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How are the Crusades portrayed in popular culture today? Have the medieval images of chivalric and military heroes survived the eras of Orientalism and decolonization? The first of its kind, this comparative study examines representations of the Crusades in both European and Arab medieval texts and in 20th and 21st century transmedia recreations. It follows the cartography and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages through modern, hybridized narratives in novels, film, comics and gaming. The shifting literary tastes, political agendas and cultural exchanges of audiences on both sides of the Mediterranean reflect their anxieties and ideals.
Arch-mediator between the divine and the mundane, the angel is an enduring figure in the Western world. It has been interpreted as an externalization of repressed fantasies, a projection of the self as other, and a metaphor for modern estrangement. This book is the first comparative study of sacred medieval images of angels and their cinematic treatment, including reference to both the medieval and modern imaginations. The text traces the traditional functions of angels and their reworking in film, then takes particular note of new icons like the female angel and others who become models for our connection with transcendence.
The legends of King Arthur have not only endured for centuries, but also flourished in constant retellings and new stories built around the central themes. With the coming of motion pictures, Arthur was destined to hit the screen. This edition of Cinema Arthuriana, revised in 2002, presents 20 essays on the topic of the recurring presence of the legend in film and television from 1904 to 2001. They cover such films as Excalibur (1981) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), television productions such as The Mists of Avalon (2001), and French and German films about the quest for the Holy Grail and the other adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Studies of the influence of the middle ages on aspects of European and American life and culture from 16c to the present day.
This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six perva...
The early thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is the first comprehensive volume devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and its medieval legacy. The twenty essays in this volume, all by internationally known scholars, locate the work in its social,...
In this first ever book-length treatment, 11 scholars with a variety of backgrounds in medieval studies, film studies, and medievalism discuss how historical and fictional medieval women have been portrayed on film and their connections to the feminist movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. From detailed studies of the portrayal of female desire and sexuality, to explorations of how and when these women gain agency, these essays look at the different ways these women reinforce, defy, and complicate traditional gender roles. Individual essays discuss the complex and sometimes conflicting cinematic treatments of Guinevere, Morgan Le Fay, Isolde, Maid Marian, Lady Godiva, Heloise, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Joan of Arc. Additional essays discuss the women in Fritz Lang's The Nibelungen, Liv Ullmann's Kristin Lavransdatter, and Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Beatrice.
Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance. Academia has never been immune to corporate culture, and despite the persistent association of medievalism with escapism, perhaps never has that been more obvious than at the present moment. The six essays that open the volume explore precisely how financial institutions have promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the middle ages. In the second part of the book, contributors explore medievalism in a variety of areas, juxtaposing specific case studies with broader investigations of the discipline...
The King Arthur we imagine did not exist in history. He is the result of stories told and retold, changed and added to by storytellers for centuries, each making the story reflect the storyteller’s time and values. The chapters in this book look at movies, manga, comic books, a television show, and traditional books released since 1960 to explore some of the ways King Arthur has been reimagined in the past 60 years. Interpreting Avalon High and The Kind Who Would Be King, Camelot 3000 and King Arthur vs. Dracula, Fate/Zero, John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, the influence of Arthurian legend on Harry Potter, Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Jerry Zucker’s First Knight, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels, and the BBC series Merlin, the authors find that while we are still interested in the idea of King Arthur, we may also want his story to be more racially and gender inclusive, less elitist, and in some cases, more secular.