Review
by: Molly Brown (molly.brown@up.ac.za)
In one of the essays in this volume,
Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg comment that “nothing is easier to mock than
medieval aspirations under the harsh light of colonial sunshine” (94). The
opposition established in this wry comment on the appearance of the United
Tinsmiths marching through the early twentieth-century streets of Melbourne
dressed in full or partial suits of armour is reflected throughout this
collection in which contemporary scholars associated with the global South
focus their attention on a range of tropes and issues conventionally linked to
a Northern past. The resulting polarization throws new light on both
post-colonial and medieval concerns, allowing two once othered discourses to interact
in unexpected and illuminating ways.
The editors acknowledge that achieving
this exhilarating creative synergy was precisely their intention. In their
introduction they refer to the significance of what Caroline Dinshaw has
recently termed atemporal encounters
in which “different time frames or temporal systems collid[e]” and argue that
the recursive presence of the medieval within the modern not only blurs
temporal distinctions, but actually “creates a cultural topography in which
national boundaries are redrawn or erased, and familiar polarities and spatial
coordinates no longer apply” (xii). In this way the volume becomes a
celebration of the multitemporal potentialities inherent in a variety of
perspectives on how medievalism may be seen to permeate and in some cases, articulate
socio-political aspects of modernity and even postmodernity.
The current proliferation of volumes of
thematically-linked academic essays has been fuelled at least in part, by a
postmodern predilection for heteroglossia, but all too often, a form that
should facilitate unexpected insights and stimulating differences collapses
instead into works in which the individual components talk past instead of to each
other. Thanks to the editors’ clear sense and lucid articulation of the
importance of the new topography they aim to explore, the essays in International
Medievalism and Popular Culture are given the freedom to range widely
without any threat to the essential coherence of the collection as a whole.
International
Medievalism and Popular Culture contains twelve
essays on subjects ranging from medievalism and contemporary Middle Eastern
politics to the presentation of dragons and teenage wizards in fantasies for
younger readers. Such is the current rage for specialization that many readers
are likely to turn only to those essays directly related to their own interests,
but those who do this will not fully
appreciate the strength of the collection as a whole, since all of these essays
are linked by a nuanced understanding of how concepts of the medieval commonly
infuse and enter into dialogue with responses to the contemporary.
Appropriately enough, the opening essay
by Clare Monagle addresses crucial issues of sovereignty and neomedievalism by
revisiting the seminal work of an earlier Australian political theorist, Hedley
Bull. Bull argued as early as 1977 that the once-dominant concept of the
national state was in decline before later suggesting in The Anarchical Society (1995) that this decline would lead to what
he called the New Medievalism, a secular
version of the system of overlapping or segmented authority presented by him as
characteristic of medieval Christendom. Monagle deftly acknowledges the
significance of Bull’s work, while also revealing that it may be read as rooted
in anxiety about all non-modern forms of political life, so that the “actions
of socialist and third world states, the actions of terrorists, and the
political formations of primitive societies prior to invasion and colonisation,
as well as the political cultures of the Western Middle Ages themselves…are all
yoked under the analogy of the medieval, flattened into a disturbing past and a
futurological otherness” (12).In this way, Monagle is able to show that the
concept of New Medievalism as applied
by neoconservatives leads to a refusal to consider the “specificity of the
other’s historicity” (13) allowing al Qaeda, for instance, to be presented as
the medievalised enemy.
This tendency to use the medieval as a
lens through which to examine and even counteract current East West conflicts
is illuminatingly developed in Louise D’Arcens analysis of three films by
Riddley Scott. D’Arcens, who is widely known for her work on medievalism in
Australian and international contexts, argues persuasively that Scott uses his
films to explore subjects too sensitive to address more directly, so that in a
startling reversal, Robin Hood’s tactics of resistance against his Norman
oppressors (Robin Hood, 2010) can be
seen to echo the ground-level activities of al Qaeda and the central figure in Body of Lies (2008) “rather than seeking
a better Aussie-style multicultural life for all, goes to ground, quite
possibly to become a high-skill terrorist” (249). Intriguingly, American
medievalist, John Ganim shows that it is not merely the western gaze that
projects medieval memes onto contemporary conflicts but that great Islamic
medieval figures such as Saladin, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta have become
powerful symbols for those anxious to modernise the Islamic world from within.
Each of these medieval figures has been used in various contexts and in various
Arab states to evoke tradition, but the tradition concerned is one of “Golden
Age cosmopolitanism, of geographic mobility before the borders of
nation-states, and of often improvisational inventiveness” (71).
If medievalism can allow for multiple
interpretations of the othered Orient, a second group of essays from International Medievalism and Popular
Culture focuses on how the medieval may help, in Chantal Bourgault du
Coudray’s words “to reinstate values that are essential to the reinvention of a
subjective experience that challenges the gendered dynamics of Cartesian
thought” (153). Du Coudray’s positive re-visioning of the story of Red Riding
Hood refreshingly undermines standard readings of the story as one that
restricts the feminine and promotes patriarchal authority. Laurie Ormond’s study
of witch hunters in contemporary fantasy fiction makes an interesting companion
piece to Du Coudray’s essay in that it draws on a similar body of theory, but
uses it to infer that while fantasy fiction rarely elides sexual violence
against women and therefore resists conventions that systematically downplay
the trauma this causes, such works cannot be seen as legitimate forms of
feminist protest because they also conform too readily to enduring cultural
stereotypes grounded in “an essentialist understanding of female vulnerability
that accompanies the figure of the monstrous and deviant rapist” (177). Nicholas
Haydock, on the other hand, discusses Julia Kristeva’s Murder in Byzantium in which a modern
scholar is drawn into an enhanced understanding of the First Crusade by an
interest in the writing of the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene. Stephen Knight
observes in his engaging conclusion to the collection that the reverse
pilgrimage described by Haydock both
“claims the Medieval for the Middle-East” and simultaneously uses “forms of
abjection seen across time as reason at war with meaning, but also as access to
the other”(249).
This idea of accessing otherness is crucial
to any assessment of International
Medievalism and Popular Culture since it demonstrates not only that the oriental
and the woman can both be simultaneously othered and affirmed by competing
medievalisms, but so also may the child, who as modern theorists have noted, has much in
common with both. Clare Bradford’s essay, “Here Be Dragons”, argues that dragon
stories promote a ludic engagement with texts in that they offer images of
delightful alterity, while in no way deluding young readers about the precise
boundaries of the fictional and the real. Instead she suggests that by drawing
attention to “the codes, conventions and cultural meanings that inform dragon
narratives….[such stories] teach interpretive strategies, conducting a kind of
training in reading the medieval” (221). In ‘The Battle for Reality’, on the
other hand, Helen Dell makes a thought-provoking contribution to the
interpretation of the animosity felt towards Harry Potter by the religious
right. Rather than glibly dismissing this as an instance of either hysterical
fanaticism or neoconservative distrust of the imagination, Dell carefully
teases out the implications of a logocentric world view in which words are both
frighteningly potent and dangerously vulnerable to change. This leads her to
conclude suggestively that “J.K. Rowling with her free-wheeling, ‘unbaptized’
imagination and her blithe disregard for the potency of words together with her
immense popularity, presents conservatives with the gravest of threats – the
threat to reality” (33).
While a Southern sensibility infuses
almost all the essays in this volume, it is particularly apparent in what might
be seen as the three most overtly Australian essays in the book. The first of
these is Karen Hall’s exploration of medieval influences and connections in the
work of four contemporary Australian artists: Alexia Sinclair, G.W. Bot, Irene
Barberis, and Laith Mc Gregor. The second is Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg’s
nuanced study of the ways in which organised labour in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century Melbourne consciously positioned itself in relation to
medieval chivalry in ways that are both reminiscent of and different from the
strategies used by the international
Knights of Labour. The third is Anne McKendry’s analysis of how Mel Gibson,
Heath Ledger and Russell Crowe flavour the medieval-themed films, Braveheart (1995), A Knight’s Tale (2001) and Robin
Hood (2010), with an Australian sense of mateship expressed in terms of a distinctively egalitarian sense of
male bonding, which she argues also “functions as an unidentified – yet
discernible factor in the appeal these characters have for broader
international audiences” (198). Each of these articles is remarkable for
foregrounding the fact that concepts of medievalism do not simply feed into
contemporary life, but in complex
reflexive processes, are themselves altered and shaped by current conventions
and modes of expression.
If one were of a
mind to quibble, one might wish for more chapters like those described in the
previous paragraph, analyses that are both unequivocally local and yet
suggestive of broader global patterns. It would certainly have been intriguing
to have had articles by scholars firmly located in other areas of the global
South to sharpen awareness of what Australian and global medievalism have in
common and also give a clearer indication of what differentiates them. I
confess too that I found the grouping of illustrations at the end of chapters
annoying as it required one to riffle continuously backward and forward,
especially in chapters like that by Karen Hall where an appreciation of images
was central to an understanding of her argument. In addition, I suspect that
the casual reader might also have appreciated the listing of full titles in the
table of contents so that it would not be necessary to turn to the first page
of each essay in order to get a clear indication of its subject matter. Despite
these minor qualms, however, International
Medievalism and Popular Culture is an intelligently edited, original and
suggestive collection that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in the
fields of either postcolonial studies or contemporary medievalism.
Molly Brown
University of
Pretoria
South Africa
