This chapter examines the various modes of film practice adopted for representing the Middle Ages, from the epic historical adventure film to low-budget art-house fare. It suggests that film-makers frequently blur the boundaries between different historical periods, and that there is something specific about the way the premodern past is represented as dangerous and dirty. The chapter compares representations of the medieval with representations of the more modern past, arguing that the former tend to adopt a more populist and masculine appeal than the numerous middle-brow costume dramas set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers the ways in which the films engage with questions of national identity and national cinema, in an era in which film production is increasingly transnational. The chapter focuses on films released since 1980 - a little over fifty of which have offered some version of the British medieval past.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that a playful confusion of temporalities is a fundamental characteristic not just of the term but also of medieval films themselves. Medieval films reflect on the fact that they make present a past that was never filmable and offer alternatives to chronological conceptions of time. The book traces the special relationship to temporality that characterises medieval film to its roots in the overlap of medievalism, film history and film theory. It suggests further examples of such new ways in which films that engage with the Middle Ages will be relevant to the present and future. Medieval film is not condemned to perpetuate the status quo, but, through its very position outside the historiographical and generic mainstreams can alter representations of history and cinematic modes.

It would seem that on virtually every aspect of Geoffrey Chaucer's work, his readers are currently assailed by a host of mutually exclusive interpretations and critical approaches. On the one hand, Chaucer is an Augustinian allegorist; on the other, he is sceptical about exegesis as a mode of interpretation and satirises the excesses of moral allegorising. On the one hand, he is a misogynist; on the other, he a defender of women. This book emphasises the ways in which seeing Chaucer in the context of the political issues, social values, generic conventions and literary theory of his own day can help us to understand the meaning of his work. It concludes that what a contextual approach to Chaucer's work reveals, above all else, is that literary texts are nowhere more historical in their nature than when they seek to pass themselves off as timeless and dehistoricised.

This chapter focuses on a select group of films set in Middle Ages, produced in Italy at two moments of dramatic transformation in Italian culture and politics the Fascist era during 1930s and early 1940s and the epoch of the 'Economic Miracle' in the 1960s. It examines how cinema appropriates the past so as to recognise 'the power it holds from its shameful kinship with the makers of history and the tellers of stories, in Jacques Ranciere's words. The chapter explains the films that have chosen probes their kinship with modes of history making, to understand better how these different cinematic inventions shed light on conceptions of medievalism and, further, on the contemporary cultural and political moments of their creators. Cinematic fables of power, such as Condottieri and La corona di ferro, are allegories containing the shards of residual elements and emergent cultural memories of medievalism as legend and folklore.

This chapter examines the contrasting uses, or non-uses, of medieval art objects in two medieval films and assesses how they contribute to the films' overall authenticity-effects. Both films are based on twentieth-century novels which share a knowing approach to the past, patching overt anachronism with real and apparent samples of medieval text. The chapter makes tentative contribution to a list of such characteristics: that the fragmented visual profile of the medieval makes medieval authenticity-effects particularly troublesome to produce. One of the few medieval films to refer explicitly to the art of the period, Perceval le Gallois, uses it to construct a non-mimetic aesthetic. The anti-mimetic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which various modes of the illusory medieval - chivalric glamour, earthy squalor, quotations of medieval forms - jostle with the rude interruptions of modernity, may be the paradigmatic medieval film, and is certainly a favourite of many medievalist.

Critics who consider the social meaning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fall into two main schools: those who present his social thought as an expression of the dominant spirit or ideology of his day and those who see Chaucer as possessing a more heterodox voice. This chapter attempts to put the case for each of these views, examining them in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's distinction between the conservative monologic work and the more subversive, dialogic text, before an assessment of their relative merits. It is possible to reconcile the apparently contradictory 'monologic' and 'dialogic' interpretations of the Canterbury Tales. If the Canterbury Tales left itself open to being read as a dialogic work by modern critics, it could be argued that, given medieval notions of the purposes of literature, such a reading was far removed from that of Chaucer himself and hardly available to readers in Chaucer's own day.

This chapter shows that all films have been considered medieval by a surprisingly large number of influential film theorists. It argues that the conceptualisation of film as medieval in its production, transmission, aesthetics or reception originates with the earliest attempts to come to terms with the new medium and underlies many influential film theories of the twentieth century and even the most recent media theories. The chapter shows the ways in which preconceived notions of the Middle Ages filtered into and were influenced by film theory throughout the twentieth century; and to what extent film theory relies on knowledge about the Middle Ages for its basic principles. The reliance of film theory on medievalism has never been acknowledged by film scholars. This is symptomatic of the traditional divide between medieval and modern studies, where the continuities and influences of medieval thought, art and culture on modernity are rarely researched.

This chapter discusses the problems posed to film, since the advent of sound film, by foreign language - problems which relate as much to questions of mimesis and representation as to the international circulation of film. It explores to what extent medieval film engages with questions of language, and to what extent these engagements may be distinctive. Three principal sites of activity are identified: extra-diegetically speaking, subtitles constitute a key authenticity-effect. Diegetically speaking, in its representations of situations of language contact and translation, it is argued here that popular medieval film shares contemporary cinematic concerns about intercultural communication in a global society. In films aimed at monolingual audiences, diegetic interpreting or subtitles are likely to be required. Rather than having a supplemental function, these subtitles constitute an integral element of filmic medievalism. Subtitles may also be pressed into service in films that portray themselves as 'rewriting' the medieval past.

This chapter highlights the music of four medieval films: the folk-inspired melodies of Brother Sun Sister Moon, the synthesised keyboards of Ladyhawke, the sweeping orchestration of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the rock-and-roll soundtrack of A Knight's Tale. These films use music to bridge a gap between the postmodern and medieval and to add new narrative information that is not present in the films' visual story. Films that are set within the medieval era are examples of medievalisms - post-medieval refashionings of the medieval age, posing as the real thing. Disphasure, then, can be a useful term to describe the ways in which film music plays a unique role in films that endeavour to represent the medieval period. Symphonic music continues to be a popular option for historical films' scores, but today a film's soundtrack is a critical component in the marketing schemes, and music videos for the film.

This chapter argues that certain films with medieval themes and settings, mostly dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, demonstrate a surprising affinity with the themes and techniques associated with film noir. The romanticism of medieval films may be regarded as a virtual antidote to the cynicism and nihilism of film noir. Film theory has also drawn some implicit parallels between medieval films and noir. Medieval historical movies and crime films share a certain generic status in cinematic taxonomies. Film noir historians have always attempted to distinguish between earlier crime films and the unique characteristics of films noir. German expressionism is one of the most widely cited sources for film noir, especially given the exile of so many fugitive film-makers from Nazi Germany in Hollywood. But German expressionist film is also one of the tributaries of high-art medieval movies.