from Medieval Academy News

"Yet Another Part of the Very Expensive Forest": A (Brief) Meditation on Medieval Studies and Popular Culture
by Martha Driver

Describing Perceval le Gallois (1978), C. G. Crisp noted that Eric Rohmer’s film “is not so much true to the Middle Ages as we have come to know them as it is true to a particular visual and literary representation of mediaeval reality,” that is, reality as conveyed in medi-eval manuscript paintings and by the text of Chrétien’s story, which remain valuable subjects of study in our libraries and classrooms (Eric Rohmer, p. 84).

Like Chrétien’s masterwork, Rohmer’s Perceval is stately in pace, rambling in narrative, and highly stylized. The actors’ gestures and the settings and music are drawn directly from medieval sources. In popular culture, the rich narrative entertainments of the medieval past have been recast and re-imagined to create the entertainments of the present, which also have their uses as powerful pedagogical tools. These modern excrescences in the form of film, novels, even the musical, are attractive perhaps because they remind us of the medieval stories we love so much, sending scholars and students back to their books.

Like medieval chronicles, modern representations of the Middle Ages do not exactly tell the truth, which immediately makes them interesting. Writing more generally about film in 1898, Boleslaw Matuszewski, a Polish filmmaker and camera-man, said that movies were “not only a proof of history but a fragment of history itself,” though whose history he does not stipulate.

Even the earliest documentaries, like the film of the Battle of the Somme, filmed in 1916, and housed in the Imperial War Museum in London, were staged. (Matus-zewski was cited and clips from the battle were shown and described by Roger Smither, keeper of the film and photographic archives of the Imperial War Museum, at the Film & History conference in Dallas, November 2004.) The idea that film represented an “accurate historical record,” in other words, was debunked almost with its invention.

There are some brilliant films with medieval themes, the majority made earlier rather than later in the twentieth century. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) is said by many people—not just medievalists—to be the best movie ever made. Alexander Nevsky (1938), directed by Sergei Eisenstein, with its powerful score by Sergei Prokofiev, still moves audiences.

Other classics include Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and of course the perennial favorite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Still other films worthy of discussion are Lancelot du Lac, directed by Robert Bresson (1974), and Eric Rohmer’s lovely Perceval le Gallois. All of these films attempt to recreate, on some level, the medieval past and to engage viewers imaginatively in medieval narrative. They are modern chronicles of medieval history.

And then there are the bad films (or the not very good films) about the Middle Ages that still have their pedagogical uses, both for students and for their professors. Jerry Bruckheimer’s film ex-travaganza, King Arthur (2004), pretentiously advertised as telling “the real truth about King Arthur,” has many problems with its historical references, but remains one good starting point for discussions of the Arthur legends and the reading of Malory (students in my classes vocally prefer Malory).

Kingdom of Heaven (2005), while visually sumptuous and a much better movie on several counts, has similar problems. Instead of focusing on the compelling historical events that occurred in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, just before its recapture by Saladin from the crusaders, the fictional plot has been dumbed down, presumably to appeal to adolescent audiences. But the movie did send me back to my books to check the movie experience against historical accounts (who was the real Balian? and who was Jerusalem’s leper king?), which is another form of pleasurable experience.

It is also interesting to note the number of recent novels that feature a medieval book or library collection as central to the action. The summer’s blockbuster The Historian (2005), by Elizabeth Kostova, features a bibliophiliac Dracula who offers the professor-protagonist a moral choice: he may opt either for instantaneous death or for a soulless eternity of studying, cataloguing, and writing about Dracula’s hidden library of lost medieval treasures. The professor in the novel immediately chooses death, of course, though this professor wanted a fuller description of Dracula’s library collection first.

Codex (2005), by Lev Grossman, focuses on the search for a lost medieval manuscript that also functions as a steganogram, or coded message. At one point, one of the amateur book sleuths believes she has located this extraordinarily valuable text. She says, “I recognize the text from the fragments: it’s Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, late fifteenth century. Terrible stuff, like medieval Jerry Falwell, but it would be a huge find. There are no complete copies in existence” (p. 178).

Similar amusing nonsense may be found in the New York Times bestseller The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (2004), which has at its center the undoubtedly beautiful and bizarre Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus in 1499. Also described in this novel as a steganogram, the Hypnerotomachia creates conflict for two generations of scholars associated with Princeton University and in-cludes murder and mayhem, along with factual information one generally learns as an undergraduate. Still, such unexpected encounters with Aldus and Lydgate (Lydgate!) create another kind of pleasure.

For medievalists, films like King Arthur or Kingdom of Heaven or bestselling novels like The Historian are a busman’s holiday, a brief vacation away from teaching and scholarly inquiry, yet it is pleasing to meet old friends in new contexts. Like many of my medieval colleagues, I shelled out $100 (actually $101.25, according to the ticket stub) to see Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway, and being a book person, I liked the Playbill with its notes in faux Finnish and the silly self-consciousness of the names of the scenes (“Yet Another Part of the Very Expensive Forest”). But as I was sitting in the Shubert Theatre, I found myself thinking about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The film seemed superior in almost all respects (with the notable exception of the Lady of the Lake as Guinevere, a wonderful invention). So, in that case, the musical sent me back to the film.

I have just purchased tickets for Beowulf, described in the advertising as a “ritualistic rock opera,” to be performed at the Irish Repertory Theatre with songs, dance, and puppets. While this musical will not (and cannot) begin to approach the pleasures of studying and reading the Anglo-Saxon text, nor the translations of Talbot Donaldson or Roy Liuzza, nor Beowulf criticism more generally (Tolkien!), the agreeable memories of these will inform my enjoyment of the performance, no matter how dreadful (or wonderful?) it might turn out to be.

Editor’s note. Martha W. Driver is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York. She was a guest editor for Film & History: Medieval Period in Film, and with Sid Ray, has co-edited The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (McFarland, 2004).