Studies in Medievalism XII

Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval images, with particular reference to recent films.

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-successfulA Knight's Tale (Chaucer as a PR agent) and the much-deridedFirst 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'sEric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga. Victorian melodramaprovides the clichés of "the bad baronet" who revives thedroit 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.

Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche inFirst Knight andA Knight's Tale - Nickolas Haydock
Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints - Gwendolyn Morgan
Seeking the Human Image inThe 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 ofPiers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Paul Hardwick
WhatTales 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