Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture ed. by Gail Ashton, Daniel T. Kline (review)

This collection of fourteen essays by diverse hands makes a major contribution to the ever growing field of medievalism/medievalisms/neomedievalism/post-medievalism studies, in no small part because it eschews debates about nomenclature and theory for their own sake and offers instead readings of texts previously ignored and new readings of texts that have often been discussed before. Umberto Eco’s disarmingly simple 1986 dictum in Travels in Hyperreality that ‘people seem to like the Middle Ages’—or, at least, what they think of as the Middle Ages—has never been more true as the essays in this volume clearly attest.

Candace Barrington begins this collection with a study of how Chaucer’s problematic Prioress’ Tale has been incorporated into high school curricula in an unusual way, with some unexpected results. The tale’s virulent anti-Semitism has long been explained away in college-level texts in terms of any number of historical contexts and bowdlerized or edited out in children’s versions, but the issue clearly presents a continuing challenge for young adult readers, an increasingly growing and important market for booksellers academic and popular. Barrington examines thirty-two YouTube videos made as part of high school assignments asking students to respond to the tale. What she finds are a series of interesting ways in which students use their videos to refract the anti-Semitism in the tale by ‘distancing themselves from it,’ ‘by adding disclaimers,’ by ‘erasing it,’ by ‘transferring it to another group,’ or by minimizing it by ‘justifying the Jews’ anger’ in the tale (20–22).

Andrew Lynch follows with a fresh look at an oft-maligned ‘medieval’ film, Disney’s 1973 full-length animated feature Robin Hood. Key to Lynch’s argument is an approach that looks at the film not within the canon of Disney animation, where it clearly suffers in comparison to any number of other full-length animated features made before or after, but within the more long standing tradition of retellings of the highly elastic legend of Robin Hood, whose medieval and post-medieval lives have never suffered from what Norris J. Lacy once called ‘a tyranny of tradition’ that governs retellings of the legend of Arthur.

Steve Ellis next examines Virginia Woolf’s Middle Ages, mining a number of her works, especially those in which she encounters Dante. Notably, Ellis looks at the very different ways Woolf and T.S. Eliot read Dante, the former for herself and the latter for others. Dante was for Woolf a source of solace; for Eliot, a source of inspiration. A comparison of contrasting ways of encountering the medieval also underlies Louise D’Arcens essay on Dario Fo’s Misterio Buffo, his most overtly medievalist play. Both Fo and his countryman Pier Paolo Pasolini were, early on, influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s Italian take on the Communist Manifesto, but Pasolini would eventually break with Gramsci and repudiate his own most medievalist work, the cinematic Trilogy of Life, while Fo would continue to negotiate between his own theories of art as a social force and Gramsci’s theories of class warfare.

Daniel T. Kline offers a fresh reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, surely the most well-known, most talked about, and (dare I say) most successful example of what I long ago dubbed ‘cinema Arthuriana.’ Kline’s approach focuses on the key roles played in the film by the eventually decapitated Historian, by excrement, and by violence to argue that the film is clearly ‘the dirtiest’ and most subversive Arthurian film ever made (80). If the Python film is one of the most discussed medievalist films, Robert S. Sturges goes looking for the cinematic medieval in some unexpected places, finding interesting (and convincing) parallels between The Second Shepherds’ Play and Courtney Hunt’s 2008 independent Canadian film Frozen River. In the process, Sturges raises an interesting larger question about what makes medievalist films most...