enlightenment érudits with the world of nineteenth-century literary history. Other chapters bring to light marginalized figures whose work was essential to the flowering of medieval studies: the pioneering scholar of medieval Latin, Édélestand Du Méril (1801–1870; presented by Jean-Yves Tilliette), who saw in medieval French poetry an expression of the Romantic Volksgeist; Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (1815–1895; in a chapter by Hélène Bouget), one of the founders of modern Celtic literary studies; or Étienne-Jean Delécluze (1781–1863; see the contribution by Alain Corbellari), the polymath scholar, painter, translator, and historian of chivalry. Further chapters provide more thematic contributions. Patricia Victorin, for example, studies the Romantic reception of Jean Froissart and the influence of his Chroniques on nineteenth-century historians and historical-novelists. Jonathan Hofer, meanwhile, tracing the editorial fate of Old French fabliaux in the first decades of the century, shows how this corpus of jocular récits gave a foundation to the myth of a ‘Moyen Âge populaire’, crude yet vibrant. The construction of a medieval imagination among the reading public is further explored by Guillaume Cousin, who focuses on the role played by literary journals under the July Monarchy. Far from constituting an exhaustive treatment of the subject, as the editors are the first to confess (p. 13), this volume is nevertheless a groundbreaking collection. Indeed, very little else by way of recent scholarship is available to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature who may be eager, when faced with instances of medievalism, to locate them in a wider intellectual context.