Neo-Medievalism: Welcome to the Future Past
About a year ago, a piece in Business Insider described a growing fascination with medieval aesthetics. From guild crafts to illuminated manuscripts, hand tools, stonework, and pre-industrial manufacturing, the past became the new hotness.
At the time, this neo-medievalism registered as one more lifestyle curiosity; the sort of fad editors slot between articles on probiotic sourdough and artisanal soap. Looking back now, that story reads as a foretaste of what’s to come.
The article matters, not because people suddenly decided mail shirts look cool, but because it gives us more data points in a pattern that has been building for years. It turns out that when institutions decline, culture need not collapse. Sometimes it relocates.
Neo-medievalism can’t be reduced to nostalgia for castles and feudal pageantry. It reflects a hunger for continuity, skill, and meaning in work that produces tangible value. Medievals understood apprenticeship and the moral obligation between maker and supporter. Art existed because someone valued it enough to sustain the artist.
Not only did that arrangement build cathedrals, manuscripts, music, and entire cities, its works endure to this day. Because all of society was organized to preserve and hand down institutional knowledge. Modern society’s failure to pass on our forefathers’ hard-won wisdom is the rupture that culturally immpoverished us all.
A vivid example frequent readers will be familiar with is anime. In the Japanese animation industry’s creative heyday of the 1980s-1990s, the vast majority of studios sourced their paints from two major suppliers, Taiyo Shikisai and STAC. As has been written before, in 1998, the key person responsible for mixing the paints at one of the two animation supply giants had a massive heart attack and retired. The trade secrets of a lifetime spent honing his craft went with him. Studios used the excuse to switch from cels to digipaint. You can see the results:
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