“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Michael Palin’s character famously declares in a 1971 skit for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The scenario repeats until it seems that invoking the Inquisition is enough to call it into being. Many of the essays in this collection take as their starting point that their audience will not expect to find traces of Europe’s Middle Ages in the United States today, given the temporal and geographic distance. But with a little looking, we find similar afterlives of the medieval abounding in the here and now. As with Monty Python’s Inquisition, invoking the medieval creates it anew.This collection is a valuable addition to the study of global receptions of Europe’s Middle Ages. The contributors include some of the most prominent critics of U.S. literary medievalisms, but this text stands out in that it applies literary and cultural studies methodologies not to texts, but rather to physical spaces in the United States. An endorsement on the back cover from John M. Ganim includes an apt assessment of the book as “a map of the landscape of a secret medieval America.” It is also a travel guide, reinterpreting the spaces of the U.S. into places that shape their own histories. The text is divided into three parts: “Building the American Middle Ages,” “Living in the American Middle Ages,” and “Playing in the American Middle Ages.” The “Building” section lays a foundation for the text, focusing on the medieval-inspired architecture of buildings and gardens. The “Living” section considers how those built medievalisms and other medievalist structures shape communal life in their cities or states. Finally, “Playing” escapes from the everyday, looking at the medievalist fantasy spaces of U.S. recreation and tourism. These topics are strongly intertwined, with individual chapters generally focusing on one of the three topics but often drawing upon one or both of the others.The first section, “Building the Middle Ages,” opens with Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s “Translatio Horti: Medievalized Gardens in Boston and Cambridge.” Kelly explores the construction, layout, functions, and experience of three gardens in the Boston/Cambridge area, paying particular attention to their uses of medieval or medieval revival horticultural principles. Kelly also considers the social ramifications of who has access to these “secret” spaces: “It is the wall that makes a garden most ‘medieval’” (37), she argues, and walls both create intimacy and reinforce privilege. Kevin J. Harty moves away from private spaces into very public ones with “Philadelphia’s Medieval(ist) Jewels: Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Glencairn, and More.” Harty analyzes key examples of medievalist religious architecture in Philadelphia: two Episcopal churches participating in the Anglo-Catholic liturgical revival, and two buildings associated with the General Church of the New Jerusalem. Although these latter structures—the Bryn Athyn Cathedral and the mansion of its main designer—blend architectural styles, Harty argues that their construction processes followed medieval principles of organic development. In “The Masonic Medievalism of Washington, D.C.,” Laurie A. Finke traces the history of freemasonry in the U.S., and how its medieval models of hegemonic masculinity helped to define American ideas of gender and nationalism. Although the masonic buildings of D.C. are neoclassical on the outside, Finke explores the wide array of pasts invoked by their inner ornamentation and ritual uses. Alfred Thomas’s chapter, “Medieval Chicago: Architecture, Patronage, and Capital at the Fin de Siècle,” shows a two-way relationship between late medieval Italian architecture and the Chicago skyline. This relationship is both architectural and economic: Thomas demonstrates how capitalism (or protocapitalism) combined with geographic pressures to push the skylines of both regions upwards into high rise buildings.Section Two, “Living in the Middle Ages,” begins with Richard Utz’s “Three Vignettes and a White Castle: Knighthood and Race in Modern Atlanta.” Utz addresses the elephant in the room of modern medievalisms: the connection to white supremacist movements, in this case through the myths of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy and Southern chivalric masculinities. Utz demonstrates the centrality of chivalry to the revival of the Klan as well as to the feudal utopia in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and traces how the “Lost Cause” becomes built into the cityscape. In “Medieval New York City: A Walk Through the Stations of the Cross,” Candace Barrington walks us through Manhattan, visiting the sites of the 2018 art installation The Stations of the Cross, and engaging with other medievalist structures along the path. Barrington considers how the medieval devotional practice of walking the Stations of the Cross intersects with the contemporary art installation’s messages of social justice and with the communal uses of the installation sites, paying particular attention to the economic viability of maintaining medievalist heritage spaces. Jana K. Schulman’s chapter, “Minnesota Medieval: Dragons, Knights, and Runestones,” explores how Minnesota has capitalized on Scandinavian history and invested in a sanitized, chivalric version of Viking masculinity. Schulman examines how medieval Scandinavian history and identity are reconstructed by cultural societies and educational institutions, and then marketed back to the broader public. In “‘I Yearned for a Strange Land and a People that Had the Charm of Originality’: Searching for Salvation in Medieval Appalachia,” Alison Gulley continues the theme of marketing a region through medievalism. Whereas Schulman sees Minnesota creating its own Viking-ness, Gulley argues that “Appalachian medievalism is almost entirely manufactured by outsiders and imposed on the region and its inhabitants to create a specific American identity” (193), an identity that feeds white supremacist myths of a transplanted, pure Anglo-Saxon race. Gulley traces the destruction of artifacts of the “real” Appalachia to pave the way for a re-created past that characterizes the region and its inhabitants as simultaneously grotesque and romantic. Ending the “Living” section is Lowell Gallagher’s “Wounded Landscapes: Topographies of Franciscan Spirituality and Deep Ecology in California Medievalism.” Gallagher is primarily interested in the metaphorical possibilities of both the Middle Ages and the San Andreas Fault as fissures in space–time, or as contact zones. To that end, the chapter explores the fault lines in the Franciscan missionary colonization of California, and reads the wounds of colonialism against the stigmata of St. Francis.Section Three, “Playing in the American Middle Ages,” opens with the quintessentially American playgrounds of Orlando. “Orlando’s Medieval Heritage Project,” written by the editors, explores the city’s re-creation of itself into a medievalist place not once but twice. The first reinvention of the city comes in the mid-nineteenth century, with its renaming from Jernigan to Orlando, a name with multiple mythic origins; the second reinvention is the story of Orlando as entertainment empire, with Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Medieval Times, and Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, each with its own mode of simulating, selling, and consuming the medieval. In “Saints and Sinners: New Orleans’s Medievalisms,” Usha Vishnuvajjala and Candace Barrington analyze the city’s churches and Mardi Gras celebrations to identify conflicting approaches to the Middle Ages. With the particular history of French, Spanish, and American colonialism in New Orleans, the city both embraces and subverts other U.S. nationalist narratives of the Middle Ages. One strand of the city’s medievalism fits with the myths of Southern chivalry identified in other chapters, reinforcing social hierarchies and white male privilege; the other strand subverts these hierarchies, invoking “an unruly Middle Ages that breaks down borders and celebrates the mingling of classes, races, and cultures” (247). Lorraine Kochanske Stock contributes a chapter on “Sherwood Forest Faire: Evoking Medieval May Games, Robin Hood Revels, and Twentieth-Century ‘Pleasure Faires’ in Contemporary Texas.” Stock explores the history of Renaissance faires in the U.S., showing how they are medieval in function if not in form, recalling medieval festivities such as the May games and Whitsun ales, and performing countercultural resistance. Stock also traces the historical functions of Robin Hood as a character in medieval and early modern revelry, and explores how both Texas’s Sherwood Forest Faire and the “real” Sherwood Forest in England perform their historical authenticity in similar ways. The final chapter of the text is Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman’s “Las Vegas: Getting Medieval in Sin City.” They identify an array of individual medieval simulacra in the city, but focus on the city’s structural medievalism as a type of sinful pilgrimage site, a place where tourists flock for a chance at redemption and healing from the woes of their lives. They read the city’s self-promotion by comparing a sales pitch for time shares with the Pardoner’s methods of selling indulgences in The Canterbury Tales. This chapter is a fitting end to the collection, displacing the reader from the layered simulations of armchair travel by challenging escapist fantasies. Even in lighthearted notions of play, the text reminds us of Pugh and Aronstein’s warning in the introduction: “some dreams of the Middle Ages bear ugly consequences” (6). Any scholar interested in how the U.S. renegotiates its multiple pasts will find much to learn in this book.