Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline, eds. Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2012.
Reviewed by: Lisa M. Horton (lhorton@d.umn.edu)
One of the great challenges in our continuing study of
medievalism is the vexed question of definitions. Such an intensely dynamic
field resists such limitation; between the variability of language and the
continual evolution of the discipline, a mere definition cannot adequately
encapsulate such a wonderfully disparate whole. A wide range of attempts at
definition appears on this very site and speaks to our tendency to solve the
conundrum by redefining “medievalism” with every new study.
In Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline’s edited collection of
essays, Medieval Afterlives in Popular
Culture, the editors set themselves an even more daunting task. Beyond
contextualizing the volume within definitions of medievalism, they also must
deal with another leviathan of reception theory: popular culture studies.
Attempting to summarize or even effectively to tether such a large collection
to any through-line of theme is ambitious, but the editorial introduction rises
to this challenge with notable, if mixed, success. Nevertheless, even the first
stages of the introduction indicate an apparent cognitive disconnect among
these extremely varied essays, as the editors begin with a précis of news
headlines from March 20, 2013. The connection between the text of the book and
its title remains nebulous until the editors point out, “if the world we’ve
just described seems neither comforting nor even, perhaps, familiar, then we
could always turn and look to the past. And so we do.”[1]
Embracing what is possibly the broadest available
demarcations (postmedieval reception of the medieval) while resisting the siren
song of periodicity, Ashton and Kline are interested in how contemporary
culture requisitions and deploys artifacts of character, story, plot, and theme
not always or necessarily from bona fide medieval histories and literatures but
from such artifacts that contemporary culture perceives to be medieval. They
explain, “if we had to choose a keyword for our dreams and theories of
medievalisms, it would be ‘provisional.’ And the plural we cite throughout this
piece intersects those notions precisely because
[emphasis theirs] it inhabits all these interstices at once even as it stakes a claim for its own
ground, its own difficult processes.”[2]
Not that this is straightforward thematic plurality, if that is not inherently
paradoxical; the volume also embraces the plurality of vision that such a
diverse collection invites. They continue, “we are, perhaps, increasingly
uneasy with our constructions of the medieval, and with good reason. So much
depends upon context and so much, too, on perspective.”[3]
Indeed, the various medieval simulacra examined in this volume are neither
strenuously academic in origin nor are they entirely “popular.” There may be
occasional overtly academic impulses in the productions of Monty Python (examined in Kline’s essay) and in the young adult
fiction of Kevin Crosley-Holland (explored by Philippa Semper’s essay),
possibly even in the work of H. P. Lovecraft (Brantley L. Bryant’s essay), but
hardly in 1960s French period TV drama (Richard Utz’s essay) or the Shrek movies (Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s
essay). Kline's "Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
discusses the central significance of the decapitated establishment academic in
Jones's and Gilliam's twisted filmic vision of the medieval. Semper explores
the difficulty of chronological setting in contemporary retellings of Arthurian
legend and how Crosley-Holland has employed layered characterizations in an
attempt to solve this conundrum. Bryant examines the 1923 short story "The
Rats in the Walls" revealing that
H. P. Lovecraft engages to include a short medieval history as a
mediation between the ancient and the contemporary. Utz, in "Robin Hood,
Frenched," explains how the French television program Thierry la Fronde (1963-1966) achieved enthusiastic popularity
through the translation and reinterpretation of the popular 1950s British
television retelling of The Adventures of
Robin Hood. Kelly maintains, in her essay "The Medieval Entertainment
Channel: The Shrek Quartet," that the blurring of boundaries and the
explorations of interrelationships in these Dreamworks animated films results
from a "queering of time"--the conflation of the medieval with all
other recognizable periods--in this supremely self-aware series. Simultaneously,
classifying under contemporary popular culture the reading journals of Virginia
Woolf (Steve Ellis’s essay), the 1969 medievalist play cycle of Dario Fo (Louis
D’Arcens’s essay), and the film Frozen
River (Robert S. Sturges’s essay), seems a significant stretch. Ellis
explores Virginia Woolf's preoccupation, during the final period of her life,
with the work of Dante. D'Arcens argues that as Fo recreates and reinterprets
the popular culture of the middle ages in his Mistero Buffo, he appropriates it
as a radical, leftist, modernist, and, most importantly, accessible vision.
Sturges draws a comparison between the 2008 independently-produced picture Frozen River and the Towneley Second Shepherd's Play, pointing out
striking similarities despite the absence of any indicators of intentional
emulation. The commonality among these representations of medievalisms is difference; by incorporating such
varied constructions, again, the collection emphasizes the strength of a
diffuse identity.
Beyond plurality of theme and perspective, the editors
profess additional pedagogical motivations: to explore how contemporary
perceptions and receptions can fuel student interest, accessibility, and
engagement both with medievalism and with the medieval. Ashton and Kline
remark, “almost all [of the texts produced by and within medievalisms] have a
strong online presence while a number of them parody and play against other
texts and ideologies, both contemporary and versions of the medieval. As a
result, many of these medieval or neo-medieval afterlives enjoy cult
status. So, too, they are hugely popular
in terms of student uptake; indeed, some of our students more immediately
recognize the contemporary afterlife than the medieval ‘original’.”[4]
Indicative of this pedagogical potential of this approach, the essay by Candace
Barrington examines how contemporary students cope with and interpret, or
attempt to elide, the overt anti-Semitism of Chaucer’s Prioress in
instructor-assigned YouTube reenactments of The
Prioress’ Tale posted between October 2006 and October 2011. Though none of
the other essays in the collection directly address student work, there remains
a potential attraction for students in an examination of medievalism in contemporary
media through such vehicles as Torchwood
(Ashton’s essay), Disney (Andrew Lynch’s essay), reality TV (Angela Jane
Weisl’s essay), and Shrek (Kelly’s
essay). Ashton undertakes to identify the BBC Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood
as a contemporary vehicle for quest-style medieval romance. Lynch describes
the complex origins of Disney's animated Robin
Hood (1973) and attempts somewhat to redeem what is considered a critical
failure in the studio's history by illuminating profound complexities in the
film's thematic subtext. Weisl examines the performative nature of weeping in reality
television and draws fascinating parallels to medieval social performance in
hagiographic texts, Dante's Purgatorio,
and The Book of Margery Kempe.
As with any essay collection, some entries seem more clearly
aligned than others with the overall message of the whole despite the stated
breadth of that message. As the editors aver, “we look to illuminate both
medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways, to
interrogate the various directions through which medievalisms [sic]
reinterprets and reconceptualizes the medieval and is compelled to reconstitute a past that is at once familiar
and profoundly different.”[5]
Certainly, many of the contemporary outlets for the reception of the medieval
as enumerated here are rather startling, and their interruption or mediation
between contemporary and medieval perceptions create productively unpredictable
refractions. Ashton and Kline advise, “we may well need to reconstruct our
critical vocabulary and the academic apparatus we employ to discuss theories,
forms, techniques, and effects.”[6]
Just as medievalism itself keeps evolving, the texts and media that disseminate
the medieval to contemporary culture are in a constant state of flux.
Overall, the collection of essays in this volume
demonstrate the variety of texts, theories, perspectives, and media available
for study as, in broadest terms, medievalism. One or two of these essays
explicitly validate the volume’s title
in their work, such as “reading” a contemporary remix of a 1960s
reinterpretation of a 1950s interpretation of medieval legend. Several
represent the interdisciplinarity that is poised to provide revitalization into
the future of the field. Others suggest new vistas of exploration and
application beyond the more obviously medieval-influenced popular culture
“texts.” Altogether, they provide a fascinating cross-section of culture
wherein to examine the afterlives of the medieval.
Lisa M. Horton
University of Minnesota - Duluth
