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In the October 1995 issue of Good Housekeeping, there appears an advertisement for a new "Barbie Collector's Series," featuring for the first time a doll called "Medieval Lady Barbie." Clad in a precious garment of the high Gothic style, this icon of our time is a dramatic representation of how the Middle Ages are perceived in popular culture at the end of the twentieth century. Medieval Lady Barbie is certainly not meant to function as an historically accurate document: she is first of all a toy, one of Mattel's many collector's series toys (compare Ebersole/Peabody 16, and Rand 164), and the use of a medieval garment for this twentiety-century doll illustrates that the Middle Ages have become a kind of treasure trove that can be mined in any way we like; they have become a kind of "queer accessory," as Erica Rand has expressed it in her anthropological study of the Barbie. By using a medieval dress, the maker does not wish to allude to the Middle Ages as a whole; rather, he wishes to play with isolated aspects of the distant era. The dress has a strangely comforting quality about it and an emotional nearness that is both apparent and mysterious. These qualities stem not from the Barbie, nor from the medieval accessory alone, but from the combination. The imagined dialogue between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century should convey an assurance to the modern reader that, amidst all the social, cultural, and political chaos present at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are constants in our cultural understanding of ourselves, in our cultural identity. The reality, of course, is that there is no dialogue going on. The Middle Ages has its twentieth-century speakers; the past can never speak for itself. The present takes over this function, for it has tamed the Middle Ages.

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