Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval images, with particular reference to recent films.
The middle ages provide the material for mass-market films, for historical and fantasy fiction, for political propaganda and claims of legitimacy, and these in their turn exert a force well outside academia. The phenomenon is tooimportant to be left unscrutinised: these essays show the continuing power and applicability of medieval images – and also, it must be said, their dangerousness and often their falsity.
Of the ten essays in this volume, several examine modern movies, including the highly-successful
A Knight’s Tale (Chaucer as a PR agent) and the much-derided
First Knight (the Round Table fights the Gulf War). Others deal with the appropriation of history and literature by a variety of interested parties: King Alfred press-ganged for the Royal Navy and the burghers of Winchester in 1901, William Langland discovered as a prophet of future Socialism, Chaucer at once venerated and tidied into New England respectability. Vikings, Normans and Saxons are claimed as forebears and disowned as losers in works as complex as Rider Haggard’s
Eric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga. Victorian melodramaprovides the clichés of ‘the bad baronet’ who revives the
droit de seigneur (but baronets are notoriously modern creations); and of the ‘bony grasping hand’ of the Catholic Church and its canon lawyers (an image spread in ways eerily reminiscent of the modern ‘urban legend’ in its Internet forms).
Contributors: BRUCE BRASINGTON, WILLIAM CALIN, CARL HAMMER, JONA HAMMER, PAUL HARDWICK, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, GWENDOLYN MORGAN, JOANNE PARKER, CLARE A. SIMMONS, WILLIAM F. WOODS.
Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.
Tabella dei contenuti
Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in
First Knight and
A Knight’s Tale – Nickolas Haydock
Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints – Gwendolyn Morgan
Seeking the Human Image in
The Advocate – William Woods
Harold in Normandy: History and Romance – Carl Hammer
The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great – Joanne Parker
Eric Brighteyes: Rider Haggard rewrites the Sagas – Jona Hammer
‘Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk’: Appropriation of
Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – Paul Hardwick
What
Tales of a Wayside Inn tells us about Longfellow and about Chaucer – William Calin
Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism – Clare A Simmons
‘The Bony Grasping Hand’: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law – Bruce Brasington
Circa l’autore
CLARE A. SIMMONS is a Professor of English at The Ohio State University.
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