Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games ed. by Carol L. Robinson, Pamela Clements (review)

This collection, edited by Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements, is bookended by the brief attempts of Richard Utz and Terry Jones to contextualize an increasingly popular neologism. Utz situates neomedievalism squarely within Jean Baudrillard’s procession of simulacra in its ‘creat(ion) of pseudo-medieval worlds that playfully obliterate history…with a simulacra of the medieval, employing images that are neither an original nor the copy of an original, but altogether “Neo”’ (v). The sly evocation of the Wachowski brothers’ films works on a number of levels. To undertake such analyses one needs to spend long hours within the matrix, but still be willing to unplug, to have one’s suspension of disbelief suspended. Utz’s pun also hints at the strange companionship of science fiction and medievalism, which, though it has a very long history, seems especially intense in recent popular media. The book’s epilogue by Terry Jones demonstrates with customary aplomb how obscure the border between fantasy and philology often becomes. (As it happens, the rotten medieval teeth in Monty Python and the Holy Grail may be a modern projection.) Jones is medievalism’s Woody Allen, and it was a very pleasant surprise indeed to find him doing a cameo here.

Umberto Eco’s use of the term ‘neomedievalism’ in his oft-cited essay ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’ (in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality [New York: Vintage, 1998]) has probably led to its wide dissemination. He notes ‘the curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological investigation’ (63), though in practice Eco constructs a binary of these terms that simply begs for deconstruction (cf. Nickolas Haydock, ‘Medievalism and Excluded Middles,’ Studies in Medievalism XVIII [2009]: 17–30). Carol L. Robinson’s introduction avoids such simple oppositions in setting forth many of the issues that emerge throughout the collection. However, the conceptual metaphors employed to organize the essays can seem giddily exuberant at times: ‘In short, this book is a mega-lens. The lenses of this mega-lens…are viewing points of observations…found within the fluid, hazy vortex of medievalisms, including neomedievalism’ (12).

The first of three essays on film, Leslie A. Coote’s ‘Remembering Dismembering’ kicks off the collection admirably by applying Barthes’ notion of a punctum to film images that capture our attention through the graphic depiction of violence. Sometimes, though, the point of this gets lost, or even misplaced, such as when Lancelot’s wound in the dream sequence of Boorman’s Excalibur is said to be caused by a spear in his thigh, and much is made of the phallic significance of the spear and castration anxieties. In fact Lancelot is pierced in the left side by his own sword. More pointedly, it is doubtful that characterizing the auteurist cinema of Tarkovsky and Bresson as ‘neomedieval’ adds very much to the argument. The following two essays by Clements (on Canterbury Tales films) and by Roman (on the dichotomy between nature and the Church) fail in similar ways to accommodate the likes of Powell and Pressburger, Pasolini, Bergman, and Zeffirelli within a book on ‘neomedieval media.’ For Clements, A Canterbury Tale (1944), I racconti di Canterbury (1972), and A Knight’s Tale (2001) represent modernist, postmodernist, and ‘postmodernist medievalism or even neomedievalism,’ respectively. Clements refuses to consider what she calls ‘looser adaptations,’ such as the recent BBC television series, though we might well ask whether that series is not a more suitable candidate for a book on neomedievalism. Similarly, Roman’s intriguing remarks on the tension between individualistic naturalism and the totalitarian, patriarchal Church in a trio of films forthrightly admits that these works remain modernist, rather than neomedieval.

The fourth chapter, Jennifer deWinter’s trenchant essay on neomedieval animé, thus constitutes the first attempt to confront the ostensible topic of the volume directly. Marshaling an impressive array of critical and theoretical sources...