Did you know we’re in the midst of a “medieval girl summer?”
So far I’ve seen “knightcore” reading lists on BookTok, fashionistas declaring that chain mail is having a moment, and lifestyle bloggers suggesting “medieval handicrafts” like book-binding and candle making.
Across Pinterest and Instagram there are images of enchanted forests, gleaming swords, and maidens in stone towers, and you can even find tips on how you can have a “medieval girl summer” right in your very own home, ranging from reading old books in your garden to making a sumptuous pigeon pie for a dinner party.
This isn’t the first time medieval aesthetics have had a modern moment.
There was the mid-century medieval trend of the ‘60s and ‘70s (which drew heavily from the Victorian era’s own medieval revival) as counter-cultural types took up medieval motifs in fashion, music, and film…
And then, in the ‘90s, the medieval imagination once again captured the cultural consciousness, from the medieval-tinged global phenomenon of the Harry Potter books and film franchise, to the broader fantasy boom that even touched the catwalk, giving us this 1998 Christian Dior by John Galliano celestial armor moment that still makes me swoon…
And today there is the specific niche of this revival known as Y2K medieval.
This takes elements of medieval fantasy and blends it with the futuristic optimism that abounded at the turn of the millennia, captured by the spate of medieval movies that came out during that time.
Seeing as how I’ve been having a medieval girl summer for, well, much of my life (my imagination has always gravitated toward stone abbeys, illuminated manuscripts, foggy forests, saints, hermits, swords, and horses) I’m delighted by this trend.
But what I find just as interesting is the discussion around it.
Many are ascribing this medieval girl summer to escapism. The thinking goes: things are tough - economically, socially, politically – so people cope by imagining themselves in a bygone age.
As Fashionista put it:
“Most everything the medieval revival brings reads as a refusal of everything modern. Earlier movements were, in large part, reactions against social turmoil: class consciousness during Victorian-era industrialization, the Vietnam War and McCarthyism in the 1960s, and the onset of the digital age in the 2000s. It was only a matter of time before big tech and rising conservatism brewed a dark age of our own, priming the fashion landscape for another medieval resurgence.”
But this conclusion falls short for me.
Because if you dig into the comments on these Tiktok videos and Instragram posts, this medieval girl summer is about something much deeper than politics or economics or technology; it’s about longing.
Miracles and Relics, Saints and Sacraments
Today we’re told there isn’t really anything magical about the world.
A sunset is just light scattering through the atmosphere, love is just hormones run amok, beauty is just personal preference, and death is just the end of existence. If you’re a modern person you know there is nothing beyond the world, no magic, no transcendence, what you see is what you get.
And I think this is what the medieval girl summer is really escaping from.
The people commenting on these viral posts are not just searching for a new fashion fix or dreamy book to read; what they want is to inhabit an enchanted world – and in the Western imagination, that is the medieval era.
In movies and books, music videos and TV shows, we have picked up on the notion that in earlier times things felt magical, there were hermits and cauldrons and quests and spells. The world “back then” felt enchanted in a way it doesn’t now.
And there’s a historical reason for that.
Far from the modern caricature of “the dark ages,” the medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic achievement. No one would argue it was perfect; spanning roughly a thousand years between 500 – 1500 AD, it encompassed wars, plagues, famine, upheaval, oppression, and the suffering and strife that always accompanies human history.
But that wasn’t all.
The medieval era was an age when a shared Christian vision blossomed into cathedrals, universities, illuminated manuscripts, sacred music, developments in technology and agriculture, and astonishing artistic achievements. It gave rise to the first coherent articulation of what we would today call human rights, which emerged from Christian theology. The medieval era left us with one of the richest intellectual inheritances the world has ever known – and it was thoroughly enchanted.
The reason for this enchantment goes like this: Medieval people believed that God created the world intentionally. Creation might be fallen, but it was nevertheless good. Creation reflects its Creator and is intelligible, meaningful, and capable of revealing God: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” – Psalm 19
The Incarnation of Christ took this even further: God entered matter itself, forever affirming that the material world can mediate divine reality. Mankind had long perceived the world was haunted by realities beyond what the eye could see, but Christianity fulfilled that ancient intuition, gathering humanity’s scattered myths and symbols into a coherent vision in which all creation found its meaning in the God who had spoken it into being.
This is the iconographic worldview, the idea that the world is like a stained glass window through which we may glimpse divine truths.
It is almost impossible for us today to understand just how completely this way of seeing shaped the life of the average medieval person. They inhabited a world in which every created thing spoke to them of God, every season was limned with spiritual significance, and everyday life unfolded within a vast tapestry of reality that was charged with divine purpose. Heaven and earth met continually in miracles, in relics, in the lives of the saints, in sacraments, and in countless stories in which angels, demons, enchanted forests, prophetic dreams, and mysterious hermits brushed up against ordinary life. It was from within this dazzling Christian imagination that so many of our beloved fairy tales and legends emerged.
The Wasteland
So how did we go from that enchanted world to the modern perspective where nothing means anything?
Because over the centuries the West underwent a long period of historical unraveling. There is much that went into this transformation but to sum it up we can point to the rise of mechanistic science, Enlightenment rationalism, and the gradual erosion of religious belief that eventually dismantled the ancient cosmic story. After this, the world was no longer a poem radiant with divine meaning, but increasingly seen as a soulless - and pointless - machine.
And so, from a world where everything meant something, we made for ourselves a world where nothing means anything. What’s worse, we are told that this way of looking at the world, this ambient belief in nothing, is a neutral appraisal of reality and therefore an inarguable fact. When really, it is a distinct, ideologically-driven dogma, one that is ruthlessly enforced everywhere you look.
And just as it’s difficult to overstate how completely the iconographic worldview shaped the life of the average medieval person, it is just as hard to recognize how completely our own secular worldview shapes our lives today. Even those in the West who believe in God have been shaped by a culture that, for generations, has taught that meaning is something we invent rather than discover. And the result hasn’t been the liberated utopia we were promised, but a culture marked by widespread alienation, fractured families, and epidemic rates of anxiety, addiction, and despair.
Having stripped the world of transcendence, we find ourselves surrounded by unprecedented material abundance yet haunted by the persistent feeling that something essential has been lost. And so we wander a secular wasteland yearning for something that can no longer be named, our hearts stricken with a homesick longing to inhabit a world charged with meaning.
Calling All Wandering Hearts
It is striking how often the medieval resurfaces in our collective imagination. It passes from one generation to the next like an inheritance that the West cannot bring itself to discard, re-emerging in the Victorian revival, in the Arts and Crafts movement, in Tolkien and Lewis and the fantasy literature of the twentieth century, and now in the 2026 Medieval Girl Summer.
This continual resurgence is about more than fashion trends; it is about the iconographic imagination itself, the intuition that the world is radiant with divine meaning, continually bearing witness to God. Every generation or so, when the metaphysical hollowness of modernity becomes too difficult to bear, we reach back toward our civilization’s former vision of reality, drawn once more to forests and saints, mystics and monasteries, because they belong to a way of seeing that still answers something deep within us.
And that longing is not moving in only one direction…
Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, mystic, and Doctor of the Church, wrote of viriditas, the greening power of God continually flowing through His creation to pull it toward its proper flourishing. And I think the God who draws all things to Himself is able to work even through the passing fashions and fleeting preoccupations of our fickle age, using them to awaken desires the trendsetters never intended.
Maybe the current trend of “medieval girl summer” is one small tendril of viriditas, that radiant vitality generated by a God who delights in speaking through the ordinary things of this world, left like a cosmic breadcrumb trail to guide all wandering hearts back to Himself.
I’d like to end by adding my own contribution to the chorus of people encouraging us to have a medieval girl summer. While others will tell you to bake pigeon pie, learn calligraphy, or wear chain mail jewelry while reading Le Morte d’Arthur in the woods, my suggestion will be less Instagramable:
Recover the iconographic worldview.
Learn to look upon the world as medieval people once did. Learn to see the stars not merely as distant suns but as declarations of His glory, forests as more than ecosystems, and your own life as much more than an accidental flicker between two oblivions. Above all, know that you are not a solitary individual burdened with inventing your own meaning, but someone made in the image of God, loved wildly, and created for communion with Him. If you begin there, I suspect you will find that the medieval girl summer was never really about fashion or food or films, but about learning to see the world as though it were - and always had been - radiant with the presence of God.
Further Reading:
Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age
Disney Adults Just Want God: A Theological Defense of Artificial Wonder
How Fantasy Literature Lost its Soul: From Narnia to Nihilsm