Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media
Author: R. Burt
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230614566

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way - not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Author: Katharine D. Scherff
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2023-03-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000852822

Through a multidisciplinary collection of case studies, this book explores the effects of the digital age on medieval and early modern studies. Divided into five parts, the book examines how people, medieval and modern, engage with medieval media and technology through an exploration of the theory underpinning audience interactions with historical materials in the past and the real-world engagement of a twenty-first century audience with medieval and early modern studies through the multimodal lens of a vast digital landscape. Each case study reveals the diversity of medieval media and technology and challenges readers to consider new types of literacy competencies as scholarly, rigorous methods of engaging in pre-modern investigations of materiality. Essays in the first section engage in the examination of medieval media, mediation, and technology from a theoretical framework, while the second section explores how digitization, smart technologies, digital mapping, and the internet have shaped medieval and early modern studies today. The book will be of interest to students in undergraduate or graduate intermediate or advanced courses as well as scholars, in medieval studies, art history, architectural history, medieval history, literary history, and religious history.

Beowulf in Contemporary Culture

Beowulf in Contemporary Culture
Author: David Clark
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1527544060

This collection explores Beowulf’s extensive impact on contemporary culture across a wide range of forms. The last 15 years have seen an intensification of scholarly interest in medievalism and reimaginings of the Middle Ages. However, in spite of the growing prominence of medievalism both in academic discourse and popular culture—and in spite of the position Beowulf itself holds in both areas—no study such as this has yet been undertaken. Beowulf in Contemporary Culture therefore makes a significant contribution both to early medieval studies and to our understanding of Beowulf’s continuing cultural impact. It should inspire further research into this topic and medievalist responses to other aspects of early medieval culture. Topics covered here range from film and television to video games, graphic novels, children’s literature, translations, and versions, along with original responses published here for the first time. The collection not only provides an overview of the positions Beowulf holds in the contemporary imagination, but also demonstrates the range of avenues yet to be explored, or even fully acknowledged, in the study of medievalism.

The Medieval Motion Picture

The Medieval Motion Picture
Author: A. Johnston
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2014-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137074248

Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, this volume highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema. Engaging with the subject of time and temporality, the essays examine the politics of adaptation and our contemporary entanglement with the medieval.

Beowulf on Film

Beowulf on Film
Author: Nickolas Haydock
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-09-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 147660617X

Why did the most read work in English literature go without cinematic adaptation for so long? And why did five major film treatments appear between 1999 and 2008? This book explores the growing number of films based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and furthers the ongoing consideration of filmic medievalism. Will the powerful influence of cinema affect the future reception of this great cultural, linguistic and inherently visual work? The films inevitably sway away from not only the story but also from the themes and concerns of the original to those more interesting to the filmmakers--or responsive to the zeitgeist. They measure the pulse of our inherited notions of heroism and teach us more about our own times than about the epic from which they derive.

The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism

The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism
Author: Louise D'Arcens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 110708671X

An introduction to medievalism offering a balance of accessibility and sophistication, with comprehensive overviews as well as detailed case studies.

The Medieval Python

The Medieval Python
Author: R. Yeager
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2012-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137075058

This is a collection of essays by diverse hands engaging, interrogating, and honoring the medieval scholarship of Terry Jones. Jones' life-long engagement with the Middle Ages in general, and with the work of Chaucer in particular, has significantly influenced contemporary understanding of the period generally, and Middle English letters in particular. Both in film of all types - full-feature comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as well as educational television series for BBC, the History Channel, etc. (e.g., Medieval Lives) - and in his published scholarship (e.g., Chaucer's Knight, in original and revised editions, Who Murdered Chaucer?), Jones has applied his unique combination of carefully researched scholarship, keen intelligence, fearless skepticism of establishment thinking, and his broad good humor to challenge, enlighten and reform. No one working today in either Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Jones' purposive, provocative views. Jones, perhaps more than any other medievalist, can be said to be an integral part of what Palgrave deems the "common dialogue."

Uncanny Fidelity

Uncanny Fidelity
Author: James Newlin
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0817361154

"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Modeling his new approach to the critical category of fidelity, Newlin closely examines four twentieth-century films and tv series next to their Shakespearean counterparts within the contexts of their casting, genre, and reception. When a director of an unconventional version of The Tempest, for example, chooses to cast a white man as either Caliban or Miranda, they seemingly depart from Shakespeare's original text. Yet with these casting decisions, Newlin argues that The Master (2012) and Brigsby Bear (2017) eerily recall the realities of the early modern theater. The Master unexpectedly depicts something like the mythic "wild man" figure that informed The Tempest's early-colonial context, while Brigsby Bear invokes the exploitative, abusive treatment of boy-actors cast in female roles on the renaissance stage. Similarly, by not explicitly identifying as an adaptation of Othello, the cult comedy series Vice Principals (2016-17) frees itself to more faithfully capture the play's early modern comic context - while also illuminating the parallels between racist discourse in Shakespeare's age and our own. By reading these works as uncannily faithful adaptations, Newlin articulates something like the original response of Shakespeare's audience. Finally, Newlin demonstrates how a filmed adaptation might itself intervene in Shakespeare's critical reception. As a version of The Winter's Tale that ends tragically, the celebrated film Manchester By The Sea (2016) effectively rebuts Stanley Cavell's celebrated reading of Shakespeare's romance. Recognizing the parallels between Manchester By The Sea and The Winter's Tale, Newlin argues that Shakespeare views grief and guilt as forms of certainty - in contradistinction to Cavell's reading of the play as a portrait of skepticism. The first extended treatment of adaptation as a form of uncanny return, Uncanny Fidelity offers students and scholars of Shakespeare in film, adaptation studies, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory a critical framework to further engage the matter of personal response with deeper theoretical rigor. In redefining what constitutes adaptation, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can radically challenge our own conception of what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean"--

The Middle Ages and the Movies

The Middle Ages and the Movies
Author: Robert Bartlett
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1789145538

From Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to Monty Python, an investigation into how eight key films have shaped our understanding of the medieval world. In The Middle Ages and the Movies, eminent historian Robert Bartlett takes a fresh, cogent look at how our view of medieval history has been shaped by eight significant films of the twentieth century. The book ranges from the concoction of sex and nationalism in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, to Fritz Lang’s silent epic Siegfried, the art-house classic The Seventh Seal, and the epic historical drama El Cid. Bartlett examines the historical accuracy of these films, as well as other salient aspects—how was Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose translated from page to screen? Why is Monty Python and the Holy Grail funny? And how was Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky shaped by the Stalinist tyranny under which it was filmed?

Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters

Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters
Author: K. Attar
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137465727

Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.