From pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emil Zola, Consuming the Past explores the complexity of the fin-de-siecle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialization.