An Open Access Review Journal Encouraging Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages

July 3, 2015

Game of Thrones, Season 5, Final Episode

Joan of Arc and Assorted Other Nods to the Medieval in the Final Episode of Season 5 of Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones, Season 5, originally broadcast 12 April-14 June 2015; written by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, and Dave Hill; directed by Michael Slovis, Mark Mylod, Jeremy Podeswa, Miguel Sapochnik, and David Nutter; Season 5 finale directed by David Nutter. Produced for HBO and British Sky Broadcasting by Home Box Office, Television 369, Grok! Television, Generator Entertainment, and Bighead Littlehead.

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University

Game of Thrones ended its fifth season on June 14, 2015, with the usual surprises as to which characters live and which die, but what was most significant about the season’s last episode was the startling image of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), the  archvillain of the series, sporting a plain shift and, what the French call, a coupe à la Jeanne d'Arc—in an evocation of yet another screen Jeanne, Jean Seberg’s in Otto Preminger’s 1957 film Saint Joan, with a screenplay by Graham Greene from the play by George Bernard Shaw.

Fans of Game of Thrones may debate its fidelity to its source, the Song of Ice and Fire series of novels by George R. R. Martin, which I have not read.  But the HBO series is certainly replete with medievalisms—all of which cater to what readers and viewers alike would generally see as examples of the medieval.  There are castles, dragons, political alliances and marriages, rivals for several thrones, dungeons and torturing, beheadings, burnings at the stake, a clear feudal system, swords, spears, armor galore, an abundance of the Gothic, and more than a dash of orientalism and the exotic. 


What has distinguished Season 5 from its predecessors has been its emphasis on religion—a topic always at the narrative edges of Seasons 1-4.  Indeed, religion seems to propel several of the interlaced plots of Season 5.  In Meereen, attempts by Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) to rule the city are undermined by the insurgent “Sons of the Harpy,” whose role model is clearly a mixture of our ideas about what medieval and contemporary Islam Extremists look like and do, thus setting up a clash among three rival religions represented by those loyal to the “Mother of Dragons,” the Unsullied, and the masked terrorists who are the “Sons of the Harpy.”

In his attempt to seize the Iron Throne, the Lord of Dragonstone in the North, Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), is coached by the Lady Melisandre (Carice van Houten), often referred to as “The Red Woman,” a priestess of the Lord of Light.  In a series where venues are often either impossibly dark or glaringly bright, her reasons for backing Stannis seem as much to do with religious fanaticism as they do with political ambition.  It is Melisandre who had, in Season 2, established Stannis’s legitimacy to claim the throne by allowing him, in an Arthurian moment, to draw a flaming sword from a statue.  And her black magic, and her lust for royal blood to support it, continue into Season 5 and ultimately prove her undoing.  In a scene that references the story of the death of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia perhaps more than that of Joan of Arc, Stannis’s daughter, Shireen (Kerry Ingram) is burned at the stake to ensure her father’s victory in his march on Castle Black.

But, in Season 5 of Thrones, religious fanaticism has most run amuck at King’s Landing.  With the marriage of Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) to the boy King Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman), Cersei’s youngest son, Cersei has a rival for her son’s affections and a potential threat to her control of King’s Landing.  To counter the threat posed by Margaery, Cersei literally makes a bargain with the devil, the High Sparrow (deliciously played by the always-oleaginous Jonathan Pryce), the leader of the Faith Militant wing of the Faith of the Seven who have unleased their own brand of ascetic fanaticism, in effect introducing the Inquisition to King’s Landing.  The High Sparrow is both Joan’s Bishop Pierre Cauchon and Florence’s Girolamo Savonarola. Cerci has been tricked into implicating herself in a number of sins—but not her incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who is also father to their children—and is imprisoned and interrogated Joan-like in the dungeons of the Great Sept for blasphemy and heresy, though the two seem to be interchangeable sins. Deprived of food, water, and any creature comforts—again the Jehanne references are fairly obvious—Cersei is visited (more properly tormented) by nun-like members of the Faith Militant who attempt to get her to confess to her crimes.  When, exhausted and on the verge of hysterics, she finally relents,
Cersei is seen kneeling at the feet of the High Sparrow to make her confession. 

Since Game plays fast and loose when it references the medieval, the exchange here between the Sparrow and Cersei recalls that between Joan and her confessor, a character played by Antonin Artaud in Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s famous 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, though the latter is more sympathetic to Joan (played by the stage actress Falconetti), while the Sparrow is simply intent upon getting Cersei to incriminate herself further. 

However, the High Sparrow fails to do so and even, presumably mistakenly (only time will tell), responds positively to Cersei’s appeal that she be allowed to see her son, King Tommen, once she has completed her atonement.  That atonement requires her to be roughly shorn and eventually walk naked through the streets back to the safety of the Red Keep while she is jeered and abused by angry mobs and followed by a Militant nun who rings a bell—in the mode of a leper’s clapper—and calls out “shame,” in a nod to the Inquisition’s auto-da-fé.

Both medievalism and the medieval are the basis for much of the complicated interlaced plot lines of Game of Thrones, and the producers have at times even gone to great lengths to use authentic medieval locations for any number of settings—in Season 5 of Thrones, the palace of House Martell of Sunspear, the Water Gardens of Dorne, is, for instance, actually the Alcázar of Seville built by the Moorish Kings of Iberia (a favorite site for movie makers—scenes for Lawrence of Arabia were filmed there)—but the visual reference to Joan of Arc in the last episode of Season 5 is novel for the series and startling overall.  In the scene, Cersei briefly has become Joan of Arc, albeit à la Jean Seberg.  Previous seasons of Thrones have offered no end of more morally upright women who might have been cast in the Jehanne image, but the writers for this final episode of Season 5 clearly seem to want to make the comparison with Joan ironically.  A woman of vice, not of virtue, a mature woman used to getting her own way no matter the cost, not a young maid receptive to the voices of heaven with no will of her own, is simply the latest in a long line of Joans—for what she will do with her newfound freedom (and to the High Sparrow and his followers) tune into Season 6 sometime in Spring of 2016.

Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University



June 24, 2015

Scaer: Passacaglia


David O. Scaer, Passacaglia. Roanoke, VA: The Fourteen Seventy.



Reviewed by Michael Evans, Delta College (michaelevans@delta.edu)

25403561You should never be king” King Louis VI of France tells his son at the beginning of David Scaer’s Passacaglia, “You have no sense of the arc of years“ (p. 5). Such an accusation could never be leveled at the author of this “Analytical Novel”. Scaer’s characters and storylines interweave and collide to illustrate how time is not a neat continuous thread but a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. For example, Vincenzo Peruggia, the would-be patriot thief of the Mona Lisa, drags his loot in a brass-cornered case through the streets of Nice, streets named after Napoleon and his generals who Peruggia (falsely) believes stole La Gioconda from his beloved Italy. Peruggia’s tragi-comic journey is interweaved with vignettes from the life of king François I, patron of Leonardo and the man really responsible for bringing the painting to France. Leonardo proposes a series of ambitious engineering projects to François, who reluctantly turns them all down, as Peruggia embarks on his equally ambitious and equally fruitless odyssey to repatriate Leonardo’s greatest work to their shared homeland.

Scaer spins five distinct but interwoven threads, two of them medieval (although medieval themes and motifs also overlap into the modern and early-modern storylines): Havoise, wife of one of William the Conqueror’s thuggish knights-turned-lords (turned-abbot in the case of her husband Torsten, an unreformed cleric who brings the Gregorian reform to England at the point of a sword), creates the Bayeux Tapestry; Philip Augustus, son of that same, hapless Louis VII who has “no sense of the arc of the years” and who loses Aquitaine, obsessively plans to win the duchy and his father’s former wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, back for the crown of France; Peruggia embarks on his picaresque quest while Leonardo languishes at the court of François I; Vicus, an intellectual is adrift in modern-day France amid a failing marriage; and finally Vicus again, now recast as a lover, woos his beloved El. The image of weaving and threads seems particularly appropriate in the case of the Havoise, who when we last see her is literally wrapped in history as she returns from England to her native Normandy clothed in her tapestry (p. 510). The characters all share in the fanatical pursuit of a lover or a work of art (or both; Peruggia’s concern for his stolen painting matches the tenderness of a lover for his beloved). A recurring motif in the novel is George Santayana’s definition of a fanatic as “one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim” (p. 423). Scaer does not, however, condemn his characters for their redoubled efforts.

As the musical-themed title suggests, the novel’s strands are also linked rhythmically. French sonnets with English translations (both written by Scaer) introduce each section (there are no numbered chapters), adding their own 4-4-3-3 rhythm to the text. The numerical sequence 9-1-4-7-3-6 recurs like a musical motif, whether describing the number of islands in the Loire delta at Nantes, the mathematics of Leonardo’s engineering, or the registers of a window dedicated by Philip II at Chartres cathedral. The author describes this numerical pattern as a site-shifting algorithm, determining the transitions between the five narrative strands of the novel.[1] The passacaglia (from Spanish pasa-calle – literally, walking along a street) accompanies the reader in the footsteps of Vicus through Nantes and Peruggia through Nice. Scaer has also written accompanying music, and the notation for one composition (“Conditur Alme Siderum”) appears in the book, where it is attributed to Vicus (p. 489). The relation between music and mathematics feels appropriate in a medievalist novel, given that the two disciplines were classed together in the quadrivium on the curriculum of medieval universities.

While Scaer emphasizes the fragility of the barrier between past and present, we are also made aware of the blurring of arbitrary national and geographical boundaries. The border between France and Italy is of utmost importance to Valois armies invading the peninsula and to Peruggia as he attempts to smuggle the Mona Lisa back to his (and its) homeland. Yet Vicus in the age of the European Union and the Schengen Agreement “had wandered over the border with Italy – and back – a few dozen times that year. It was no big deal. There was no wall, no fence, no nothing. No Italians with machine guns demanding his papers in one direction, no Frenchmen with machine guns in the other direction, either” (p. 28). Ironically, Peruggia barely notices the frontier when he reaches it; “It’s not like there’s a wall or anything before legal Italy starts … it’s not like they’re suddenly about to leap out, weapons drawn, as I Cross Over” (p. 449). Nice itself is barely French; originally Greek Nikaia, given to France only 21 years before Peruggia’s birth as payment for Napoleon’s III’s aid in the wars of the Risorgimento, it is today the place “where France and Italy rub their loins together” (p. 86). Seated in the city’s Italianesque cathedral of Sainte Réparate, Peruggia encounters a huge (French) tricolor and fantasizes about tearing it down (p.388). Nice is also the venue for his rendez-vous with partner-in-crime Guillaume Apollinaire; the Roman-born Apollinaire is an appropriately Franco-Italian figure to encounter in this hybrid border city.

The River Loire also plays an important role intersecting the different timelines. It flows through the Angevin lands that Philip Augustus covets, past François I’s palace at Amboise down to Nantes, where we first encounter Vicus in the city where land and sea, France and Brittany meet and blur together. Leonardo’s plans to divert the Loire as part of his grandiose architectural schemes on behalf of François are rejected as unrealistic by the king’s advisors, and we are reminded later that the movement of rivers’ courses must be the work of centuries, not of a single man: “empires rose and fell and rivers changed their course in their meandering way” (p. 433). Water is not the only element to cross the time-lines; fire destroys Chartres Cathedral in the twelfth century, and the Cathedral of Nantes in the twentieth, just the latest of a series of conflagrations from Viking invasion via World War II bombs. (A percentage of the price of each copy of Passacaglia is donated to the Amis de la Cathédrale de Nantes).

Geography is also central to Philip Augustus’ obsessive pursuit of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like Prince Herbert’s father in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he is interested not so much in the woman herself as her “huge tracts of land”. As he lies with his wife Isabelle of Hainault, the young king thinks of territories and titles, “Aquitaine with her ammonitic peaks. Aquitaine with her rushing-grustling forests sighing. Aquitaine with her dappled Atlantic sands, her salt-capped waves and her dusty grapes ... Aquitaine and her Eleanor, that restless huntress who had besotted his slow, cold, dimwitted father … And he came, hot and freely” (p. 13). When he finally defeats and kills Richard the Lionheart at Château-Gaillard (the historical Richard died in the Limousin, fighting a rebellious vassal) Philip’s joy is almost sexual as he exclaims “Eleanor, you are mine” (p. 500). Eleanor never appears directly in the novel, but her presence is felt not only through Philip’s ambitions but in the modern love triangle between Vicus, his beloved El, and his rival Ricus, which recalls Philip’s father Louis VII’s loss of Eleanor (and Aquitaine) to Henry of Anjou; [Ludo]Vicus, El[eanor], [Hen]Ricus.

Scaer, a professor of French literature of Roanoke College, joins the ranks of academics who also engage in the writing of fiction (and, in Scaer’s case, of music and poetry also). His interdisciplinary background allows the author to adopt a more complex, playful, and multilayered approach to the past than is usually encountered in the sometimes tired genre of the historical novel. Like other academic-novelists such as Umberto Eco and Bruce Holsinger, Scaer strives not to reproduce the past as a Rankean “as it really was” – there are deliberate historical “errors” (improvements?), such as Philip Augustus killing Richard the Lionheart, and Peruggia and Apollinaire’s meeting in Nice – but to engage with how history is made, and how the past intersects with the present. Scaer’s work is complex without being baffling, challenging without being inaccessible, and intellectual without being pretentious. Readers with a background in the history, music, art or literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance will enjoy identifying the allusions and references, but those without such a background will still appreciate the novel for its strong characterizations, fine prose and poetry, and evocation of France.

Michael Evans
Delta College






[1] Personal communication, June 23, 2015.

June 4, 2015

Looney: Freedom Readers

P01455Dennis Looney,  Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press

Reviewed by Ronald Herzman (herzman@geneseo.edu)

Dennis Looney's Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy convincingly and importantly argues that Dante's critical fortunes in the United States are entangled more closely to the history of the country's black and white citizens that we have ever imagined.  Freedom Readers examines how "African Americans have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work over the last two centuries..."(p. 2).  It would be an important book if only for the new material that the author has discovered and brought together that links Dante to traditions of African American literature and culture.  But it is also an important book for understanding issues connected to the reception of Dante more generally. To provide the context that fits Dante with the African American tradition, Looney presents an enormous amount of information about the way that the Divine Comedy has been understood and interpreted throughout its long afterlife.

The connection goes something like this:  Dante was a hero, indeed in many ways the poster child, for the architects of the Italian Risorgimento.  There was a great deal of cross-fertilization between that set of intellectuals and many of the leading American abolitionists, with the result that Dante also became something of a poster child for abolition.  As Looney carefully and memorably phrases it:  "... this dependence on Dante to make sense of perceived injustice and to effect a change in politics to which one is opposed, underlies the play on words in the book's title, Freedom Readers" (p. 2).  And again:  "They all turn to Dante for help in interpreting their paradoxical experience as citizens of the United States of America whose ancestors were likely to have arrived on a slave ship" (p. 3).  Although the main lines of the story are clear, there are complex ramifications, and Looney has done an excellent job of gathering and distilling an enormous amount of source material.

After an introductory methodological chapter, rich in its implications and inferences, the study moves through two centuries of African American culture and literature's encounter with Dante.  The chapter titles suggest that more is at issue than chronology, however.  Each chapter highlights a different kind of encounter between African American Culture and Dante as well as an analysis of the most interesting texts by the African American authors who engage him.   "Colored Dante" covers the nineteenth century and highlights Henrietta Cordelia Ray, whose fifty-two line poem "Dante" (1885) shows a "deep understanding of Dante's life and poetry as well as a strong emotional and intellectual response to the man and his work" (p. 56).  "Negro Dante" moves from 1900 to 1950, and covers such canonical and important writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and less canonical but perhaps more interestingly Spencer Williams, an African American filmmaker better known for his role as Andy in the controversial TV sitcom Amos 'n' Andy.    In his film Go Down, Death! (1944), Williams intersperses clips from the 1911 Italian silent film of the Inferno into his work.  As Looney has it, "...the quality of the final product does not detract from the deliberate, intelligent reading of Dante behind Williams's allusive adaptation of the cinematic Inferno, from whose fifty or so scenes he chooses six that suit the allegorical purposes of Go Down, Death!" (p. 77).  In a book full of surprises, this might be the biggest.

Chapter 3. "Black Dante," covers the period from the late 50's through the mid-70's.  In it, Looney presents his most elaborate and extended analysis of a single text, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones' The System of Dante's Hell (1965).  Looney makes the claim that his is the first attempt to actually sort out the allusions to Dante in this autobiographical novel in a systematic way (p. 106). Looney's analysis shows the extent to which Baraka (pictured) was using, maybe even abusing, Dante for his own paradoxical purposes. One of the important themes that Looney foregrounds throughout Freedom Readers is the relationship between high culture Dante and popular Dante:  the Dante of the footnotes and the Dante of street singers.  The African American appropriation of Dante provides Looney with a very clear lens to look at this theme, with The System of Dante's Hell providing the most extended test case of someone whose agenda is to reject the very notion of a high-culture Dante as simply not relevant to his own enterprise.  The System of Dante's Hell is not really about Dante, even though there are more explicit references to the Comedy in this work than in any of the others that Looney analyzes. Nevertheless, Dante as constructed in The System "enables Baraka to understand better his own experience of hell on earth..."(p. 107).   Baraka appropriates for his own purposes a Dante that does and that does not in some recognizable way actually exist.  It does in that System refers to Dante's categories in very explicit ways.  It does not in that they become starting points for rearrangement, rejection, and reinterpretation of the text.  It does not in that as often as Baraka refers to the text of Dante, he more often refers to the scaffolding that the Sinclair edition provides for naming categories and mapping out the terrain. It could be argued that the system that Baraka appropriates belongs more to Sinclair the editor than to Dante himself. Rather than digging into Dante, he holds on to what Dante provides him by way of a system.  Baraka is using one of the icons of European high culture to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature.  There is an obvious paradox here, in that the very process of separating himself from Dante and from European culture more generally can only be done with Dante's help, even if the Dante that Baraka appropriates is sort of a stick-figure Dante, useful to play off but without any, one might also say in deliberate defiance of any, attempt to see what the real Dante might have been getting at.  To concede more to Dante would have been to defeat Baraka's purpose in his use-cum-rejection of the Commedia.  Looney is sensitive to all of the complexities this position entails, and more than respectful of Baraka's enterprise, and perhaps that explains why The System of Dante's Hell receives such detailed analysis in Freedom Readers. 

In chapter 4, "African American Dante," Looney examines Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.  Linden Hills is an interesting counterweight to Baraka because its juxtaposition of European and American cultural values depends on a much more nuanced appreciation of Dante and a much more thorough appropriation of him in her novel.  Looney calls Naylor "the most educated" of the writers he considers in his work (p. 158), and the one most steeped in the tradition of black literary culture.  Looney gives a persuasive account of the way she utilizes Dante and in the process he provides a key to the major contours of Freedom Readers as a wholeHe sees Naylor as someone "who learned Dante in school, but whose experiences out of the academy put her in touch with that other version of Dante that has its origins in the abolitionists' practical reading of the medieval poet and politician. Her imitation of Dante bespeaks a familiar dichotomy of highbrow and lowbrow culture, of establishmentarian and radical responses to Dante, of aesthetic and political readings of Dante."  (p. 159).  How these two trajectories interact is the essence of Freedom Readers no less than Linden Hills.

For Naylor an interesting moment of both convergence and conversion occurred in college when she read Dante the same year (1977) that she read Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which, as Looney tells us, "Dante plays a small but significant part" (p. 183). Looney's look at The Bluest Eye shows us something of the extraordinary precision of Morrison’s artistry in her appropriation of Dante. Through the character of Soaphead Church, "a hybrid product of mixed colonial culture," Morrison imagines someone whose reading of Dante is dazzlingly defective, someone who uses Dante "for a moral system that coheres with his perverted sense of the world" (p. 187).  Morrison "takes the reader into Soaphead's warped mind for a theological disquisition on good and evil, with Dante as arbiter" (p. 185).  If Dante is everywhere in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, which is in effect a modern recreation of the Inferno, his appearance in The Bluest Eye is carefully circumscribed, injected by means of a brilliant surgical strike, with a laser-like intensity that provides evidence that Morrison knew the Dante that she was withholding from her character.

In this schematic summary I do not mean to give the impression that there is more unity in the African American experience of Dante than there actually is.  Looney understands the degree to which any reception study that spans two hundred years is going to be both complicated and a little bit messy.  The study asks questions and provokes further investigation.  Nevertheless, I think that it is interesting that my response to the book was of a piece with other important studies of Dante that have changed my way of looking at him. After assimilating any new and cogent interpretation of Dante, something I have never thought of before, something clicks in, and the new interpretation becomes part of the way I look at Dante as though it had always been there, and as though it would be perfectly obvious to everyone else as well. Such is what happened after my first experience of Freedom Readers.  Despite an obvious connection between the two traditions--the Exodus narrative after all is the structural and thematic skeleton onto which the Commedia is fleshed out as well as the defining master narrative of the movement from slavery to freedom in the African American tradition--before Looney's work, I had never made any kind of connection between Dante and the African American experience.  After reading the book (and, spurred by my reading, teaching a course called "Dante and African American Literature" with my African-Americanist colleague), its revelations, some of them stunning when I first came across them, now seem in my mind to belong to the "everyone knows this" category.  But everybody does not know them, and so Looney has opened up for us huge possibilities.  It will be interesting to see how much more we find now that we have found a new way to look.

Ronald Herzman
SUNY Geneseo