Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval images, with particular reference to recent films. The middle ages provide the material for mass-market films, for historical and fantasy fiction, for political propaganda and claims of legitimacy, and these in their turn exert a force well outside academia. The phenomenon is tooimportant to be left unscrutinised: these essays show the continuing power and applicability of medieval images - and also, it must be said, their dangerousness and often their falsity. Of the ten essays in this volume, several examine modern movies, including the highly-successful A Knight's Tale (Chaucer as a PR agent) and the much-derided First Knight (the Round Table fights the Gulf War). Others deal with the appropriation of history and literature by a variety of interested parties: King Alfred press-ganged for the Royal Navy and the burghers of Winchester in 1901, William Langland discovered as a prophet of future Socialism, Chaucer at once venerated and tidied into New England respectability. Vikings, Normans and Saxons are claimed as forebears and disowned as losers in works as complex as Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga. Victorian melodramaprovides the cliches of "the bad baronet" who revives the droit de seigneur (but baronets are notoriously modern creations); and of the "bony grasping hand" of the Catholic Church and its canon lawyers (an image spread in ways eerily reminiscent of the modern "urban legend" in its Internet forms). Contributors: BRUCE BRASINGTON, WILLIAM CALIN, CARL HAMMER, JONA HAMMER, PAUL HARDWICK, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, GWENDOLYN MORGAN, JOANNE PARKER, CLARE A. SIMMONS, WILLIAM F. WOODS. Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.

Why did the most read work in English literature go without cinematic adaptation for so long? And why, after so much neglect, did five major film adaptations of the poem appear between 1999 and 2008? This book explores the growing list of films based on or inspired by the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and thus joins the ongoing consideration of film medievalism. If the films lead audiences back to the original, the will discover a work of great cultural, linguistic, and inherent visual power - but will the pervasive influence of cinema affect the future reception of Beowulf? The films derived from it constitute an interesting if yet incomplete body of variants with their own specific social commentary: they inevitably sway not only from the story, but also from the themes and concerns of the original to those more interesting to the filmmakers. The films under consideration here, like all others, respond to the zeitgeist: they measure the pulse of how we are processing inherited notions of heroism in contemporary media, and they teach us more about our own times than about the poem from which they derive.

This work offers a theoretical introduction to the portrayal of medievalism in popular film. Employing the techniques of film criticism and theory, it moves beyond the simple identification of error toward a poetics of this type of film, sensitive to both cinema history and to the role these films play in constructing what the author terms the ""medieval imaginary.""The opening two chapters introduce the rapidly burgeoning field of medieval film studies, viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian philosophy of the time-image. The first chapter explores how a vast array of films (including both auteur cinema and popular movies) contributes to the modern vision of life in the Middle Ages, while the second is concerned with how time itself functions in cinematic representations of the medieval.The final five chapters offer detailed considerations of specific examples of representations of medievalism in recent films, including ""First Knight"", ""A Knight's Tale"", ""The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc"", ""Kingdom of Heaven"", ""King Arthur"", ""Night Watch"", and ""The Da Vinci Code"". The book also surveys important benchmarks in the development of Deleuze's time-image, from classic examples like Bergman's ""The Seventh Seal"" and Kurosawa's ""Kagemusha"" through contemporary popular cinema, in order to trace how movie medievalism constructs images of the multivalence of time in memory and representation.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance. In the wake of the many passionate responses to its predecessor, Studies in Medievalism 22 also addresses the role of corporations in medievalism. Amid the three opening essays, Amy S. Kaufman examines how three modern novelists have refracted contemporary corporate culture through an imagined and highly dystopic Middle Ages. On either side of that paper, Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz explore how the Woolworth Company and Google have variously promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the Middle Ages. And Clare Simmons expands on that approach in a full-length article on the Lord Mayor's Show in London. Readers are then invited to find other permutations of corporate influence in six articles on the gendering of Percy's Reliques, the Romantic Pre-Reformation in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, renovation and resurrection in M.R. James's "Episode of Cathedral History", salvation in the Commedia references of Rodin's Gates of Hell, film theory and the relationship of the Sister Arts to the cinematic Beowulf, and American containment culture in medievalist comic-books. While offering close, thorough studies of traditional media and materials, the volume directly engages timely concerns about the motives and methods behind this field and many others inacademia. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Aida Audeh, Elizabeth Emery, Katie Garner, Nickolas Haydock, Amy S. Kaufman, Peter W. Lee, Patrick J. Murphy, Fred Porcheddu, Clare A. Simmons, Mark B. Spencer, Richard Utz.

An exciting new work in the burgeoning field of movie medieval ism, this collection of essays focuses on film representations of the Crusades, other medieval East/West encounters, and the modern inheritance of encounters between orientalist fantasy and apocalyptic conspiracy. The essays themselves make substantial contributions to our understanding of orientalist medieval ism in film. Several study the various filmic representations of popular figures such as El Cid, Roland, Richard I, and Saladin in films like Anthony Mann's El Cid and Frank Cassenti's Chanson de Roland. Other topics include the political crusade in Youssef Chahine's ""El Naser Salah Ad Din"", the redemption of history and templar romance in recent films like ""National Treasure"" and ""The Da Vinci Code"", and the role of set design, location, and landscape in setting the stage for cinematic medieval ism. A substantial introduction surveys the notion of cinematic inheritance and draws parallels between the medieval-era crusades and the modern inter-faith wars which have been thrust to the center of mass-mediated political discourse in the post-9/11 world.