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“Castles are like possessions: merely temporary!”: Neomedieval Architectural Praxis in Stronghold: Crusader II
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXXII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 March 2023, pp 73-92
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Summary
In Firefly Studio's real-time strategy game Stronghold: Crusader II, players are tasked with creating order and wealth from an otherwise anarchical wilderness. Entrusted with Richard the Lionheart's expeditionary force, they sail to the Holy Land to prepare a beachhead for his march towards Jerusalem. Yet after rough weather and plague devastates their small flotilla, they land with only a handful of peasants and even fewer supplies. To make matters worse, players soon discover that this “strange new land” is not as uninhabited as the game's narrator, their loquacious scribe, seems to think. Despite its inhospitable climate, fierce beasts, and volatile weather, the vast majority of the game's arid landscape has been settled and fortified by Saladin's forces – forces that hold the upper hand in almost every aspect that the game counts as success: population, trade, troop strength, and martial technology. Players, however, do possess one advantage that the “infidel” does not. Privy to the secrets of Western architectural praxis, they know how to build castles. They know where to site granaries, where to establish farms and quarries, where to build barracks, hovels, workshops, taverns, churches, and everything else that, in popular accounts of the Crusades, are constructed as prerequisites to Western cultural and military dominance.
Players, as such, are ultimately able to redeem the Holy Land. Wielding a kind of architectural sovereignty, they are able to reshape and thereby conquer its spectacular topography. As David Matthews writes about St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Australia, they are able “to medievalise it,” which is to say, “to colonize it.” Stronghold: Crusader II thus constructs medieval architectural praxis as a strategy of domination. As with the real-time strategy games in the aptly named Civilization and Ages of Empires franchises, Stronghold: Crusader II engages players in a fantasy of empire-building, one that justifies genocide and wholesale environmental devastation through what Dan Kline describes as the always-moral imperative of imposing economic and cultural hegemony on territories that are constructed as otherwise wild, unruly, or contested. In doing so, Stronghold Crusader II inverts one of the most enduring tenets of nineteenth-century medievalist architectural praxis: the idea that the exigencies of the present can be contained in and understood through the more permanent values of an idealized past.
15 - Swords, Sorcery, and Steam: The Industrial Dark Ages in Contemporary Medievalism
- from III - Other Interpretations
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- By Kevin Moberly, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Brent Moberly, Indiana University
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland
- With Vincent Ferré, Alicia C. Montoya
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXIV
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 December 2015
- Print publication:
- 19 February 2015, pp 193-216
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Summary
Peter Jackson's The Desolation of Smaug affords audiences a rare glimpse of the means of production through which the spectacular wealth of Middle Earth is realized. The second installment of Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, the film culminates in the bowels of the Lonely Mountain as Bilbo and company lead Smaug to an abandoned cavern where the remnants of long-dormant Dwarven industry wait. After tricking Smaug into reigniting the furnaces, Thorin directs Bombur to the bellows and Bilbo to a lever high above the room. At Thorin's signal, Bilbo sends water surging from a series of sluice gates set into the mouths of enormous, carved Dwarven heads. Smaug reels backwards, engulfed in water and steam as waterwheels begin to turn and ore buckets come clanking to life. One of the most startling embellishments in Jackson's film, this scene underscores the degree to which the industrial has become synonymous with the magical and the heroic in many works of contemporary medievalism. With its lingering shots of careful rivet work and cast iron gears, it suggests that swords and sorcery are no longer sufficient to the larger cultural and sociopolitical project of medievalism. If one is to exorcise the malingering, monstrous serpent of greed and accumulation, one must also have steam.
Smaug's expulsion from the Lonely Mountain vividly illustrates a primary difference between Tolkien's medievalism and the medievalism of the contemporary moment. Tolkien was profoundly inspired by John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. While this influence is immediately apparent in Tolkien's watercolors, it is equally present in his well-documented antipathy for industrialization and mass production.
20 - Play
- Edited by Elizabeth Emery, Richard Utz
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- Book:
- Medievalism: Key Critical Terms
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2014, pp 173-180
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Summary
WHEN WE THINK about the Middle Ages, we do not usually think of play. Famously characterized as a “thousand years without a bath” by the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet, the period is imagined as an uninterrupted spectacle of violence and brutality, one in which the ordeals of everyday life preclude anything as frivolous as play. Take, for instance, the opening episode of the Swedish mini-series Arn: the Knight Templar. After the obligatory introductory sequence in which Arn is shown riding down Saracens in the deserts of the twelfth-century Holy Land, the episode shifts to an equally familiar, though in many ways antithetical, version of the medieval: the snowy forests of West Gothia some twenty years earlier. There, the audience discovers a markedly younger Arn playing a spirited game of Folkungs versus Sverkers with his friend Knut. The boys have no sooner begun to play, however, when they are discovered by armed riders who bear them back to their parents’ bleak village. Admonished never again to play in the woods, the boys endure a night of halfunderstood political conversation, and, on the following day, are carted to the courtyard of a nearby church. Caught in an ambush, they watch as Knut's father, King Ericsson, is beheaded. Play is thus constructed as a prerequisite to violence in Arn; it is a fundamentally transgressive activity that lures participants outside the protective confines of civilization and, in doing so, exposes them to a hyper-adult, hyper-traumatic world in which childhood, like everything else, is represented as “serious business.”
By the same token, however, many of these medieval worlds are not imagined as mature or complete, but instead represent the contemporary era in its childhood. This is very much the case with Arn, which is adapted from Jan Guillou's Crusades Trilogy, a series of novels that, according to Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, presents readers with “A Birth Certificate for Sweden.” This is also the case with medievalism in general, which, according to Umberto Eco, often stages a return to the pre-modern in an attempt to diagnose the complexities of the present. It is not surprising, then, that the medieval makes for such fantastic play. A staple of mass culture, it allows participants to stage a return to what is, in essence, a particularly traumatic childhood, yet does not require them to endure the trauma of acting like children.
The Dark Ages of the Mind: Eugenics, Amnesia, and Historiography in Dan Brown's Inferno
- from II - Interpretations
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- By Kevin Moberly, Old Dominion University, Brent Moberly, Indiana University
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXIII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 May 2014
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2014, pp 81-106
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Summary
Eugenics is one of those words that seems older than it is. The term itself, though, is actually younger than the movement that it has come to represent. Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin and English public intellectual at large, first proposed his ambitious program of human improvement through selective breeding and sociological investigation in a two-part article, published in 1865 in MacMillan's Magazine and, in much more detail, in his 1869 Hereditary Genius. When the movement's first two names, “viriculture” and “stirpiculture,” proved to be public-relations nightmares, Galton subsequently coined the term “eugenics,” which, derived from the Greek for “good” and “birth,” was meant to imply the “conditions under which men of a high type are produced.” Eugenics, as such, began tinkering with its origins almost from the moment it was conceived. Concerned with establishing its own lineage, it returned relentlessly to history as a means of rationalizing many of the social, economic, and political measures that its proponents believed were necessary for the propagation of a more hygienic future.
The medieval was key to this strategy. As Charles Dellheim notes, Victorian historiography often found itself negotiating two sometimes-overlapping and sometimes-competing versions of the past: the classical and the medieval. Although eugenics had only just begun to come into its own at the sunset of the Victorian age, eugenicist historians were no exceptions to this rule.
Reincorporating the Medieval: Morality, Chivalry, and Honor in Post-Financial-Meltdown Corporate Revisionism
- from I - Corporate Medievalism: Some Perspective(s)
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- By Kevin Moberly, Old Dominion University, Brent Moberly, Indiana University
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2012, pp 11-26
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Summary
Those who follow such things will have undoubtedly noticed that the Capital One “What's in your Wallet” Viking commercials have undergone a dramatic change since they originally aired. Early versions of the commercials cast the Vikings as a collective, agonistic, and decidedly pre-modern other. Garbed in pelts, wearing horned helmets, and wielding all manner of medieval weaponry, they waited in hordes just beyond the horizon, ready to charge screaming into the fray and ruthlessly visit any unfortunate credit-card purchase with requisite and over-determined medieval violence – that is, any credit-card purchase that was not made from beyond the silvered shield-wall of a Capital One credit card. In more recent commercials, however, the Vikings have acquired a decidedly more domestic mien. Though neither their garb nor their weaponry has changed, they have nevertheless forsworn raiding in favor of more mundane and innocuous pursuits such as babysitting, playing in rock bands, and serving as flight attendants, shoe salesmen, and electricians. The Vikings, as such, have become apt spokesmen for the corporation that once thwarted them at every turn and, arguably, for all of the major banks (including Capital One) whose lending policies were responsible for the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Heavy-handed brutes who cause chaos and destruction at every turn, they are portrayed as well-intentioned and likeable and, if the scenarios featured in the most recent commercials are any indication, well on their way to becoming productive members of society.
Neomedievalism, Hyperrealism, and Simulation
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2010, pp 12-24
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Summary
“Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in expurgated form.”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and SimulationAlthough most definitions of the neomedieval begin with Umberto Eco’s “Return of the Middle Ages,” we feel that it is more appropriate to begin with his “Travels in Hyperreality,” as it is here that Eco describes the interplay between the authentic and the inauthentic, the historical, mythical, and the technological that constitutes neomedievalism as a representational strategy. Searching for instances “where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake,” Eco’s essay invariably leads him to the Movieland Wax Museum and the Palace of the Living Arts in Buena Park, California. Standing beside each other, these museums present visitors with what, to Eco, is the contemporary equivalent of the Wunderkammern that were popular in Renaissance Europe – collections of curiosities in which a “unicorn’s horn would be found next to a copy of a Greek statue, and later, among mechanical crèches and wondrous automata, cocks of precious metal that sang, clocks with a procession of little figures that paraded at noon.” As in these Renaissance collections, Movieland and the Palace of the Living Arts mix the historical and the fictional for maximum effect. Movieland restages famous moments from feature films, dressing wax statues of notable actors and famous movie characters in period clothing and posing them among period furniture and other artifacts. The Palace of Living Arts employs similar techniques to recreate famous works of art. The result, as Eco writes, is not simply that “the ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake’,” but that the two function to validate each other. The period props, furniture, and clothing displayed in the exhibits make the wax statues of the film stars appear more realistic, more authentic, and more true-to-life, while the statues themselves, which are promoted as authentic copies of their originals, make the furniture, clothing, and other objects appear to be more than simply antiques requisitioned for the exhibits.
A similar interplay takes place amongst the exhibits themselves. Movieland visitors, for example, discover Mozart and Tom Sawyer standing within feet of each other, and, as Eco relates, “enter the cave of The Planet of the Apes after having witnessed the Sermon on the Mount with Jesus and the Apostles.”
Revising the Future: The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Carol L. Robinson
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XVI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 21 April 2008, pp 159-183
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Summary
When science-fiction computer games imagine the future, they often do so in medieval terms. Set after the fall of empire, many such games present players with dystopian, science-fictional worlds that invariably appropriate the tropes of the medieval romance. Cities, space stations, and planetary outposts stand as pockets of order and stability, centers of government, religion, culture, and trade that simultaneously represent the remnants of the lost empire and the hopes of the new. Yet, as in medieval romance, these technological Camelots are few and far between. Surrounded on all sides by the sprawling chaos and horror of an encroaching, often alien wilderness, they are constantly in jeopardy of being contaminated, overrun, and lost. Strapped into the cockpit of starships and weighed down by armor, shields, and weaponry, players must venture forth to joust against this wilderness, to push it back and, if possible, to recover the sovereign order lost with the collapse of empire. The player's most potent ally in such quests, however, is not the promise of exotic technologies of an alien future, but the chivalric ideals of an imagined medieval past in which the knightly hero fought to regain the glory of ancient times.
While purists differentiate science fiction from fantasy (the critical difference being that, in the former, technology is magic, while in the latter, magic is magic), the two genres are much less distinct in the popular imagination. Some of this blurring may be due to the fact that both genres are equally derived from the shared pedigree of medieval romance. Although Kathryn Hume cautions that the apparent derivation of science fiction from romance is much more complicated than it initially seems, she nevertheless admits that “there is some truth to [the] assumption” that science fiction “bear[s] a similar, if not identical, relationship to the medieval romance: run Guy of Warwick or some Charlemagne chansons through a transformer, and one ought to come up with space opera or space epic.” Of course, not all science fiction is “space opera or space epic,” but this does not necessarily invalidate Hume's point, since much of what Hume observes concerns the relatively recent emergence of space opera as the most widely recognized (and, arguably, predominant) sub-genre of science fiction today.
Coined as a pejorative play on “horse opera,” the phrase “space opera” originally referred to hack Westerns repackaged as science fiction for popular consumption.