Date Knight: American Myth Making and the Medieval Imaginary

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was held to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Situated in Jackson Park the fair covered over 600 acres and featured nearly 200 buildings. Of these, the California Building was the largest of the state-sponsored constructions. In the central atrium of the California Building stood a sculpture of a medievalized knight on horseback composed of 20,000,000 pounds of prunes. Taking as its point of departure this remarkable sculpture, this paper examines how the medievalism aesthetic of the late-nineteenth century generally and the Chicago World’s Fair specifically worked to ennoble American exceptionalism with a heroic, chivalric, veneer. The publicity of the Fair and the centrality of the Prune Knight offer a unique lens to view the role of “the medieval” in the public imagination.