Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Editorial Note
- Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight's Tale
- Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints
- Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate
- Harold in Normandy: History and Romance
- The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester's 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great
- Eric Brighteyes: Rider Haggard Rewrites the Sagas
- “Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk”: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- What Tales of a Wayside Inn Tells Us about Longfellow and about Chaucer
- Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism
- “The Bony, Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law
- Notes on Contributors
Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight's Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Editorial Note
- Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight's Tale
- Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints
- Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate
- Harold in Normandy: History and Romance
- The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester's 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great
- Eric Brighteyes: Rider Haggard Rewrites the Sagas
- “Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk”: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- What Tales of a Wayside Inn Tells Us about Longfellow and about Chaucer
- Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism
- “The Bony, Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
If they met aboard some unidentified flying object near Montaillou, would Darth Vader, Jacques Fornier, and Parsifal speak the same language? If so, would it be a galactic pidgin or the Latin of the Gospel according to St. Luke Skywalker?
(Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”)
An art not systematic but additive and compositive, ours and that of the Middle Ages.
(Umberto Eco, “Living in the New Middle Ages”)
“That medieval style offends me, it is all artifice. What is it that you painters say? Pasticcio. It is all pasticcio… “It must be real,” she went on. “What is the reason for the imitation of an imitation?”
(Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton)
This essay explores certain broad analogies in the medievalism of American popular cinema during the past six years, focusing primarily on First Knight (1995) and A Knight's Tale (2001). Both movies flaunt anachronism, designed not to render faithfully their respective sources in Malory or Chaucer, but rather to appeal to a cinematic imaginary about the Middle Ages, composed of bits and pieces drawn from film history and popular culture. The postmodern call to revisit the past with a mixture of nostalgia and irony is answered in such films by deploying the “prior textualization” of the cinematic history of the “Middle Ages” as pastiche. First Knight reimagines Arthurian courtly romance as an amalgam of feudal horse opera and Hollywood melodrama. A Knight's Tale recreates fourteenth century England as a Debordian society of the spectacle where jousting is an X-treme sport.
What is by turns engaging and infuriating about both films is their postmodern ontology: Exactly what worlds are these? The two quotes by Umberto Eco above reflect our mixed emotions about the medievalismby- collage of such movies. We distrust the depthlessness of pastiche and yet recognize that the anachronistic, agglutinative representation of the past in Helgeland's A Knight's Tale may be closer to the poetics of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale than we would comfortably admit. Likewise, the nostalgic eclecticism of First Knight is, mutatis mutandis, a salient feature of many medieval romances. Yet if both films flaunt the wild conglomerations of postmodernism, they do not share its suspicion of meta-narratives. First Knight rewrites the Day of Doom as a Hollywood happy ending, a smooth translatio imperii where Camelot never falls and Excalibur passes from the notably British Connery to the notably American Gere.
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- Studies in Medievalism XIIFilm and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages, pp. 5 - 38Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003