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a royal hall (Figure 5): Camelot ’s world has one source of power and authority, the monarchy, not the dual powers of lordship and church of medieval history. The Winchester Round Table is perhaps the most interesting of the objects, for it is an artefact which neatly encapsulates the multiple media and times of Arthurianism. It was probably made in the late thirteenth century for an Arthurian
]), pp. 152–227. 2 Medieval film has been defined in a number of ways, and potentially covers an enormous range of films engaging with medieval history, texts, characters and/ or themes; see, e.g., Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, ‘Preface: Hollywood knights’ in Driver and Ray (eds), The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from
-known Kurosawa film, Throne of Blood (1957), sets Shakespeare’s Macbeth in medieval Japan, also recalling the noir world of betrayal, ambition, murder, a recursive plot and a devious and manipulative female character. If Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood combines Shakespeare’s version of medieval history with certain noir characteristics, it is certainly a nod to an earlier filming of
is a story chosen for its ability to address current concerns. The filmmakers thus use a version of medieval history in Kingdom of Heaven to address twenty-first-century tensions between East and West, Islam and Christianity – yet they managed to invoke the wrath of conservatives in both camps. On the one hand, they received death threats from Muslim activists who saw any revival of the crusader
, Condottieri uses myth and allegory differently from Lang’s spiritualised treatment of the hero’s life and death. What has been generally considered worthy of comment about the film is its partisan, if not propagandistic, appropriation of Italian medieval history and, as many critics and viewers have commented, its evocation of the figure of Benito Mussolini through the figure of Giovanni delle Bande Nere. 21
democracy’. 7 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jefferson was also an ardent proponent of teaching early medieval history, law and Anglo-Saxon at the newly emerging universities of North America. 8 Underlying such views of the early medieval – specifically Anglo-Saxon – origin of American institutions was the ‘germ theory’, proposed in the 1880s by the historian Herbert Baxter Adams, under whom both Woodrow
. 49 John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (London, Routledge, 2003 ), p. 24. 50 Ibid ., p. 25. 51 Ibid . 52
This is the first of a two-volume textbook that is aimed at first-year undergraduates as they begin their study of medieval history. It covers the period from the so-called ‘fall of Rome’ in the course of the fifth century through to the ‘Norman moment’ in the course of the eleventh. The textbook covers the broad geographical area defined by the former Western Roman Empire in an even-handed fashion, giving equal attention to Iberia and to Sicily as to England and to Francia. Each chapter deals with a given region within a defined chronological framework, but is structured thematically, and deliberately avoids a narrative presentation. The topics of governmentality, identity and religiosity serve as broad overarching categories with which to structure each chapter. The authors outline the scholarly debates within each field, explaining to a student audience what is at stake in those debates, and how different bodies of evidence and different interpretations of that evidence give rise to different perspectives upon early medieval European history. Medieval history can seem to the student as if it were an impenetrable thicket of agreed fact that just has to be learned: nothing could be further from the truth, and this textbook sets out to open the way to an engaged understanding of the period and its sources.
This introduction situates the volume within the existing academic literature on gothic and family relations, and introduces the guiding research questions. Within Gothic studies, the central role of kinship relations has been acknowledged but it has seldom been studied as a topic in itself; within disciplines that study kinship, such as anthropology or history, the attention for Gothic has been lacking. Starting from the assumption that Gothic fiction is a key site where sociocultural figurations of the family are negotiated, this volume aims to analyze how Gothic figurations of kinship both contest and reinforce orthodox notions of the nuclear family. The chapters address such questions as: how does Gothic fiction mediate the ways in which the family is understood, both as a shifting constellation of social and personal ties and as a powerful regulatory ideal; how does Gothic fiction configure, refigure or disfigure conceptualizations and representations of kinship; when do cultural figurations of kinship become Gothic?
This chapter deals with the importance of maternal miniature identification for first-wave Gothic heroines. Elliott focuses on how first-wave Gothic fiction pits matriarchal against patriarchal pictorial identifications to reinforce the bourgeois attack on aristocratic patriarchy with gendered as well as class-based narratives of kinship. Gothic texts such as Evelina, The Confessional of Valombre and others demonstrate that, against an overt play of binary oppositions, and against the prevailing emphasis on difference in contemporary literary studies, the greatest power of matriarchal picture identification lies in its ability to produce and project devastating resemblances.