This engaging new study analyzes cinematic treatments of the Middle Ages within a diverse range of popular and artistic films. At a time when students have more experience with watching movies than with reading and evaluating literature and history, Cinematic Illuminations harnesses the power of popular culture to make accessible a period that often seems forbidding and remote. From The Seventh Seal and The Lion in Winter to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the authors examine the ways in which the twentieth century has reimagined medieval times. Such analysis brings to life for students the literature, poetry, history, and art of the Middle Ages.Drawing from current critical approaches to both medieval and film studies, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman focus on two main issues of historical film. First is the inherent tension between the artifice required by film to create historical reality and the accuracy central to claims of history. Second are the ways iconography and filming conventions rewrite our understanding of the historical period portrayed in the film. In this case, the authors ask, how do contemporary representations of the Middle Ages influence cultural fantasies about our own time? Their detailed and accessible readings reveal just how strongly medieval history continues to resonate with modern audiences.Cinematic Illuminations offers medievalists, literary and cultural theorists, and film theorists and buffs a fresh approach to understanding how popular culture interprets and makes use of the past through the medium of film.''The authors' nuanced and detailed analysis of an amazing diversity of medieval films... in their political and cultural contexts artfully supports their assertion that medieval films offer us 'a different way of thinking about the past as well as the present.''' -- Susan Aronstein, author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia
List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsPart 1: Theory and Methods of Cinematic Medievalism1. Traversing the Fantasy: Screening the Middle Ages2. Signs of the Medieval: A Sociological Stylistics of Film3. Celluloid History: Cinematic Fidelity and InfidelityPart 2: The Politics of Cinematic Medievalism4. Mirror of Princes: Representations of Political Authority in Medieval Films5. The Politics of Hagiography: Joan of Arc on the Screen6. The Hagiography of Politics: Mourning in America7. The Crusades: War of the Cross or God's Own Bloodbath?Part 3: Cinematic Medievalism and the Anxieties of Modernity8. Looking Awry at the Grail: Mourning Becomes Modernity9. Apocalyptic Medievalism: Rape and Disease as Figures of Social Anomie10. Forever Young: The Teen Middle AgesNotesBibliographyIndex
""A number of studies have followed, but none can hold a candle to Cinematic Illuminations.""
