21st Century Medievalisms: Between the global and individual [1 ed.] 9786156405760, 6156405763

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Karl Christian Alvestad 1 Medievalist Comic Book Characters and Their Feminist Readers Elizabeth Allyn Woock 11 Are Pigs Pink? Cinematic Perceptions of the Medieval Past Francis Mickus 33 Re-imagining Historical Fighting: Knights in Medievalism Jürg Gassmann 55 Dark Medieval Times: Violence and Darkness in Black-Metal Medievalism Dario Capelli 97

Crusading as Damnation, Killing for Salvation Crusading Ideology and Ludonarrative Dissonance in Dante’s Inferno Juan Manuel Rubio Arévalo 121 French Cultural Exception: When King Arthur Does Not Cross the Borders Justine Breton 147 The Witcher: Visions of a Shifting Europe Meg Feller 167 Medieval Love Through Centuries from Far East to Far West in Romanesque, by Tonino Benacquista Leticia Ding, Philippe Frieden, Stefania Maffei Boillat 183 Medievalism, Philosophers, and Medievalists in the Twenty-First Century in Peru: From the Forgotten Image to New Perspectives Jean Christian Egoavil 217 The Use of Political Neomedievalism in Spain Álvaro Garrote Pascual 243 The Black Veil of Freedom: Widows Beyond Westeros Dawn A. Seymour Klos 265

The Frozen Middle Ages: Elsa as a Contemporary Joan of Arc? Andrea Maraschi 287 Beyond the Bounds of Camelot and Hogwarts: The Medieval Quest Becomes Political Activism Through Harry Potter Monica J. Stenzel, Josephine C. Stenzel 311 Memories of the Medieval in the Age of White Supremacy Leland Renato Grigoli 335

INTRODUCTION KARL CHRISTIAN ALVESTAD

The persistence and flourishing of medievalisms, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a field of study, in the twenty-first century demonstrates the continual lure of the Middle Ages to the modern mind. The manifestations of this allure can clearly be seen in contemporary culture, politics, and communities. This is exemplified by the use and abuse of the medieval period during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here we have seen the medieval past being used to make sense of the world around us, as well as provide legitimacy for political action and ambitions. 1 During the Covid-19 pandemic, medieval scholars experienced an increased interest in knowledge about the black death,2 as well as references to it in media, popular culture and Marples, David Roger, “Vladimir Putin points to history to justify his Ukraine invasion, regardless of reality,” The Conversation, 07.03.2022. https://theconversation.com/ vladimir-putin-points-to-history-to-justify-his-ukraine-invasion-regardless-of-reality177882; Anna Reid, “Putin’s War on History,” Foreign Affairs, April 6, 2022. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/putins-war-history-ukraine-russia. 2 Knut J. Meland, “Eksplosiv interesse for svartedauden,” USN.NO, 07.01.2021. accessed: www.usn.no/nyhetsarkiv/eksplosiv-interesse-for-svartedauden; Nükhet Varlik, “From Black death to Covid-19 pandemics have always pushed people to honor death and celebrate life,” The Conversation, 26.10.2021. https://theconvers ation.com/fromblack-death-to-covid-19-pandemics-have-always-pushed-people-to-ho nor-death-andcelebrate-life-170517; Robert Gonzalez, “Expert on the 'Black Death' puts Corona virus in Historical Perspective - Dr. Dodds talked to Robert Gonzalez,” Florida State University 24.02.2020. https://history.fsu.edu/article/expert-black-death-puts-coronavirus-historical-perspective-dr-dodds-talked-robert-gonzalez. 1

Introduction

politics. Whereas the leadup to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 saw a conscious retelling of the medieval past, by the Kremlin, to legitimise their actions and policies.3 Yet, these examples are not unique in their use and interaction with the medieval past and its post-medieval memory. Other examples may include the Norwegian government naming its CO2-storing initiative “Longship,” and the 2016 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally. 4 These are some of many contemporary manifestations of medievalisms that build on a long tradition of memory and cultural interaction with the Middle Ages. In the case of the Norwegian “Longship” project, the national historical memory and cultural sentiments seem to have been dominant in the creation, presentation, and reception of this medievalism.5 This national frame for medievalisms is to a great extent, a revival of the importance of national audiences and frames of reference in the political and cultural spheres. The revival of nationalism in the twenty-first century shapes the very nature of some contemporary medievalisms, their purpose, audiences, and the way we can understand them. Unlike late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist medievalisms, the medievalisms of the twenty-first century seem, as demonstrated by chapters in this volume, to be part of a much more diverse landscape of medievalisms. This landscape of medievalisms includes, as this volume shows, traditional political and cultural medievalisms, such as medieval films, tv-series, literature, activism, as well as personal experiences with the medieval through re-enactment and activism. This diversity of manifestations of medievalisms has long been a part landscape of medievalisms. Yet, in the Anglophone world, Hollywood, along with other examples of Western film and TV industries, has been Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia. 12.07.2021. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/66181; Beer, Daniel. “Putin’s centuries-long march into Ukraine.” The Washington Post 29.09.2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/29/ russian-history-books-review-putin-ukraine/. 4 Olje og Energidepartementet. 2020. Langskip – fangst og lagring av CO2. Meld. St. 33 (2019-2020). Oslo: Olje og Energidepartementet. www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/ meld.-st.-33-20192020/id2765361/; Blake, Thomas. “Getting Medieval PostCharlottesville,” in Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History, ed. Louie Dean ValenciaGarcía, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2020), 178-97. 5 Karl C. Alvestad, “Mainstream Norwegian Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century: Continuity and Change in Narrative and Form,” Mirator 21 (2021): 50-64. https://journal.fi/mirator/article/view/102586. 3

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particularly visible through the genre of medieval film, with among seminal productions being Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Vikings (2013–2020), Game of Thrones (2011–2019).6 In recent decades the gaming industry has been growing in popularity, 7 and that has contributed to developing a shared canon of medievalisms including, among other things, Crusader Kings II and III, Skyrim, The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, and others. This canon contributes to the broader medievalism culture and corpus of references and has significantly contributed to the transmission of medievalism tropes, stereotypes and myths, that easily can be used and abused for different agendas. Helen Young argued in 2020 that one of these tropes, the whiteness of the Middle Ages, actively influences the creation and consumption of medievalisms in gaming.8 Similarly, Sian Beavers and Sylvia Warnecke, and Daisy Black argued the same when it came to gender and gender stereotypes as presented in medievalisms.9 The active use and abuse of medieval narratives, symbols and tropes are still permeating culture both in the “West” and beyond. Although the Middle Ages is, often incorrectly, seen as a European, Catholic, homogeneous period, recent studies of medievalisms have demonstrated that the medieval is and has been culturally relevant beyond the Bettina Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D'Arcens, Cambridge Companions to Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 45–59. doi: 10.1017/CCO9781316091708.004. 7 Daniel T. Kline, “Participatory Medievalism, Role-Playing, and Digital Gaming,” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens, Cambridge Companions to Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 75–88. doi: 10.1017/CCO9781316091708.006. 8 Helen Young, “Race and historical authenticity: Kingdom Come: Deliverance,” in The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism, ed. Karl Alvestad and Robert Houghton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Accessed November 28, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167452.0009. 9 Sian Beavers and Sylvia Warnecke. “Audience perceptions of historical authenticity in visual media,” in The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism, ed. Karl Alvestad and Robert Houghton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 74–89. Accessed November 28, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167452. 0013; Daisy Black, “Malevolent and marginal: The feminized ‘Dark Ages’ in modern card game cultures,” in The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism, ed. Karl Alvestad and Robert Houghton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 105–118. Accessed November 28, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350 167452.0015. 6

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European “origins” of the Middle Ages.10 Yet, at the same time there exists, as Andrew B.R. Elliott, Amy S. Kaufman, Paul Sturtevant and Daniel Wollenberg have reminded us of an extensive community of individuals who read and understand the middle ages as a white, homogeneous, heterosexual time in the past, which according to these communities is under threat, and need to be re-claimed and emulated.11 The years since the dawn of the 21st century have seen an increase in scholarly interest in, and discussions about the various forms of medievalisms. At the same time this overarching trend of revival and continued innovation has taken place, scholars have observed and commented on some diversification of the nature of medievalisms, their purpose and their consumption. Scholars have demonstrated how medievalisms are alive and well in the 21st century, and how it has diversified and flourished for good and evil with the democratisation of the internet and the rise of populist politics. Some of these medievalisms have their roots in the nineteenth century, while others are more recent. Some are what the more traditional medievalisms, as defined by Pugh and Weisl as “the art, literature, scholarship, avocational pastimes, and sundry forms of entertainment and culture that turn to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration, and in doing so, explicitly or implicitly, by comparison, or by contrast, comment on the artist ’ s contemporary sociocultural milieu.” 12 While other examples fall more easily into what Bruce Holsinger describes as neo-medievalisms “a mode of appropriation that operates with a more overtly blatant disregard for historical veracity than its more imitative or avowedly ‘true-to-the-past’ medievalist counterparts.”13 The differentiation of these two categories Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe. Rethinking Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Nadia R. Altschul, Politics of Temporalization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Helen Young and Kavita Mudan Finn, Global Medievalism: An Introduction, Elements in the Global Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), doi:10.1017/9781009119658. 11 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. NED – New ed. Vol. 10. Medievalism (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017); Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, The Devil's Historians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Daniel Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today's Politics. Past Imperfect (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2018). 12 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2012), 1. 13 Bruce Holsinger, “Neomedievalism and International Relations,” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens, Cambridge Companions to 10

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of medievalisms can help us make sense of the materiality and memories within these medievalisms, at the same time as they also create a somewhat unnatural distinction between the discovered and the created when both have similar social and cultural purposes. At the same time, Pugh and Weisl while drawing on David Marshall warns against the categorisation of different medievalisms as this can limit our ability to fully engage with and study the long appeal of the medieval in a postmedieval world. A growing trend is the use of medievalisms for social and cultural activism. We see this expressed in the invocation of Saint Wilgefortis in trans communities in the West,14 as well as in studies by Jonathan Hsy and Noëlle Phillips. 15 Although these medievalisms, by their categorisations, are singled out from other political medievalisms, they aim at a more progressive development in politics and culture. It could be argued that their use of the medieval resembles more traditional nationalistic medievalisms. Whereas progressive medievalisms like those explored by Stenzel and Stenzel in this volume aim to stimulate individuals to build a more inclusive and better future, 16 the more conservative aim at galvanising a community in fear or have been used to promote a more exclusionary aim as seen in Grigoli and Pascual’s contributions to this volume.17 This volume which was planned as the inaugural volume of the Medievalism series published by Trivent Publishing explores examples of contemporary medievalisms in the 21st century. Consequently, the volume has sought to shed light on the vast spectre of medievalisms in the twenty-first century and to showcase how the Middle Ages are being Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 165–79. doi: 10.1017/CCO978 1316091708.012, 165. 14 Cherry Kittredge, “Saint Wilgefortis: Holy bearded woman fascinates for centuries,” Queer Spirituality. 20.11.2022. https://qspirit.net/saint-wilgefortis-bearded-woman/; Stephanie A. Budwey, “Saint Wilgefortis: A Queer Image for Today” Religions 13, no. 7 (2022): 616. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13070616. 15 Jonathan Hsy. Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021); Noëlle Phillips, Craft Beer Culture and Modern Medievalism: Brewing Dissent. Collection Development, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). 16 See chapter 13. 17 See chapters 10 and 14. 5

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invoked, used and abused in local, national and global communities, as well as by the individual. The chapters in this volume are a collection of examples of how the medieval and medievalisms are present in our contemporary societies across the world. The geographic scope of the chapters in this volume is the western hemisphere. While the temporal scope of the medievalisms discussed below, initially focused on the twenty-first century, stretches from the 1970s until the 2020s. These longer temporal ranges allow demonstrates how medievalisms in the twenty-first century are part of a long cultural continuity, even though some of the examples below have distinct features of this modern age. Yet, the core discussions in the chapters are engaging with how the medieval and medievalisms speak to modern audiences and contexts. They, as demonstrated especially in the chapters by Mickus, Capelli, Grigoli, Gassmann, and Seymour Klos show how universalised medievalist tropes influence cultural perceptions of the Middle Ages, and how we might unpick these tropes to see beyond the perceived knowledge of the period. At the same time, Justine Breton’s chapter highlights how the well-known narrative of King Arthur might have distinct manifestations and nuances that do not transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. In the same way, Jean Christian Egoavil’s, as well as Álvaro Garrote Pascual’s contributions show how ideas of the medieval, medievalisms, and neo-medievalisms based on these ideas in many ways are local and regional phenomena in a globalised world. Egoavil investigates the medieval and medievalisms in Peru, especially considering its revival and re-popularisation in the 21st century. Pascual explores the use of neomedievalism by VOX, the Spanish far-right political party, in the Spanish political discourse. He stresses their use of neomedievalism in collapsing the Muslim invasion of Iberia in 711 with the Reconquista when dehumanising immigrants and immigration from North Africa in the modern age. Interestingly, these examples, like those of Breton, and Ding, Freiden and Maffei, are contributions that deal with medievalisms in a nonanglophone context. Similarly to Breton’s chapter, Ding, Freiden and Maffei’s chapter studies the novel Romanesque (2016) in light of medieval romances and romantic love. Whereby, they argue that the book not only romanticizes the medieval romances and courtly love, but also the retelling of stories and that through this, the book transgresses the 6

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boundaries between prose and fiction by simultaneously theorizing and performing the love and its story as told in the book. Breton, and Ding, Freiden and Maffei’s chapters are focused on a French-speaking context. While Egoavil and Pascual’s focus is on the Spanish-speaking world. As such, these chapters are focused on two global language communities contributing to the diversity of chapters in this volume. Thus, they offer important complementary studies to an expanding corpus of studies of medievalisms from an English-speaking context. Building on and complementing the ideas of Nadia Altschul, 18 Louise D’Arcens, 19 Jonathan Hsy20 and others about medievalisms outside Europe and the United States, these texts can help scholars and students better appreciate the nuances and diversity of medievalisms and neo-medievalisms in the world around us. In addition, the chapters by Francis Mickus on medieval film, Jürg Gassmann on modern medieval fighting, and Juan Manuel Rubio Arévalo on the game Dante’s Inferno, discuss how contemporary medievalisms engage with accuracy and authenticity when attempting to present and re-create a medieval past in popular culture. They also highlight how contemporary medievalisms engage with historical sources and scholarship on the period often creating what Arévalo calls palimpsests blending perceptions of the past with contemporary cultural and economic sensitivities.21 Similarly, Dario Capelli’s, and Meg Feller’s chapters highlight how different contemporary sensitivities and cultural needs interplay in contemporary medievalisms in music, literature, and games. In Capelli’s chapter, he examines the relationship between black metal and the Middle Ages as a dark and violent time, and through this analysis, he highlights that black metal is a rich source of materials for those who seek to study medievalism or the Middle Ages.22 Where Capelli examines a genre’s relationship with the medieval, Feller focuses on one artistic universe –that of the Witcher. In her chapter, Feller, offers a discussion of the Witcher universe in light of contemporary Polish sensitivities and postNadia R. Altschul, Politics of Temporalization. Louise D’Arcens, World Medievalism. Oxford Textual Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 20 Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter. 21 See chapter 5. 22 See chapter 4. 18 19

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communist anxieties, through which she highlights the interplay between the narratives in the games with the real lived experiences of Poles in the post-communist era. Andrea Maraschi, Dawn A. Seymour Klos, and Elizabeth Allyn Woock all engage with questions of gender and medievalisms in the 21st century in their chapters with Woock examining the depiction of women in medievalist comic books. She especially focuses on the depiction of the chainmail bikini, and how it has evolved through time. In so doing Woock engages with feminism, women’s liberation, sexual freedom, post-feminism, and the evolution of the medievalist trope of the chainmail bikini over time. Seymour Klos reflects on how the women of Game of Thrones allow us to stop considering medieval women like Isolde Pantulf as extraordinary, and that we, through the lens of popular culture, can better appreciate the complex lives of medieval women. Maraschi’s chapter also engages with an extremely popular example of medievalism on the silver screen, namely Frozen. In this chapter, Maraschi demonstrates how a brief sequence that includes a reference to Joan of Arc in the film situates Elsa and her story as a post-feminist critique of Western society. Individually and combined these three chapters offer thought-provoking examples of contemporary medievalisms. Consequently, this book offers the reader a selection of case studies giving thematic, material and contextual variety for studying medievalisms in the 21st century. As such, we hope this book will complement other works dealing with similar material, while also showcasing medievalism and medievalisms distinct from other examples and contexts previously examined. As this book explores different forms of medievalisms in the 21st century, as well as their audiences, communities and their relationship with identities in a globalising world, the chapters are arranged in groups of similar foci. It starts with five chapters exploring stereotypes and myths in medievalisms. Here we find Elizabeth Allyn Woock’s chapter on comic books and their feminist readers, Francis Mickus’ essay on how the Middle Ages are perceived in cinematic productions, and Jürg Gassmann’s contribution on the stereotypes and realities of the medieval knight as presented in medievalism. Dario Capelli writes in his chapter about the richness of materials in Black-Metal medievalisms and how this defies the stereotypes of metal music, while Juan Manuel Rubio Arévalo explores

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how ludo narrative dissonance and stereotypes of medievalism manifest in the game Dante’s Inferno. Succeeding this paper, are five chapters dealing with medievalisms that speak to particular communities and audiences. First out is Justin Breton’s study of the French presentation of King Arthur in Kaamelott and how it speaks to its French audience. Meg Feller considers in her work how The Witcher opens a window to understanding Polish identity and cultural sensitivities in the post-communist age, thus shedding light on the resonances of this story in Polish cultural contexts. Leticia Ding, Philippe Frieden and Stefania Maffei Boillat offer us a study that explores how a story of love and romance in the novel Romanesque can be told, retold, and theorized about in the same novel through an experimental structure and approach from the author. They focus on how the author takes his readership on a journey that explores the transmission of narratives through time and space. Jean Christian Egoavil examines how medieval studies, and particularly medieval philosophy have been reactualized in Peru in the 21st century with an acceptance of how the Middle Ages has contributed to the Peruvian cultural fabric. While Álvaro Garrote Pascual’s chapter focuses on the use of political neomedievalism by the party VOX in Spain, and how this conveys certain political narratives to their audiences. The last four chapters of this book belong to authors Dawn A. Seymour Klos, Andrea Maraschi, Monica J. Stenzel and Josephine C. Stenzel, and Leland Renato Grigoli, who all in their ways explore how medievalisms are impacted by or stimulate conversations of politics and gender. Klos focuses in her chapter on how an intertextual reading of Isolde Pantulf and the women of Game of Thornes can help contribute to a greater understanding of female agency past and present. Maraschi’s post-feminist reading of Elsa from Frozen in light of an image of Joan of Arc broadens our horizons when it comes to understanding and conversing about femininity, masculinity, and the societal structures that impact our lives and our expressions. Stenzel and Stenzel’s chapter takes the broadening of horizons further when discussing how fans of the Harry Potter books have taken up political activism likened to a medieval quest inspired by Herminie’s campaign for the rights of house elves. They have shown in their essay how the world of Potter has given youths around the world the impetus to stand up for what they believe in. In the final chapter of this book, Grigoli reminds us about how medievalism 9

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and neomedievalism in its evolution have been, and still are, tied to race and racism. He also demonstrates convincingly how acknowledging the affective relationships we have with the medieval past might contribute to breaking the far-rights hold on the medieval and medievalism. As the excellent chapters in this book demonstrated, medievalisms old and new are alive and well in the 21st century, and by considering the manifestation of this through the examples in the 14 chapters of this book, it is safe to say that the study of medievalisms will have a fruitful future.

Acknowledgement I wish to extend my sincerest thanks to the authors in this book for their patience with me. Thank you also to the reviewers of the chapters in this volume for their feedback and support, and to the team at Trivent and especially Teodora Artimon for supporting us in putting together this collection. Finally, I hope you who reads this will enjoy these chapters as much as I have done and still do.

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Medievalist Comic Book Characters and Their Feminist Readers Elizabeth Allyn Woock*

I. Introducing the Chainmaille Bikini In the children’s comic Princeless,1 the young protagonist Adrienne visits a blacksmith to be fitted for armor, and she is offered to look at the “Women Warriors Collection” of superhero costumes, which features an iron-colored bikini on a dress form in the position of honor at the center of the room. “There are women warriors?” she asks in surprise. “More than you’d think. This is one of the most popular… at least among fans of women warriors. The chain mail bra has a super industrial clasp to make sure your bosoms stay secure in the heat of battle… We call it ‘The Sonya,’”2 the smith offers. The scenario presented in this comic will strike a chord with readers familiar with the seemingly limited representation of female comic book characters who fall into the medieval fighter category. Much of this limitation is visible at first glance: bare skin and suggestive poses dressed in some version of “The Sonya” contrast with the heavy weaponry these characters hold in their hands. The medievalist, chainmaille armor worn by the character Red Sonja, first introduced in the Conan the Barbarian * Department

of English and American Studies, Palacký University, Czech Republic. This research was funded by the grant “American comics studies: Choices and ethics in representation” IGA_FF_2022_047. 1 Jeremy Whitley and Mia Goodwin, Princeless, Vol. 1: Save Yourself (Pittsburgh, PA: Action Lab, 2012), https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14623529-princeless-vol-1. 2 Whitley and Goodwin, no. 3, 9.

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series, has been in turn admired, berated, and reinvented every decade since its arrival. Second-wave feminist readers will wince at the costume, as her garb often symbolizes all that is wrong with female representation in comics. Historians will note everything ridiculously incorrect about medieval-inspired comics costumes. Contrary to this, I have found that contemporary female fans themselves consider this symbol not a rejection of feminism but even more surprisingly embrace it as an indicator of progress in feminist thought, gleefully aware of the anachronism of the design. The chainmaille bikini has survived the last two waves of popular feminism, and this study looks at the depiction of Red Sonja as a medievalist figure and how fans use the signature bikini from the 1980s to the present, focusing on how the self-conscious comic book writers and cosplayers position the chainmaille bikini within the broader discussion of gender politics and history in comics. Red Sonja is necessarily a medievalist character, and her medievalism is essential for creating the imaginative space which allows her character to be accepted as both a sex symbol and a depiction of feminist strength, which could never be achieved through realism or historical accuracy. In his book on medievalism in American comics, Christopher Bishop argues it “is the paradox of medievalism whereby the temporal distance from the historical period magnifies its exoticism to such a point that anything might be possible,”3 and so authors and illustrators have a wider range of creative choice. In 1973, Red Sonja appeared in the Conan series, adapted from a swashbuckling Renaissance or Medieval character from Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Shadow of the Vulture.”4 The storyworld these characters inhabit is not temporally discrete; rather it comfortably borrows from a range of historic settings, particularly from the medieval era. This is not only a matter of aesthetics, but plays a role in the ideological styling of the comic as well. Harry Ziegler notes that the medievalist setting is particularly popular in contemporary fiction because of the fantasy of medieval individualism; the assumption that society and order did not exist, and only the individual and at most the

Chris Bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), chap. 5, p. 4. 4 Robert E. Howard, “The Shadow of the Vulture,” The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934. 3

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family were the acting units when it comes to problem-solving.5 Rather than generating cognitive dissonance by contrasting modern values with historic settings, Bishop explains that Red Sonja is not a contradiction, because popular imagination “knows” that “women could not be warriors in the Middle Ages and so by imagining a fantasy in which they might be we feel less resistance to emotionally engaging with that period.”6 Thus Red Sonja can act out the role of the individualistic woman willing to engage in violence without feeling forced, thanks to the fantasy context. The medievalist fantasy also allows for the creation of her nontraditional dress, and visually signifies the ideologies that make Red Sonja an attractive character for female cosplayers. A character’s costume, along with their superpower (or signature weapon) and their tagline comprise the character’s identifying features in the comic book storyworld. These features also play the strongest role in cosplay,7 which is one of the ways that fans connect to a favorite character and embody them in the world as an expression of their fandom. The choice of dress and styling of a character aims to summarize the important features of the character’s personality and is carefully chosen. In her first comic book manifestation, Sonja was illustrated in medievalist lorica plumata armor over her torso and modern, red, high-cut shorts, wielding both a sword and a dagger. Throughout further issues of Conan the Barbarian and then in her own series and various reboots, Red Sonja has worn a range of outfits ranging from the practical to outlandish, yet the image that most fans will recognize is of the swordswoman scantily clad in a few triangles of scalemaille, fondly referred to as the “chainmaille bikini.” John Arnold notes that “costumes, strangely enough, seem to make a difference somehow – history can make violence safe, particularly perhaps medieval history,”8 and indeed, rather than being rendered helpless and exposed in a setting generally considered unfriendly to women, Red Sonja is a brutal fighter Harry Ziegler, “Anarchy and Order: Re-Inventing the Medieval in Contemporary Popular Narrative,” in History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. John Arnold, Kate Davies, and Simon Ditchfield (Shaftesbury: Donhead, 1998), 27, 35. 6 Bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century, chap. 5, p. 4. 7 “Cosplay” is a term created from the collocation “costume play,” coined by game designer Takahashi Nobuyuki in the 1980s (Bruno, 2002; Winge, 2006). 8 John Arnold, "Nasty Histories: Medievalism and Horror,” in History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. John Arnold, Kate Davies, and Simon Ditchfield (Shaftesbury: Donhead, 1998), 40. 5

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in her minimal coverage. Red Sonja’s costume represents a retelling of medieval society and gender roles, where such an independent, and violent, woman could exist. Though chainmaille is anchored in a specific point of development in the history of arms and armor, evolving from ancient scalemaille to the small, round links of the Middle Ages, the chainmaille bikini is wholly a modern invention. The chainmaille bikini has been so widely copied and circulated that it has become a recognizable symbol within medievalism9 which falls under Lauren Mayer’s definition of simulacrum. She describes medievalist simulacra as being built on the symbols and tropes of the past so thoroughly that all the nuance of historic research has been replaced with a militant amateurism which demands accuracy and is thus comfortable with the constructed nature of recreations because it provides a firmly established and agreed upon packaging of the Middle Ages.10 Correct and incorrect ways to depict the chainmaille bikini have been codified, including the standardization of the “correct” bikini for Red Sonja being constructed of circular scalemaille. This extends beyond Red Sonja to other medievalist storyworlds, as referenced by the smith in Princeless, and so the chainmaille bikini itself has become a standard feature, though a simulacrum or copy for which no original exists,11 of the Middle Ages in popular media. II. Analysing Comic Books Characters Through Cosplay For comic book artists and writers, the first time they see a fan cosplay as a character can be a significant moment speaking to the success of the character design. Cosplay is a chance for fans to dress up and pretend to be a fictional character, usually a sci-fi, comic book, or anime character. Cornel Sandvoss confirms this on a personal level, in that whatever the Just the term “chainmail bikini” itself was used also as a summary of the concept of women in male-dominated media spaces, as in the 2015 anthology of comics called Chainmail Bikini (2016), about female gamers. 10 See Lauren S. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), 223. 11 Mayer ties this with Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra” (2009), which I will extend to include medievalist simulacra in comic books and graphic novels, and Umberto Eco’s theory of hyper-reality, within which the difference between the “real” and a copy, fake, or outright simulacra becomes irrelevant. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990). 9

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object of fandom, it is intertwined with the fan’s conception of self – who they think they are and who they want to be12 – which makes the choice of character all the more significant. Rosenberg and Letamendi confirmed this specifically in the case of cosplayers, choosing to play characters to whom they feel similar and, on another level, whom they can idealize, cautioning that: given the time and energy cosplayers devote to this activity and the importance of cosplaying for their well-being and self-concept, further research is warranted to better understand how decisions – such as who to cosplay – may affect the outcomes of cosplaying.13 The choice to meticulously embody a medievalist character in fleshbaring armor, as in the case of Red Sonja, is a statement of many factors of the ideal self for a feminist or post-feminist fan. This study will consider the following factors: the statement made the choice of a character and what that character represents to the fan, the history that this character engages with, the gender politics of the character, and the significance of “taking up space” in the fandom as a female fan. For people who chose to honor these characters with cosplay, the most glaring issue is the role of the “male gaze” in the creation of these characters, and the question about who the audience might be for the cosplay. Ziegler notes that male writers create extremes in the representation of women,14 and indeed among the comics series under examination in this chapter, both the earlier issues of Red Sonja and the Rat Queens series are directed by male creators and invest the most time and space in creating attractive, sexy female characters, poised, and idyllic even when fighting. In the case of Red Sonja’s series, the publisher Dynamite reports that 74% of their overall readership is male,15 even after the more “feminist” reboot lead by Gail Simone. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 96. Stephen Reysen et al., ‘“Who I Want to Be”: Self-Perception and Cosplayers’ Identification with Their Favorite Characters,” The Phoenix Papers 3, no. 2 (March 2018): 5. 14 Ziegler, “Anarchy and Order: Re-Inventing the Medieval in Contemporary Popular Narrative,” 31. 15 ‘Dynamite - The Official Site | Dejah Thoris Vol. 3, Die!Namite, Killing Red Sonja, The Boys and More!,” accessed 21 December 2020, www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/ contact.html. 12 13

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However, there are variations between different medievalist comics of the same time of production. While Rat Queens16 allows some of its protagonists to be illustrated with deep décolleté, it is also true that the Queens are often presented in what Jeffrey Brown calls a sort of masculine “drag,” wearing masculine clothing while doing masculine activities such as engaging in violence.17 Rat Queens goes so far to include a bearded character (the dwarf Violet), and depicts the Queens unapologetically getting into fistfights, drinking, and swaggering about the town. Another example of rejecting the chainmaille bikini standard is found in Nimona, wherein the titular character is dressed in a full chainmaille shirt and a long, loose tunic which does not expose much skin. Nimona is not depicted in suggestive poses, or in any scenarios where she would be considered a “damsel in distress.” There are Nimona and Violet cosplayers, to be sure, but they are not quite so common as Red Sonja. In embodying a character, the effort goes beyond the costume. More deeply, many cosplayers also adopt an alternate “body rhetoric”18 and speech style that complements their costume.19 These embodied performances make use of a clearly delineated range of mannerisms of poses which are evidenced in the canonic texts and legible by the wider public, generating an association between the body, the “parent text” through the use of signs. This is not unlike the conflicting balance struck by post-feminism in its public performance of rejection of the previous waves of feminism and its requirement that female subjects both self-invent and selfregulate. If rule-following is an effective means for demonstrating the self-regulation required for postfeminist success, how, then, to make sense of the cultural capital that attaches to the rule-breaker… As social codes and rules, norms assign varying degrees of moral value to ruleKurtis J. Wiebe, Roc Upchurch, and Ed Brisson, Rat Queens: Volume One: Sass and Sorcery, ed. Laura Tavishati (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2015). 17 Jeffrey A. Brown, Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 22. 18 Jan Laude, “Body Rhetoric: A Study in Lesbian Coding,” New York Folklore 19 (1993): 105–20. 19 Matthew Hale, “Cosplay: Intertextuality, Public Texts, and the Body Fantastic,” Western Folklore 73, no. 1 (2014): 8. 16

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following and rule-breaking behavior, thereby determining the power available to the subjects who enact it.20 As the cosplayer manifests the body rhetoric of the character, in the case of characters viewed as being feminist or postfeminist, this embodiment plays a double role. The embodiment of medievalist comic book characters such as Red Sonja collides with conversations about what is feminism in this context, how to portray history, and how to manifest female participation in comic book fandoms. III. Postfeminist Medievalism Cosplay is an interesting way to measure or monitor fan engagement with a comic book character. The whole process of cosplay is comprised of both transmedial and commercial elements,21 in that the cosplay takes place in real time or in photographs or short videos and is both an act of consumption and production of the costume and participation in the fandom world, which might include social media or comic conferences. Fandom can seem like an outward performance, in terms of cosplay or turning one’s fandom into a creative project, such as fan fiction or a new text within the genre, but Sandvoss proposes that “the first and foremost audience for the performance of the fans, is the fan him or herself.”22 For fans, cosplaying is an expression of embodying a character, and the choice to embody a character is at once personal and political. The audience, who both consume and produce the character through cosplay, becomes also a productive actor in the creation of a character. This is complicated when cosplaying a medievalist character who is identified by her skimpy armor and is the subject of feminist criticism. In regard to cosplaying a buxom shieldmaiden in barely-there armor, second-wave feminism stands in sharp contrast to later waves in that it openly resists the visual presentation of the female body for sexual objectification, with “the claim that women need to be protected against

Marjorie Jolles, “Going Rogue: Postfeminism and the Privilege of Breaking Rules,” Feminist Formations 24, no. 3 (2012): 48, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2012.0031. 21 Nicolle Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters: The Affective Process of Cosplay,” in Productive Fandom, Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 201, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65svxz.14. 22 Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption, 98. 20

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sexual objectification.”23 This is one of the points where the third wave breaks off, in that the debate in the mid-1980s centered on the issue of pornography, a division emerged during this time between those feminists who emphasized the need to protect women from sexual objectification and those who emphasized the importance of women’s sexual liberation.24 Wendy Pini’s first appearance portraying Red Sonja took place in 1976, still within the second wave, but already reflecting the attitudes which moved feminism to the third wave. This activity was called “portraying” at the time, and both Wendy Pini and her partner Richard Pini participated in the scene, going to conferences and events with their group The Hyborian Players. Looking at this time retrospectively, Richard Pini’s comments on Wendy Pini’s emergence as the best Red Sonja reflect the tension between a less assertive, more sexualized use of the chainmaille bikini by some portrayers, and the stronger character which Wendy Pini created, saying: They had different takes in the character, but none of them got in the deep dark soul of the character as Wendy did. And I think that all the people who ever saw her could tell all right, there’s a lot of cheesecake running around in chain mail bikinis, but watch out for that one. Because you mess with her and you’ll get that sword where you don’t want it.25 Though Red Sonja is not illustrated explicitly as pornography, nor are the cosplayers aiming to create pornographic images, “as bare as the chain mail bikini leaves you”26 leaves a lot of space for debate. The cosplayers, or portrayers such as Wendy Pini, are aware of this, and it is even commented on internally in the comics as a meta-criticism. Red Sonja herself referenced and joked about the bikini while dressing in Jess Butler, “For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 39, https://doi.org/doi:10.1353/ff.2013.0009. 24 Butler, 38. 25 Jason Sacks, “Wendy and Richard Pini Part Three: Creating a Different Family,” Comics Bulletin, 1 May 2014, http://comicsbulletin.com/wendy-and-richard-pini-partthree-creating-different-family/. 26 Sacks. 23

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more practical clothing, warning a friend that “it’s not too practical and it chafes, you’ll see, but I couldn’t bear to throw it out.”27 Wendy Pini locates the motivations of the character beyond the discussion of sex, stating: Absolutely, and her motivations often didn’t have much to do with her gender. She was a female version of Conan. Except she had this backstory that a woman could totally relate to. You know, women were pretty angry back then. Women were feeling it. There was something going on in all of us that wanted to bust out, and I found that from portraying Sonja, was a socially acceptable way of getting a lot of anger out.28 This anticipates the third-wave and post-feminist interpretations of the character. Amber Kinser describes the difference between the second and third waves of feminism as “less about differences in politics than it is about differences in climate render the two words problematic in their own way,”29 and also emphasizes the necessity of the medievalism of the character to the ability to act out modern ideologies. In this case, the medievalism of the character and the portrayal of the character in real spaces as feminist female representation – she is equipped with a sword and has the permission to act outside of expected gendered norms, despite being dressed so suggestively. In the newest reinvention of Red Sonja, this anachronistic, fantasy garb still occupies an ideological and intensely contested space within contemporary feminist thought. Sonja is a powerful and self-assured and a thoroughly modern woman. But she is still wearing that bikini that bikini so many young women still choose to wear at comic conventions.30 More recent comics overlapping the rise of the “third wave” of feminism cover a wide range, and the subcategory of medievalist comics Louise Simonson, Mary Wilshire, et al, Red Sonja, no. 8 (April), New York, NY: Marvel, 1985, p. 15. Also quoted in Bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century. 28 Sacks, “Wendy and Richard Pini Part Three.” 29 Amber E. Kinser, “Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism,” NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 132. 30 Bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century, chap. 5, p. 17. 27

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range from Red Sonja’s eponymous series to newer series about female adventurers, such as Heathen31 and Nimona.32 Labelled also as “pop feminism” or “do-it-yourself-feminism,”33 the third wave has slightly more complicated views on dress, with the presentation of costuming or dress appearing in different media. There is some ambiguity about the separation between the third wave and post-feminism as both arise parallelly as a response to the second wave, but for the sake of this study I will draw the differentiating line at an awareness of gender performance in the presentation of the character; the third wave presents an expansive view of the female body and female empowerment or what it means to be female, while post-feminism insists on the “right to sexualize” oneself and is self-aware in the performance of traditional markers of femininity. The final permutation of feminism in the dress of comic book characters is post-feminism, which assumes the work of equality is complete. Butler identifies “a narrative, performance, and/or text as postfeminist if it incorporates one or more of the following characteristics: • That it implies that gender equality has been achieved and feminist activism is thus no longer necessary; • defines femininity as a bodily property and revives notions of natural sexual difference; • marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification; • encourages self-surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover paradigm; • emphasizes individualism, choice, and empowerment as the primary routes to women’s independence and freedom; • and promotes consumerism and the commodification of difference.34

Natasha Alterici, Heathen: Vol. 1, Previous edition: January 20th, 2016, by Literati Press (Bethesda, MD; Missoula, MT: Vault, 2017). 32 Noelle Stevenson, Nimona (Harper Collins, 2015). 33 Ricarda Drüeke and Elke Zobl, “Introduction: Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship,” in Feminist Media, ed. Ricarda Drüeke and Elke Zobl, Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship (Transcript Verlag, 2012), 11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxr2f.4. 34 Butler, “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” 44. 31

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This can manifest in medievalism in the more fantastical costume design, and the attitudes embodied by the cosplayer in an accurate portrayal of a character. Post-feminism strikes a difficult balance in its public performance of rejection of the previous waves of feminism and its requirement that female subjects both self-invent and selfregulate. If rule-following is an effective means for demonstrating the self-regulation required for postfeminist success, how, then, to make sense of the cultural capital that attaches to the rule-breaker… As social codes and rules, norms assign varying degrees of moral value to rulefollowing and rule-breaking behavior, thereby determining the power available to the subjects who enact it.35 This maps closely onto the pressures on cosplayers to depict a character through “screen accurate” costumes and body rhetoric, also reflecting the different ways that cosplay is performed, as it is no longer limited to live appearances at events. The climate that feminism of any type now manifests in is public and digital, moreover, self-produced, wherein women choose their form of representation, or, in the case of fictional characters, act out presentation on them. In terms of cosplay and character design, with each aesthetic act, whether a fan decides to imitate a particular character with incredible fidelity or modifies a basic set of recognizable aesthetic structures, cosplayers display their fluency and expertise within a set of textualities or discursive fields through material forms and embodied actions.36 If the character has been embodied successfully through cosplay, what is the ideal that the cosplayer is portraying? The next section looks at some of the ideologies underpinning the medievalism of the chainmaille bikini, and the (post)feminist politics of putting in on one’s body for the sake of cosplay.

35 36

Jolles, “Going Rogue: Postfeminism and the Privilege of Breaking Rules,” 48. Hale, “Cosplay,” 9. 21

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IV. White Heroism and Sexual Liberation The choices made in the creation and presentation of female comic book characters are important thanks to the increased interest in creating characters which move away from the previously male-dominated industry’s imagination. In a 2014 interview, Wendy Pini reflected on the changing demands on characters, in particular the “Strong Female Character,” but she goes beyond the third wave of “girl power” explicit enthusiasm and rather takes a post-feminist stance: We’re in that portion of history where we have to label things. We have to call attention to things. And I’m so waiting for when we can say “That’s a great story. Those characters are wonderful, and you’re not labeling them as one thing or the other.”37 With the introduction of female writers and illustrators, such as Mary Wilshire, Gail Simone, and now Marguerite Bennett, Red Sonja “became a hero, whom girls could look up to rather than one who boys simply looked at.” There are many interpretations of the “Strong Female Character” in medievalist comics created around the same time as Pini reflected on this phenomenon. They are all armed and in amour, mostly freed from an obligation to appeal to the male-gaze, as the second wave would approve of, but not free from questions about the application of armored bikinis. The range of women’s armor has not been limited to armored swimwear. Dedicated to “all the monstrous girls,”38 Noelle Stevenson’s heroine Nimona is a shapeshifter, but in her human form she wears chain mail and stylized armor with a tunic, high boots, and leather vambraces, looking like a robust young woman with a partly shaved head. She’s quite protected, even if her secondary form is a vicious, fiery dragon, and she is quite capable of defending herself even without the armor. One of her shapeshifts is into the form of a scared little girl, with long hair and a bow, right before she stabs an armed guard in the back,39 and again she is presented as helpless and stereotypically feminine after having exhausted her powers by splitting her energy, leaving her a small and Sacks, “Wendy and Richard Pini Part Three.” Stevenson, Nimona, vi. 39 Stevenson, 10. 37 38

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helpless child.40 Though Nimona is not devoid of sex appeal in her grown-up form (some of Stevenson’s sketches even include a few cheeky poses),41 she is never dressed in something suggestive, and is more likely to shapeshift into a burly young man42 as she is to attempt to disguise herself as a lovely maiden. A few years later, in 2017, Natasha Alterici designed the character Aydis for the series Heathen, a young Viking woman who wants to prove herself as a warrior in her own right. She dons a fur cloak, thigh-high leather boots, a horned helmet, a thick belt, and a bikini. Perhaps appropriate for the Scandinavian setting, Aydis’ bikini armor is leather and fur, but the “barbarian babe look” heavily references the tradition started by Red Sonja. Many of the female characters in this series have similar outfits, some even casually topless. Medievalism informed the costume rather than historical research: “She started out as nothing more than a Renaissance Fair costume design.” In a way, Aydis is cosplaying the comic book heroines of earlier series, and the chainmaille bikini is not necessarily attached to Red Sonja specifically but appears as medievalist armor on Angela (originally from the Spawn universe, now a Marvel character), on Lady Death (Chaos Comics, first appearing in 1991), and appearing in occasionally medievalist TV series such as Xena: Warrior Princess. The choice of attire is never commented on, and the male characters are depicted shirtless as well, with cloaks, solidifying a style of dress for the whole storyworld. As Richard Pini said about Red Sonja’s costume, “… the accuracy of the costume aside, and it was a spectacular costume,”43 this statement could easily sum up the attitude of Aydis’ costume as well. The chosen differences between the costuming of Aydis in Heathen and Nimona in the eponymous graphic novel represent the range of interpretations of what “feminist” presentation means. In these cases, the characters in the comics themselves are “cosplaying” earlier medievalist characters, because they draw heavily from established aesthetic expectations of what medieval warrior women look like, either adopting the second-wave stance of “protecting” women from exploitative dress, or leaning into the skimpy bikinis as a form of Stevenson, 226. Stevenson, 264–65. 42 Stevenson, 129–35. 43 Sacks, “Wendy and Richard Pini Part Three.” 40 41

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empowerment and expression of rejecting second-wave feminism, which is itself an act of post-feminism. There is a further link between medievalism, the presentation of the female body, and the embodiment of “warrior” characters as feminist models within the whiteness of medievalism. The chainmaille bikini is allowed to continue throughout the waves of feminism not only as a “culturally intelligible”44 touchstone, but also Butler’s (1990) theorization of “culturally intelligible” agency based on the belief that female agency is constructed through rather than against culture, which can be used as a shorthand for empowerment, but “girl power discourse tends to valorize white girls’ socially accepted aggressiveness and link it to the rhetoric of liberation and empowerment through ‘heroification,’”45 in contrast to the presentation of women and girls of other races. The depiction of a physically aggressive heroine is further made possible by the medievalist fantasy context, which in turn reiterates the whiteness of the character in the popular expectation of a “white Middle Ages.” In cosplay, by avoiding the “new” Red Sonja, dressed in sensible gear, and cosplaying the “classic” Sonja, women both have a way to perform the expected, while thumbing their nose at out-of-date ideologies of “feminism” which ostentatiously reject the presentation of the female body for a presumed male gaze. The photographer/subject who both cosplays and controls the media presentation of herself can present authenticity within the community, the self-branding required of postfeminism, and the adoption of a second-wave character in a way that frustrates the second and third waves both in the current cultural climate. As cosplay is performed in public, the white-washed Middle Ages, wherein whiteness is considered a sign of authenticity, makes medievalist Red Sonja a perfect conduit to perform culturally intelligible and socially acceptable heroification of white postfeminism. Many medievalist characters designed with the chainmaille bikini costume – such as Red Sonja, Tarot, Lady Death, The Magdalena, and Aydis – are all white women who lean closer to a postfeminist ideal than a second or third wave ideology.

Michelle S. Bae, “Interrogating Girl Power: Girlhood, Popular Media, and Postfeminism,” Visual Arts Research 37, no. 2 (2011): 31, https://doi.org/10.5406/ visuartsrese.37.2.0028. 45 Bae, 23. 44

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If Red Sonja, in her bikini, is no longer understood to be a symptom of the male gaze and historical inaccuracy, what exactly is embodied when a fan undertakes the effort to cosplay this character, and why has the chainmaille bikini not yet been discarded, or exchange for a similarly sexy, medievalist costume? The fidelity to the most identifiable signifier of the character and the character’s accompanying medievalism both play a role. Matthew Hale proposed a phenomenological approach to fandom and cosplay as “participatory culture.”46 He emphasizes that cosplayers are playing with codes established by the texts and the canonical facts about the characters, and the skill of the cosplayer is evidenced by their fluency in embodying these characters in real time.47 Hale identifies two types of character representation: a “discrete” representation48 which requires that a single character is clearly embodied (for example, Red Sonja), and a “generic” representation49 which requires a category of character to be represented (for example, a medievalist barbarian). In both cases, an accurate representation relies on the faithful translation of material and action signs from canonical texts to the costume and the performance of the cosplayer. This translation is reliant on “conventionalized, repeatable configuration of signs,” which Hale says can even include texts such as memes,50 forming “dynamic semiotic structures.”51 The conventionalization of signs and mannerisms can include more abstracted simulacra, such as the manifestation an “ideal leader” in the embodiment of King Arthur.52 The cosplayer is obliged to close the “intertexual gap” of the character being brought to life out of context by maximizing the “costume and performance’s recognizability” thus earning what Hale calls “referential currency” among the audience members.53 In this, it doesn’t matter if the other Red Sonja costumes exist, because the simulacrum bikini commands the best referential value. The generic representation follows a similar set of requirements, but the range of canonical texts can be wider, and the cosplayer may need to Hale, ‘Cosplay,” 8. Hale, 8–9. 48 Hale, 10. 49 Hale, 12. 50 Hale, 8. 51 Hale, 19. 52 Roberta Davidson, The ‘Reel’ Arthur: Politics and Truth Claims in ‘Camelot, Excalibur, and King Arthur,”’ Arthuriana 17, no. 2 (2007): 62. 53 Hale, “Cosplay,” 15–16. 46 47

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work harder to earn referential currency because achieving recognizability of a categorical character is less impressive than “screen accurate” costumes, which are the most popular and most photographed in Hale’s study.54 On the other hand, a generic entity may be lower risk because they do not undergo the scrutiny that discrete representations may endure, as generic representations draw on a wider range of “referential cultural commons”55 and thus have less room for inaccuracies. In terms of medievalist cosplay, Hale suggests that a complex of signs can be shifted into registers, including a “medieval generic register.”56 The fact that the bikini is not only recognizable, but the medieval generic register is significant for the act of closing the intertextual gap in cosplay. In donning the chainmaille bikini, red hair, holding a sword and performing Sonja’s attitude of “will slay 4 [sic] mead,”57 a cosplayer can create a relatively legible discrete representation, the accuracy of which to be determined by the effort of the performer. Taken alone, those signs do not necessarily represent “medievalism,” except for the chainmaille bikini, while the sword can be exchanged for a bow to the same effect. This enables the application of the chainmaille, or in extension an armor bikini of any type, to function as part of the cultural commons used to inform the performance of a medieval generic representation. The particularities of the medievalist chainmaille bikini signal heroification of the white postfeminist, which is communicated by a legible performance as understood by the audience. While embodiment of female characters can challenge the “dominance of Anglo-American feminism” as a time after an age of feminist action, “while third-wave feminism actively engages with feminist history, if only to deem it inadequate, postfeminism displaces or replaces feminism altogether,”58 as the medievalist simulacra of the costume replaces historical realism and becomes the only acceptable representation. An accurate chainmaille bikini is essential and the ability to remain faithful to a text is measured by the legibility of the embodiment, and the legibility of an embodiment is essential for public feminism. Legibility Hale, 17. Hale, 18. 56 Hale, 24. 57 Ben Cadwell, Red Sonja # 23 Cover Illustration, 2018, 2018. 58 Butler, “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” 42. 54 55

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doesn’t need to happen in person, but can be preserved in a photograph, further aided by extra manipulations of the photo (such as adding the visual indicators of magic powers). Both cosplay and female presence in media require a level of “self-imaging practice” wherein “artist is both object and the subject at the same time.”59 The decision to faithfully embody a character whose physical presentation is commonly derided by second-wave feminist ideology occupies a precarious position of rejecting the male gaze while still working within a platform of “image production that is controlled through a patriarchal lens” in cases like Instagram where there is “still a particular ideal and image exerted over a woman’s body” to the point that Gretchen Faust identifies censorship of basic female physiology.60 The control of the patriarchal lens goes so far as to even challenge female cosplayers’ motivations for engaging in the embodiment of female comic book characters, accusing them of participating only for attention and insisting that they may not even be informed about canonic texts.61 This would be a second-wave feminist criticism falling on the deaf ears of post-feminism, but also a form of gatekeeping within the comic fandom. The chainmaille bikini here plays multiple roles: as an instantly recognisable signifier of the medieval register and thus the associated ideologies, a guarantee of “screen accurate” costuming to secure membership to the fandom, and an opportunity to make a public statement of post-feminism while claiming to control the presentation. Butler emphasizes post-feminists as “liberated consumers” who selfconsciously participate in a highly stylized “postfeminist masquerade”62 as a statement of personal choice. In the representation of Red Sonja, conspicuous consumption in both contemporary cosplay and postfeminism is displayed thanks to the public and performative aspect, and the level of surveillance by both the cosplayer and the audience of accurate discrete character presentation or medievalist authenticity both play a significant role in the success of the cosplay. Even the “DIY” Gretchen Faust, “Hair, Blood and the Nipple Instagram Censorship and the Female Body: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces’, in Digital Environments, 2017, 160, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839434970-012. 60 Faust, 160, 164. 61 Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters’, 210. 62 McRobbie 2009, 64 in: Butler, “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” 45–46. 59

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aspect of cosplay, i.e., making one’s costume rather than buying it finished, requires conspicuous use of free time and resources, which are on display in the final product. A ready-made costume of Red Sonja costs roughly $300 from an independent artist.63 The cosplay both signals community membership in the community of comic book fans, but also makes a statement of post-feminism in that as cosplay requires visible consumption, post-feminism aligned with commodity feminism is seen as a weakening of conventional feminist social goals through an aesthetic depoliticization that, by focusing on individual style, fetishizes feminism. Additionally, despite postfeminism’s noncontradictory unification of feminism and femininity, post-feminism is thought to inherently involve an ideological contradiction; women use autonomous control over their bodies and appearance to build a construct that will eventually be objectified by the male gaze.64 The market of choice for cosplay is wide; one could select Violet from Rat Queens, a bellicose dwarf, who remains fully covered and occasionally is illustrated with a beard (which she shaves as an act of rebellion against her own dwarf community). The “girl power” of Red Sonja, which Simone emphasizes, is tied to strict feminine posturing which is “a circuitous system of postfeminist ideologies suggests a close tie among individual power, feminine identity, consumption, and girls’ self-monitoring practices in a neoliberal capitalist regime,”65 which grants successful cosplayers, who master legibility of embodiment, both social and financial capital. Images of a cosplayer in her Red Sonja costume, acting in appropriate storyworld faithful contexts, can cost roughly $10 per print,66 to the benefit of the consumer-producer cosplayer, fueled by the referential currency of the chainmaille bikini. The current versions of Red Sonja offer a dynamic lens through which to examine how female comic fans today negotiate presence in public spaces through the act of cosplay. The contemporary cosplayer of Red Sonja, or a medievalist barbarian clad in an armored bikini, presents “Scalemail Red Sonja Costume - Cosplay,” Etsy, accessed 20 December 2020, www.etsy.com/listing/657167725/scalemail-red-sonja-costume-cosplay?utm_source= OpenGraph&utm_medium=PageTools&utm_campaign=Share. 64 Bae, “Interrogating Girl Power,” 29. 65 Bae, 30–31. 66 “Red Sonja Prints,” Etsy, accessed 20 December 2020, www.etsy.com/ listing/726362581/red-sonja-prints?utm_source=OpenGraph&utm_medium=PageT ools&utm_campaign=Share. 63

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confidence that the display of the female body no longer needs to be censored, nor to women need to be protected from sexual exploitation, that femininity is a natural asset to be capitalized on, and that the subject of the image is also the empowered artist responsible for the creation of the image. The self-surveillance inherent in the act of embodying a character to “screen accuracy” levels, as well as the public monitoring of social media and the wider fandom community which rewards strict fidelity to a discrete representation, or a legible generic representation, is present as both an aspect of cosplay and post-feminism. Post-feminism and cosplay both pivot around conspicuous consumerism and commodification, either in the creation of the costume to achieve referential currency or the subsequent monetization of cosplayer images or performances. Finally, the neoliberal ideologies channeled through medievalism emphasize an individualism, choice, empowerment, and a stereotypical performance of women’s independence overlaps with medievalist, fantasy imaginings of a storyworld set in the Dark Ages. While “earlier feminist demands for equal rights, collective activism, and the eradication of gender inequality are taken into account and then displaced by the postfeminist ideals of individualism, choice, and empowerment,”67 these larger trends can be seen even in comics fandom. There are other popular choices of female warriors exist, but the portrayal of Red Sonja, specifically in her chainmaille bikini, still holds substantial value within the fandom, thanks to, and not in spite, of the medievalism of the design and the potentially post-feminist cosplay of the character.

Bibliography Alterici, Natasha. Heathen: Vol. 1. Previous edition: January 20, 2016 by Literati Press. Bethesda, MD; Missoula, MT: Vault, 2017. Arnold, John. “Nasty Histories: Medievalism and Horror.” In History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, edited by John Arnold, Kate Davies, and Simon Ditchfield. Shaftesbury: Donhead, 1998.

McRobbie 2009, 1 in Butler, “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” 44. 67

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Bae, Michelle S. “Interrogating Girl Power: Girlhood, Popular Media, and Postfeminism.” Visual Arts Research 37, no. 2 (2011): 28–40. Bishop, Chris. Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Black Water Armoury. “Scalemail Red Sonja Costume – Cosplay.” www.etsy.com/listing/657167725/scalemail-red-sonja-costumecosplay?utm_source=OpenGraph&utm_medium=PageTools&utm _campaign=Share (accessed December, 20 2020) Brown, Jeffrey A. Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Butler, Jess. “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion.” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 35–58. Cadwell, Ben. Red Sonja # 23. Cover Illustration. Mount Laurel, NJ: Dynamite Entertainment, 2018. Davidson, Roberta. “The ‘Reel’ Arthur: Politics and Truth Claims in ‘Camelot, Excalibur, and King Arthur.’” Arthuriana 17, no. 2 (2007): 62–84. Drüeke, Ricarda, and Elke Zobl. “Introduction: Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship.” In Feminist Media, edited by Ricarda Drüeke and Elke Zobl, 11–18. Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012. “Dynamite - The Official Site | Dejah Thoris Vol. 3, Die!Namite, Killing Red Sonja, The Boys and More!” www.dynamite.com/ htmlfiles/contact.html. (accessed December 21, 2020) Faust, Gretchen. “Hair, Blood and the Nipple Instagram Censorship and the Female Body: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces.” In Digital Environments, edited by Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, and Mike Terry, 159–70. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017. Hale, Matthew. “Cosplay: Intertextuality, Public Texts, and the Body Fantastic.” Western Folklore 73, no. 1 (2014): 5–37. Howard, Robert E. “The Shadow of the Vulture.” The Magic Carpet Magazine 3, no. 5 (January 1934). Jolles, Marjorie. “Going Rogue: Postfeminism and the Privilege of Breaking Rules.” Feminist Formations 24, no. 3 (2012): 43–61. Kinser, Amber E. “Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism.” NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 124–53. 30

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Lamerichs, Nicolle. “Embodied Characters: The Affective Process of Cosplay.” In Productive Fandom, 199–230. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Laude, Jan. “Body Rhetoric: A Study in Lesbian Coding.” New York Folklore 19 (1993): 105–20. Mayer, Lauren S. “Simulacrum.” In Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, 223–30. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Reysen, Stephen, Courtney Plante, Sharon Roberts, and Kathleen Gerbasi. “‘Who I Want to Be’: Self-Perception and Cosplayers’ Identification with Their Favorite Characters.” The Phoenix Papers 3, no. 2 (March 2018): 1–7. Sacks, Jason. “Wendy and Richard Pini Part Three: Creating a Different Family’. Comics Bulletin, 1 May 2014. http://comicsbulletin.com/ wendy-and-richard-pini-part-three-creating-different-family/ (accessed December 20, 2020). Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Stevenson, Noelle. Nimona. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2015. Whitley, Jeremy, and Mia Goodwin. Princeless, Vol. 1: Save Yourself. Pittsburgh, PA: Action Lab, 2012. Wiebe, Kurtis J., Roc Upchurch, and Ed Brisson. Rat Queens: Volume One: Sass and Sorcery. Edited by Laura Tavishati. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2015. Ziegler, Harry. “Anarchy and Order: Re-Inventing the Medieval in Contemporary Popular Narrative.” In History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, edited by John Arnold, Kate Davies, and Simon Ditchfield, 27–28. Shaftesbury: Donhead, 1998.

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Are Pigs Pink? Cinematic Perceptions of the Medieval Past Francis Mickus*

I. The Woes of the Technical Consultant When discussing the tensions between fictional narrative and historical research, the problem is not so much the uncertainty in following events (that happens everywhere), but in the means used to convey a situation. The Devil is principally in the details. Film conveys information through the presentation of physical objects and actions; thus, for a historical film to function, not only sets and costumes have to look real, but manners and behavior have to convey the sense of a different time. Historians are comfortable with the latter but taken unawares by the former. As a result, when filmmakers turn to historians to gather information, they tend to irritate them by subsequently ignoring their advice. Even constructive and congenial exchanges tend to leave out aspects that are important for historians. This was the case in producing Le Retour de Martin Guerre.1 Historian Nathalie Zemon-Davies, as a technical consultant, sent the filmmakers copious information. The resulting film remains a model for historic recreation, yet much of Zemon-Davies’ input was set aside.2 These exclusions may have occurred for a variety of reasons which can say a great deal about the economics of film production, but also about

Ecole Doctorale d’Histoire, Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. Written by Jean-Claude Carrière and directed by Daniel Vigne. Released in 1982. 2 N. Zemon-Davies, “Movie or Monograph? A Historian/Filmmaker’s Perspective,” The Public Historian Vol. 25 N°3 (Summer 2003): 45-48. The idea that filmmakers have a propensity to play “fast and loose” with historical facts became the subject of Alan Alda’s 1986 film Sweet Liberty, where a Revolutionary War historian (played by Alda) tries to overwrite the script to a film about his historical specialty. *

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the social, aesthetic and even historical attitudes towards the Middle Ages. The knowledge that a filmmaker needs to convey physical reality is precisely the knowledge that eludes the consulted specialists: how did people greet each other? When would a monk wear his hood or take it off? Historians do not really know the answers, as such mundane and repetitious information is weeded out from the sources they have at their disposal.3 This may be why historians feel, as Marc Ferro argues, that only historical reconstructions are incapable of going beyond conveying the filmmakers’ ideology, but can give a vivid sense of what the past looked like.4 Michel Pastoureau made a similar observation when he expanded on his role as a technical consultant on two different occasions and the resulting use of the information he offered. With Eric Rohmer, while preparing Perceval le Gallois (1978), he discussed the use of color in the Middle Ages, but Rohmer and his set and costume designers discarded the information – indeed they followed a path that went counter to Pastoureau’s suggestions, with, for example, a profuse use of violet, a color that would have been meaningless at the time.5 But historians can make mistakes, as Pastoureau humorously recalls: while working with the team of consultants headed by Jacques le Goff on The Name of the Rose (1986), Pastoureau remembered at the last minute that medieval pigs were not pink, they were black. The designers did try to integrate the information by painting the pigs; the resulting footage showed a scene of unutterable squalor – which greatly pleased the film’s director, Jean-

Moreover, this is information with which historians even do not always concern themselves. 4 See the short interview posted by Gallimard for the 1994 reissue of Marc Ferro’s Book Cinema et Histoire/Cinema and History (accessed October 31, 2020): www.gallimard.fr/ catalog/entretiens/01027953.htm. 5 In his perceptive essay on the use of Medieval imagery in reconstructing the past, Corneliu Dragomirescu does not notice this shift in color. While the article predates Pastoureau’s specific reminiscence (see note 2, below), it does not predate his exploration of color and heraldry in the Middle Ages. As a comparative study of Rohmer’s film and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in their respective uses of Medieval manuscript imagery to convey a sense of the Medieval world, the starling differences in the use of color and lighting in the two films should have been a central concern. C. Dragomirescu, “Le Cinéma à l’épreuve des représentations médiévales : l’enluminure et le théâtre : Perceval le Gallois d’Eric Rohmer et Henry V de Laurence Olivier,” Babel, N°15, 2007. 3

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Jacques Annaud, as it played into the film’s mysterious atmosphere, as well as a desire to depict the harsh conditions of the times.6 Annaud’s response is the key to understanding filmic recreation: contemporary conceptions are the latest renditions of a tradition of interpretive reconstructions, a tradition that precedes the advent of film. The idea is not so much to show the reality of the Middle Ages as it is to give audiences a sense of being there. That conception of the past is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century’s flowering of historical recreation based on objective discoveries in archaeology. As the first part of this paper will explore, there is a break with the classical ideal. It became important to accurately depict historical evolution (complete with its nationalistic intents). While the major arts moved away from historical recreation, the theater continued to do so, and, in England, Shakespeare became the primary historical conduit. Film eventually replaced theater in this desire to recreate the past, but, as we will go on to demonstrate, film streamlines the process, creating generic codes to make a period in time and space recognizable.7 Realism, we will see, thus becomes more a matter of expectations than of factual reconstruction: our expectations of the Middle Ages reside in the period’s very timelessness. Finally, as Shakespeare remains a conduit to our visions of the medieval past, we will study how various interpretations of Henry V’s character both question and exploit those filmic recreations. The sense of being there is a constant conversation between what we know of the past and the history of our interpretations of that past. II. The Break from Classicism and the Search for an Authentic Past The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of historical revival. Historians began presenting the history that favored each nation’s past, transforming it into a carefully manipulated narrative that justified the

6 See M. Pastoureau, Les couleurs de nos souvenirs/The Colors of Memory

(Paris: Seuil, Collection Points, 2010), 103-4. 7 “Film can most directly render the look and feel of all sorts of historical particulars and situations.” R. A. Rosentone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, N°5 (Dec. 1988): 1173-85. 1179. 35

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present situation.8 Alongside the profusion of discoveries and rediscoveries about the Ancient World that occurred in the early century, more localized archaeology also took place, such as the search for the site of Alesia in France. Archaeology and history both fed and grew from the desire to establish national identities that are not necessarily bound to Classical Antiquity. The recent film The Dig (Simon Stone, 2021) explores the political implications of the discovery of a Saxon ship at Sutton Hoo, in 1939. England had felt an early sense of revolt when faced with the destruction of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, but for obvious political reasons could not save the great architectural achievements of the British Middle Ages. The Dissolution, in its very ruthlessness, shocked contemporaries into reexamining what was lost.9 It sparked the activities of various antiquarians collecting small, mobile artifacts, which would have a cumulative effect not so far removed from France’s later determination to save its monuments. Victor Hugo’s rallying cry, Guerre aux démolisseurs/War on the Demolishers, was an article published in 1832 (the same year he published his classic Notre Dame de Paris/The Hunchback of Notre Dame), calling for a halt to the destruction of monuments for profit. It eventually resulted in the creation of a governmental department dedicated to the cataloguing and preservation of historically significant structures and sites. France owes much of the safeguarding and restoration of its medieval sites and monuments to the pioneering inventory drawn up by Prosper Mérimée and to the research and reconstruction led by the architect and designer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. A curious consequence of this rediscovery of the past was that it offered people a profusion of historical visual styles to choose from, drowning out any innovations in design. French art historians coined the term Eclectism to describe the visual style, or lack thereof, that permeated the mid-nineteenth century in France and beyond. That eclectic taste,

The Making of Medieval History, eds. G. A. Loud and M. Staub (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, York Medieval Press, 2017). Two chapters in this book focus particularly on these problems: I. Wood, “Literary Composition and the Early Medieval Historian in the Nineteenth Century,” 37-53, and P. Geary, “European Ethnicities and European as an Ethnicity: Does Europe Have Too Much History?,” 57-69. 9 M. Aston, “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past,” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 36 (1973): 231-255. 8

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however, was accompanied by a desire to depict each of these styles in their original state as accurately as possible.10 While today we would see such artistic and historical attitudes as intensely Victorian, it was in fact an important break from prevalent attitudes towards history and its visual representation. Henry Fusseli, in painting a scene from Henry V for the Boydell Gallery project at the end of the eighteenth century, could place the setting and scene in a fanciful Classical style: it was meant as a History Painting, a scene of a past event recreated for its moral value. By the mid-century, such a composition would seem terribly out of place, as historical accuracy was a necessary component for historical representation. One could say that History painting gave way to Historical painting, with artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme infusing a sense of historical reconstruction into an “academic” visual style. While these works maintained the sense of moral example in the subject matter, it was the historical representation that mattered, the sense of being there. Visual accuracy became an end in itself: it served to validate the intended meaning of the painting. Baudelaire mocked Gérôme’s project by stating that he used erudition to hide a visible lack of imagination.11 This assessment led artists to turn away from historical representation, paving the way for the Modernist schools, as epitomized by Manet and the Impressionists, with their modern subject matter and treatments and their more direct depiction of contemporary reality. III. Shakespeare and the Prehistory of Filmic Recreations of the Past Imagery of the past was relegated to lesser media, such as engravings, book illustrations, or trading cards, where it would flourish. These images dominate our conception of the past, permeating our primary access to past events, such as school books, and distilling historical narrative in iconic scenes: the knight in shining armor defending a bridge, King Either that or achieve a sense of synthesis of all the existing styles, as was the case for the Paris Opera by Charles Garnier. 11 As noted in the Musée d’Orsay’s introductory web page to the 2010 Gérôme retrospective: “Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) : L’Histoire en spectacle” (accessed October 8, 2010): https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/agenda/expositions/jean-leongerome-1824-1904-lhistoire-en-spectacle. 10

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John’s signing of the Magna Carta, or Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The Astérix series of comic books lampoons such images relentlessly, because they hold so pervasive a place in our collective conscience: as late as 1980, Steven Spielberg, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, could plausibly show Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) referring to an image of ancient Israel from Gustave Doré’s Illustrated Bible as an accurate depiction of an event. The venue where visual historical accuracy was held at a premium was the theater. One could argue that Shakespeare really took root in English culture during the Victorian era. This was the era when editions of his plays were published for virtually every level of society, many augmented by illustrations by artists such as H.C. Selous or Sir John Gilbert.12 In both cases, the illustrators offered images that didn’t show actual theatrical representations, but sought rather to recall the reality of the eras in which the plays were set. It was at this time that scholars, as well as editors, tried to establish the play’s chronology. This started with Edmond Malone’s edition of the plays in 1795-6, followed by James Boswell’s 1821 edition, both established the plays in their conjectured order of composition, except for the Histories, which were presented in their historically chronological order. Charles Knight’s edition, stretching from 1838 to 1843, followed the same pattern.13 This had (and continues to have) a number of implications for understanding Shakespeare’s intent in writing the Histories, the most important of which being that nineteenth-century scholars tended to ignore the obvious fact that Shakespeare himself was writing about history, i.e., about a past that was different from his present day, and he went out of his way to underscore the fact. As Martha Driver and Syd Ray point out, Shakespeare’s plays, then, give us an early modern perspective on the medieval world, full of inaccuracies, anachronisms idealizations and demonizations that differentiate the two eras. The modern interpretation of the medieval world, particularly Shakespeare’s, had been highly Respectively the editions by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke and Howard Staunton, both released in the early to mid-1860s, which give an idea of the competitive market for Shakespeare’s plays. 13 S. Sillars, Shakespeare and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28-9. 12

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influential and tenacious despite the efforts of medievalists to set the records straight.14 Shakespeare’s texts, in short, “project the present onto the past, and they do so knowingly.”15 The rediscovery of Shakespeare was developed in conjunction with an increased exploration of England’s past. Antiquarianism expressed itself on the stage as a desire to visually recreate history, much as it was illustrated in books. Actors, for instance, sought to dress in the costumes of the play’s period.16 As historical knowledge progressed, it became increasingly apparent that Shakespeare, however, left out events that seemed of vital importance to midnineteenth-century producers. Plays were therefore augmented with silent tableaux to remedy such essential lacunae, a practice which continued throughout the century and beyond. In 1859, Charles Kean interjected both a reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt and a monumental scene depicting Henry V’s triumphant return to London from Agincourt. In 1899, Beerbohm-Tree inserted the signing of the Magna Carta in his production of King John. Shakespeare, and not Scott or contemporary historians, served as the basis of historical authority. “Audiences,” as Adrian Poole puts it, “were made to feel they were being educated.”17 This education is founded on a sense of History and its realization. Poole notes how Mrs. Kean was cast as the Chorus in the 1859 production of Henry V, serving as a reference to Clio, the Muse of History, as these productions become “a serious contribution to ideas about history and Englishness that began to solidify in the 1850’s and 1860’s.”18 Shakespeare was bent to fit the historical ideals of the times. IV. Streamlined History: Falstaff, Film Genres, and Fairy Tales It is often proposed that theater overextended its ability to recreate the realities of the past, and that film, with its unlimited visual abilities, took M. W. Driver & S. Ray, General introduction to Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays, eds. M. Driver & S. Ray (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co, 2009), 7-17, 10. 15 Ibid. 16 S. Sillars, Shakespeare and the Victorians, 14. 17 A. Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 204. 18 Ibid. Poole refers to a convincing argument made by Richard Schock. 14

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over. Rather than develop the Victorian desire to reenact historically important moments, however, in film a form not so far removed from the aesthetic of eclectism set in: historical films, in general, and medieval films, in particular, chose to simplify their subjects by offering preestablished visual categorizations. Film thus inherited the practice of historical reconstruction, but the practice would eventually streamline into meta-filmic frameworks: genres. A medieval film is a genre in the way a Western or film noir are genres, in the sense that they can be defined, as Bettina Bildhauer put it, as “a cluster or corpus of films that share certain features and raise certain expectations because, they are, to an extent, modelled on each other.”19 To follow a genre is to borrow a number of visual and narrative codes, pre-established information about the story’s time and place. By reducing a film to its specified genre, directors have a visual shorthand at their fingertips. The conventions of the genre allow for a meta-cinematic discussion of the themes the genre represents. A Western-like High Noon (1951) relies on the audience’s expectations in a Western, as much the visual motif of the gunfight as the thematic motif of community, to achieve its full impact. With a genre, filmmakers can enjoy a narrative concision that allows greater thematic focus.20 With such a short hand, however, film directors can be astonishingly casual about a film’s sets. Hitchcock famously reduces the visual indicators of a place to its basic clichés and then uses those clichés to great effect, such as umbrellas and windmills in Holland for the 1940 film Foreign Correspondent.21 Set designer Richard Sylbert notes how it’s the set designer that creates the look of a film, as some directors have surprisingly little visual sense. They do not establish a detailed description of the place where a film unfolds.22 Genres preclude the need for realism and rely more on recognition. We do not know where High Noon takes place. A town in one Western looks like a town in every Western, which is precisely the point: it is sufficient that it be the Old West. B. Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaction Books, 2011), 12. To give an idea of the strength of such a discussion, Howard Hawks found the basic idea of a professional asking the townspeople for help in High Noon so unseemly that, in 1959, he produced Rio Bravo as a direct rebuttal. 21 See Hitchcock/Truffaut, definitive edition, (Paris: Ramsay Poche Cinéma, 1983), 109. 22 As quoted by I Christie, “Changing Worlds: The Changing Role of the Production Designer,” in Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, eds. S. Allen & L. Hubner (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 13-36. 31. 19 20

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While the West retains a sense of historical grounding, as it remains a vision of the post-Civil War western territories of the United States, the Medieval film loses even such grounding, creating a sense of prelapsarian timelessness. A medieval castle may be in England, France, Germany, or Spain. Indeed, a church can stand in for a Castle, as was the case in Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), where a Spanish church was used to convey an English king’s main hall. Representing the medieval world is a desire to represent a Europe before the Europe we know. Orson Welles expressed his intent to create an ode to “Merry England” with Chimes at Midnight and so London, which in the fifteenth century was already becoming a bustling administrative and economic center, is curiously absent from his film.But there is a tragic undercurrent in that ode. The comedy which may have existed is lost in his conception of Falstaff, which, played thus, kills the joke: Falstaff is a man defending a force – the old England – which is going down. What is difficult about Falstaff is that he is great conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama.23 This conception of Falstaff as the embodiment of Old England dovetails with G.K. Chesterton’s analysis of Medieval England as a time of slow but relentless social progress, much of which would be lost with the modern world.24 It is this world that Falstaff defends while educating Hal. The sense that the Middle Ages represent a lost Golden Age has been often expressed. Over at least the last two centuries, the Middle Ages, for good or ill, has almost invariably been presented as the opposite of Modern Times.25 It would demand much of later historians to develop the idea that the otherness of the medieval is essentially neutral.26 Orson Welles, interview with Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio for Sight and Sound, N° 35, (Autumn, 1966), pp. 158-61. Collected in Chimes at Midnight, ed. Bridget Gellert Lyons (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers Films in Print Collection, 1988), 259-66, 261. 24 G.K. Chesteron, A Short History of England, Chapter Eight, “The Meaning of Merry England” (London: Chatto and Windus, 1917. Reprint by Sevenoaks, Kent: Fisher Press, 1994). It should be noted that Chesterton wrote his history at the height of the Great War: his history had to project the idea of an England worth fighting for. 25 G. A. Loud and M. Staub, “Some Thoughts on the Making of the Middle Ages,” in The Making of Medieval History, 1-13. 9. 26 See, for instance, Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de l’Occident Médiéval/The Civilisation of the Medieval West (Paris: Flammarion, Coll. Champs Histoires, 2008, reprinted from 1964). 23

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Welles intended Chimes to be historically realistic, and was somewhat uncomfortable when, in their interview, Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio pointed to the “rather stylized and unreal feeling about it.”27 Welles explains this as a problem of location shooting, but conversely understands that a film set must not seem perfectly real. Films must imbue sets with something more, and period pieces lose that aura. The shoestring budget for Chimes forced Welles to focus his action on specific locations, but also helped to create a synthesis in the sets, illustrating the symbolic opposition between the two worlds Hal had to choose from: the world of the tavern, Falstaff’s world, made of wood, which is both changing and alive, and the world of the court, Henry IV’s, world, made of stone which is eternal and dead. While the sense of the unreal is the sense of the tragedy inherent in the film, it also underscores the fact that looking at history is always an exercise of the remembrance of things past, which will always be selective and partial. Do we regret that sense of loss or do we celebrate what has since been gained?28 Falstaff is crushed by Hal’s rejection, but also proud of seeing the great statesman his young protégé will become. Which aspect does the audience see? The past is invariably a foil for the present. Despite the realities of technical and social evolutions in medieval history, there is also a sense of timelessness that stems from the Middle Ages themselves. The medieval world sought to fend off change, a source of instability, and, in the face of persistent invasion, plague and famine, a source of danger.29 Welles’ own disquiet in the face of change would find a perfect echo in a depiction of that world.Falstaff’s is just one of the many sad stories of the death of kings. They are eternally applicable, fables for all times.30 Is it so surprising that fairy tales are often given a medieval flavor? Many tales are set in the symbolic space of the medieval world: Red Riding Hood lost in the forest; Sleeping Beauty Cobos and Rubio, “Welles and Falstaff,” 259. W. Johnson, shortly after the film’s release, analyses this as a recurring theme throughout Welles’ œuvre, in “Orson Welles: of Time and Loss,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, N°1 (Autumn, 1967): 13-24. 29 Le Goff, L’Occident Médiéval, chapter 1, “Structures spatiales et temporelles”. 30 Chimes At Midnight is a good example of Bettina Bildhauer’s sense of achronological history at work in medieval film, particularly in its relationship to time. See B. Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages, and A. Bernau & B. Bildhauer, “The A-chronolgy of Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, eds. A. Bernau and B. Bildhauer (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 1-19. 27 28

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locked in her castle. “Once upon a time” refers to that lost timelessness which is our memory of the Middle Ages. This aspect of the medieval genre helps filmmakers ignore the specific realities of the periods each film is set in, and accept a generalized sense of the Middle Ages. All knights, for instance, be they from King Arthur’s sixth century or King Henry’s fifteenth century, wear (shining) plate armor. William F. Woods usefully sums up the generic nature of our vision of the Medieval and its practical application in films: The Medieval world is filled with men on horseback, edged weapons, elegant queens and scruffy peasants, but because we can enter this world and dwell in it through the apparent reality of film, it is also a mirror for us: a shared experience dramatizing what we covertly hope and fear.31 In a recent conference, Andrew Elliott picked up on Wood’s cue that audience expectation is central to what is expected as an “accurate” representation of past events.32 The trap, of course, is that the demands of the genre become so overwhelming as to strip them of their use as narrative templates. For the medieval genre, the visual and narrative simplifications can lead the film to an unintended self-parody. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) looks unintentionally more like a Tolkienesque heroic fantasy, undermining its serious intent. The armors here are so shiny as to strain the film’s credibility. The genre, finally, is as easily parodied as taken seriously. The comic treatment of the visual style, however, often tends to reinforce its thematic timelessness. The difference between The Adventures of Robin Hood (1939) and its direct spoof, The Court Jester (1955), is one of tone, rather than intent. V. Henry V: Structuring the Medieval The use of medieval images as a source of patriotism and valor continued well into the twentieth century, and, in 1944, Laurence Olivier would insert a twenty-minute sequence depicting the battle of Agincourt in his W. F. Woods, The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic Mirror (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2014), 1. 32 A. Elliott, “Between the Screens of Medievalism,” at the online conference Medievalisms on the Screen: Representation of the Middle Ages in 21st Century Audiovisual Media (April 29th-May 1st, 2021), May 1st, 2021, Central European University. 31

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film production of Henry V. In many ways, Olivier’s film production is the direct descendant of the Victorian stage productions like Charles Kean’s. One may even wonder to what extent Olivier’s ideas are conscious recollections.In the film, the chorus announces the passage of the English fleet, which appears as a transition on the stage screen which becomes a crossfade to a shot of the fleet. William Macready used a similar device in his 1839 stage production of the play, using translucent draping to suggest a view of the fleet’s crossing.33 Macready’s production inaugurated the tradition of historically researched visual spectacle, one that reached its climax with the Kean 1859 production. These productions felt historically secure: the images of the time they portrayed were a factual reenactment of reality in their eyes. Kean could stage his play as he saw fit. Yet, if the past is used to justify national identity, representing the past is subjected to a variety of political, social, and aesthetic pressures, especially when faced with shooting a film like Henry V over the last, bleakest months of the Second World War. Olivier was initially uncomfortable with the film’s objectives, which required such extensive historical realignement.34 By the 1930s, productions of Shakespeare’s Henry V more closely explored the ambiguities of the original text.Olivier’s own 1937 performance, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, presents a version of the play one reviewer considered a pacifist tract!35 Henry V is a far more ambiguous play than tradition would lead audiences to believe.36 Olivier knew that for the film cuts had to be made, some to streamline the play. Other more politically troublesome cuts were made at the behest of Churchill himself. 37 How many cuts could one make before falsifying the play’s initial intent? Guthrie thought the Sillars, Shakespeare and the Victorians, 39. B. Eder, on The Criterion Collection website, explains how he initially tried to recruit another director for the project. “Henry V,” www.criterion.com/current/posts/49henry-v (accessed June 7, 2021, no page numbers). 35 As noted by J. D. Mardock, “Stage and Screen” https://internetshakespeare. uvic.ca/doc/H5_StageHistory/complete/ (accessed June 7, 2021, no page numbers). 36 Including, at times, well-informed audiences. C Barbier, in his analysis of Henry V, dismisses the play as blatant Tudor propaganda. One wonders if he had actually read the play or accepted Olivier’s film as a faithful adaptation. “Prince Hal, Henry V and the Tudor Monarchy” in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, ed. D.W. Jefferson (London: Routledge Keegan Paul, 1969), 76-75. 37 P. A. Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 187, sqq. 33 34

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film was vulgar, an opinion which Olivier laughed off, but implicitly understood, by saying only Guthrie could pronounce such a judgment.38 Olivier’s production strikes a balance between the conflicting political and artistic imperatives, precisely by using the visual tradition which desired to recreate the past, and by asking which past was to be recreated? The film opens with a tracking shot of Elizabethan London; the opening act of the play is set in a recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. The film shifts to a vision of fifteenth-century France, then to a realistic depiction of the battle of Agincourt and thereafter recedes to the beginning in reverse order.39 In so doing, Olivier calls attention to the tensions between history, its Shakespearean representation, and our own.It is not a sense of the reality of the past, but a history of its images, which Olivier animates in his film.Historical London is a print, and then the theater; the first medieval image is of Southampton. Many of the images of France are direct quotes from the illuminated manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, as it was known through the first modern edition with color lithographic reproductions.40 Even the Battle of Agincourt sequence owes more to Hollywood productions such as the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood than to any realistic reenactment of the battle. With Agincourt, for instance, we can appreciate Olivier’s strategic use of color to reinforce the sense of animated image rather than filmed action. Welles dismissed the scene as people in costumes riding across a golf green,41 but that is precisely the point: green is the color of chance.42 The film’s form undercuts the ostensible wartime propaganda that is presented in its content: we may watch the flag waving, but we are presented with an image. Initially hailed by critics, such as Bosley Crowther and, more strikingly, James Agee, as a faithful adaptation of the play, the sense of travesty eventually began to make itself felt. Gorman Beauchamp even R. Shaughnessy, “Tyrone Guthrie,” in The Routledge Companion to the Shakespeare Director, ed. John Russel Brown (London and New York, Routledge, 2008), 123-139. 137-8. 39 D. Krempel was the first to notice the layered quality of Olivier’s visual design, going from the Elizabethan world, to the picture book Middle Ages, to the realism of Agincourt, and back again in reverse order. “Olivier’s ‘Henry V’: Design in Motion Pictures,” in Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, N°4, (Dec., 1950), 322-28. 40 Verve, N°7 (Christmas, 1939) and N°10 (1943), with a text by Henri Malo. 41 Cobos and Rubio, “Falstaff and Welles,” 260. 42 M. Pastoureau, Vert, Histoire d’une Couleur/Green: The History of a Color (Paris: Folio, Collection Points Histoire, 2017), 128. 38

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analyzed those problems in their relationship to the content and therefore the meaning of the play. “Not the medium, then, but the message he wants to impart is primarily responsible for Olivier’s travesty of Shakespeare.”43 Imagery is not the basic problem, even if, just before that sentence, Beauchamp likened Olivier’s project to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.44 Beauchamp attacks Olivier’s misuse of Shakespeare, but he is not overly troubled by Olivier’s rendition of the medieval era. In 1978, though, his article coincides with a reassessment of the validity of medieval representation in general. Are the Middle Ages so preposterously heroic and visually bright? A few years later, in 1986, an intelligent director like Jean-Jacques Annaud would revitalize the genre by challenging and thus reinventing what an audience should expect a medieval world to look like. Annaud started by avoiding shining armor altogether, with a film set in a monastery. The film is visually and thematically dark: one could say that Annaud invented the “scruffy peasants,” as the sense of squalor is an important motif in the film, as exemplified by Pastoureau’s painted pigs. The squalor is amplified by Benedictine monks’ crushing exploitation of the people. The monks are the basis for a very diversified vision of the religious, which is developed as a triangle with the Benedictines at the base, the Franciscans, who are the central characters in the story (played by Sean Connery and Christian Slater), and the Dominicans, presented as austere, yet closed-minded priests (as portrayed by F. Murray Abraham). The film itself finally is quite dark, using low key lighting, extensive night shooting, as well as dark colors for the sets and costumes. Eco himself was a noted medievalist, and was impressed by Ellis Peters’ brother Cadfael series.The Name of the Rose was his response; with a certain puckish sense of humor, he named his hero William of Baskerville. Both the novel and the subsequent film borrow the plot structures of a murder mystery.Eco’s novel is something of an answer to the question that arises from reading Cadfael: would the Medieval mind solve a mystery as the modern mind would? The answer paradoxically appears to be yes, but not exactly in the same way. G. Beauchamp, “‘Henry V’: Movie, Myth, Play,” College Literature, Vol. 5, N°3 (Fall, 1978): 228-238. 236. 44 One wonders how often critics have actually seen the film: it is used simply as shorthand for Nazi propaganda. 43

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Annaud’s project was to represent a valid image of the Middle Ages. Not only was the original novel written by a medievalist; Annaud would build an entire team of major social and cultural historians as technical consultants, led by Jacques Le Goff. The credibility of his film came from his use of what was at the time the cutting edge of medieval history and would spark a revival of the genre. Through Annaud, Olivier’s picture-book gives way to Branagh’s more naturalistic approach nearly a half-century later. Like Annaud, Branagh’s vision of the fifteenth century is darker. This darkness is amplified by the absence of windows in the interior scenes, a claustrophobia that is reinforced by Branagh’s insistent use of close-ups and tight group shots. Even collective scenes focus on the people, almost negating the existence of the room or any surrounding space. This strategy leads Branagh to satisfy one of Beauchamp’s suggestions for the visual treatment of the play: “an extended reaction shot” to Henry’s exhortation at the gates of Harfleur.45 Branagh’s version of Henry V is as much (if not more) of a remake of Olivier’s version as it is a retelling of Shakespeare’s play.46 He cuts as many scenes and lines as Olivier does, but they are not the same cuts, yet he retains the focus on Olivier placed on Henry himself. Branagh’s film verges on the monochromatic, while Olivier’s film is a dazzle of colors. Mud is as much a motif in Branagh’s film as it is absent in Olivier’s. The only visible blow in Olivier’s Agincourt is when Henry knocks down the French Constable.Branagh’s Agincourt is a constant series of thrusts and parries (set to the repetitive whoosh of arrows being shot), with a climatic insistence on the duke of York’s death, complete with blood issuing from his mouth. Like Olivier, however, Branagh plays with the tension between film, history, and theater: he uses the theatrical device of recycling sets: the same red brick wall serves as a backdrop for all the palace scenes. Olivier’s Chorus (Leslie Banks) is an Elizabethan stage manager, while Branagh’s (Derek Jacobi) is a modern tour-guide. Olivier explores the Très Riches Heures, while Branagh uses English manuscripts Beauchamp, “Movie Myth, Play,” 232. In various interviews and texts, Branagh calls attention to the intended differences between the two films, carefully downplaying their formal relationships. See his Introduction to the published screenplay of the film (New York, London: W. H. Norton and Co., 1989) or the short promotional film A little Touch of Harry: The Making of Henry V, 1989, Mary Gwatkin, Dir. 45 46

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to dress Henry, such as the robe at the French court which is patterned from the portrait of Henry found in the British Library manuscript Arundel 38. VI. Henry and the Historians The comparisons and contrasts between the two films can continue for a considerable time; indeed, many of the articles on Branagh’s version explore its relationship with Olivier’s film, as well as with Welles’ contribution to the characterization of Henry of Monmouth. These three films are structurally identical and thus form something of a triad. They stand as the primary contribution to the contemporary exploration of his character. The two versions of Henry V essentially bookend a dry spell in the historical exploration of Henry V, and, to a lesser extent, of Lancastrian England. Olivier’s version closes a rich period, dominated by James Wylie and William Waughn’s two-volume Reign of Henry V, which was completed in 1929, but with other biographies appearing as well. Branagh’s film appears a few years after G. L. Harriss reignites the study of Henry V with the collaborative Henry V, the Practice of Kingship, in 1985. The fact that both Olivier’s and Branagh’s films are technically adaptations of Shakespeare (which is in itself a mediation of historical representation) tends to obfuscate the fact that they are clearly selfconscious depictions of a medieval past. When taken into consideration by scholars, however, the medieval is dismissed, as décor: a peripheral aspect of the filmmakers’ intention. It is rarely taken into consideration in its own right (or if it is, it is done at the expense of Shakespeare). Even Erwin Panofsky, who refers to Olivier’s film in his essay, does not pause to consider how Olivier’s film contributes to our vision of the past.47 In Olivier’s case, most certainly, there is a persistent desire to anchor the film in historical iconography. The companion booklet on the making of Henry V is peppered with photographs of Olivier reprising classic poses, including the King in Majesty and, most interestingly, the profile portrait of Henry V from the National Portrait Gallery. Yet these 47 In all fairness, Panofsky’s famous

essay “Style and Medium in Motion Pictures,” which, in its 1947 revision, refers to Olivier’s Henry V, is not really concerned with the representations of the past in general or of the fifteenth century in particular. Yet, considering his extensive knowledge of the art of the times, it is surprising that he had nothing to say about it. 48

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images are rarely discussed, and, in that silence, they are dismissed as irrelevant to any historical discussion. Olivier’s project in particular is radical: rather than offer a sense of what it would be like to live in the fifteenth century, he offered the audience an animated vision of how the fifteenth century saw itself. Branagh, on the other hand, due in part to the success of the recent production of The Name of the Rose, returns to the longer tradition of offering audiences a vision of what it would be like for us to live in the fifteenth century. Can either be considered a real vision of the past?48 Images, like texts, are special: they are not so much an objective reflection, as they are a subjective selection of specific details that are meant to be recorded and commemorated. As such, an image is always a construct. We may think there is a spontaneity to snapshots on the beach, but even such commonplace records are subject to choice, organization, and editorialization. Not only does the (usually anonymous) photographer choose what is to appear in the frame and how, but that image can be reshaped afterwards, by being cropped for the family album, for instance. When the content to be photographed or filmed is in turn manipulated to achieve a specific effect, the photograph becomes even more subjectively selective. Images for historians are, at best, superfluous, when they are seen as instantly recognizable (anyone can snap a shot on their cellphone), at worst, useless, when they become inscrutable (what does a prehistoric image mean?). But, on the whole, they do not convey the complexities of the past: they cannot explain, they can only illustrate. But, as Pastoureau’s blunder makes clear, we in fact see things according to mental visual preconceptions. Even he took a pig for granted. That error led Pastoureau to subsequently study medieval bestiaries, and in the process he discovered that not only are pigs not pink, but they are neither drawn, nor classified according to categories that we would recognize: the medieval world literally did not see the world as we did. Historians dismiss the idea that images can convey the realities of the past, subtly implying that their research and verbal interpretations can. Are historians not just as subjected to a contemporary perspective as artists The question in the case is obscured somewhat by the relationship to Shakespeare and the problems related to the adaptation of the play, which itself is a problematic depiction of history. A similar and more visible case can be made regarding Richard III, which is constantly being rebutted to no avail. Josephine Tey’s 1951 detective novel The Daughter of Time is probably the best response in its popular impact. 48

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are? Is the shifting perspective really not more interesting? Historians describe the past. Artists – be they Shakespeare’s plays or the films made from them – are what make us see it.

Bibliography “Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) : L’Histoire en spectacle” www.museeorsay.fr/fr/agenda/expositions/jean-leon-gerome-1824-1904-lhisto ire-en-spectacle. Agee, James. “Review: Henry V.” Time Magazine. April 8, 1946. Alda, Alan. Sweet Liberty, Universal; USA, 1986. Annaud, Jean-Jacques. The Name of the Rose, Neue Constantin/ZDF; Italy, France, Germany, 1986. Aston, Margaret. “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past.” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 36 (1973): 231-255. Barbier, Charles. “Prince Hal, Henry V and the Tudor Monarchy” in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, ed. D.W. Jefferson, 76-75. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1969. Beauchamp, Gorman. “‘Henry V’: Movie, Myth, Play.” College Literature, Vol. 5, N°3 (Fall, 1978): 228-238. Bernau, Anke & Bildhauer, Bettina. “The A-chronolgy of Medieval Film.” In Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau, & Bettina Bildhauer, 1-19. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. Bildhauer, Bettina. Filming the Middle Ages. London: Reaction Books, 2011. Branaugh, Kenneth “Introduction.” In Henry V a Screenplay. New York, London: W. H. Norton and Co., 1989. Chesteron, Gilbert Keith. A Short History of England. London: Chatto and Windus, 1917. Reprint by Sevenoaks, Kent: Fisher Press, 1994. Christie, Ian. “Changing Worlds: The Changing Role of the Production Designer.” In Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, eds. Steven Allen and Laura Hubner, 13-36. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012. Cohen, Paul A. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Crowther, Bosley, “The Screen.” The New York Times, June 18, 1946. 50

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Dragomirescu, Corneliu. “Le Cinéma à l’épreuve des représentations médiévales : l’enluminure et le théâtre : Perceval le Gallois d’Eric Rohmer et Henry V de Laurence Olivier.” Babel, N°15, 2007, 135-175. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/babel.772. Driver, Martha W. & Ray, Sid. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays, eds. Martha W. Driver and Syd Ray, 7-17. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co, 2009., Eco, Umberto. Il Nome della Rosa. Milano: Fabri-Bompiari, 1980. B. Eder, Bruce. “Henry V.” The Criterion Collection. June 21, 1999. “Henry V,” www.criterion.com/current/posts/49-henry-v. (accessed June 7, 2021). Elliott, Andrew. “Between the Screens of Medievalism.” Medievalisms on the Screen: Representation of the Middle Ages in 21st Century Audiovisual Media, May 1st, 2021, Central European University, April 29th-May 1st, 2021. Ferro, Marc. Interview. www.gallimard.fr/catalog/entretiens/01027953.htm. –––. Cinéma et Histoire, Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio Histoire, 1993. Hawks, Howard. Rio Bravo. Armada Productions; USA, 1959. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Paris: Ramsay Poche Cinéma, 1983. Hugo, Victor. Guerre aux démolisseurs. In La Revue des deux mondes, Marche 13, 1832. www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/guerre-aux-demolisseurs/. Hutton, C. Clayton. The Making of Henry V. London: Ernest J. Day & Co. Gwatkin, Mary. A Little Touch of Harry: The Making of Henry V, Channel Four; UK: 1989. Krempel, David. “Olivier’s ‘Henry V’: Design in Motion Pictures.” Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, N°4, (Dec., 1950): 322-28. Loud, Graham A & Staub Martial. The Making of Medieval History. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, York Medieval Press, 2017. Including: G. A. Loud and M. Staub. “Some Thoughts on the Making of the Middle Ages,” 1-13. Wood, Ian. “Literary Composition and the Early Medieval Historian in the Nineteenth Century,” 37-53. Geary, Patrick “European Ethnicities and European as an Ethnicity: Does Europe Have Too Much History?” 57-69.

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Malo, Henri, “Les Très Riches Heures du Duce de Berry.” Verve, N°7 (Christmas, 1939) and N°10 (1943). Mardock, James D. “Stage and Screen” https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/H5_StageHistory/index.ht ml (accessed June 7, 2021, no page numbers). Mérimée, Prospère. La Naissance des Monuments historiques : La Correspondence de Prospère Mérimée avec Ludovic Vitet. Paris: Edition du CTHS, 1998. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in Motion Pictures,” In Three Essays on Style. Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1997. Pastoureau, Michel. Les couleurs de nos souvenirs. Paris: Seuil, Collection Points, 2010. –––. Bestiaire du Moyen Age. Paris: Seuil, 2011. –––. Vert, Histoire d’une Couleur. Paris: Folio, Collection Points Histoire, 2017. Peters, Ellis. The Cadfael Chronicles. London: MacMillan and later Headline,1977-94. Poole, Adrian. Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004. Reifensthal, Leni. Triumph des Willens, UFA: Germany, 1935. Rosentone, Robert A. “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, N°5 (Dec. 1988) 1173-85. Shakespeare, William, Works. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, London: Cassel, 1864-68. Howard Staunton, The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare, London 1858. Shaughnessy, Robert. “Tyrone Guthrie.” In John Russell Brown, ed. The Routledge Companion to the Shakespeare Director, 123-139. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Sillars, Stuart. Shakespeare and the Victorians. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2013. Vigne, Daniel. Le Retour de Marin Guerre. Dassault, FR2 et al; France, 1982. Welles, Orson. Interview with Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio for Sight and Sound, N° 35, (Autumn, 1966): 158-61. Collected Chimes at Midnight. Bridget Gellert Lyons, ed, 259-66. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers Films in Print Collection, 1988.

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Woods, William F. The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic Mirror. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2014. Zemon-Davies, Natalie. “Movie or Monograph? A Historian/ Filmmaker’s Perspective.” The Public Historian Vol. 25 N°3 (Summer 2003): 45-48. Zinnemann, Fred. High Noon. United Artists; USA, 1952.

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Re-imagining Historical Fighting: Knights in Medievalism Jürg Gassmann*

Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s seyn Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe Faust, Der Tragödie Erster Theil, Vor dem Thor, 940

I. Introduction and Scope A. Medievalism and Projection “An elegant weapon from a more civilized age,” says the British knight Sir Alec Guinness of the light saber in the first installment of the unabashedly medievalist Star Wars series, in his character as the Jedi knight Obi-wan Kenobi. The suffix “-ism” – as used by Edward Said in his 1978 work Orientalism – has come to mean something different from the mere preoccupation with the subject-matter preceding it; “-ism” now implies an ideologically informed and so epistemologically closed framework which controls and shapes our understanding of the subject-matter, and thus prevents or at least impedes our ability to see its reality. Because the reality of the subject-matter is erased, the framework then allows the projection of the “-ism’s” ideological conceptions.1 Independent Researcher, Ireland. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 6-8; Daniel T. Kline, “Participatory medievalism, role-playing, and digital gaming,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens, 75-88 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) at 79 evokes the image of a palimpsest. *

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The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism defines “Medievalism” as “the reception, interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages in post-medieval cultures.”2 This definition does not expressly focus on projection, but as the further elaboration in the introduction shows, a key feature of medievalism is the positive or negative valence ascribed to the historical phenomena3 – a categorization derived from a modern scale of values projected onto the historical situation. Similarly, Richard Utz defines medievalism as “…the ongoing and broad cultural phenomenon of reinventing, remembering, recreating and reenacting the Middle Ages.”4 The objective of Utz’s manifesto is focused on academic medievalism and therefore does not harp on projection, but the concept is very much in evidence in two of his case studies, about post-WW II Eastern Bavaria and the US South. As used in this chapter, the term “medievalism” then implies the projection of certain features, properties, motivations, or concepts onto the Middle Ages which at best have only a tenuous link to historical reality, and are given a positive valence.5 From this valence medievalism infers such conclusions as that the Middle Ages were in some specific respect “better” than modern times, and the relevant feature is worth emulating or “returning to.” Unlike the Orient, we cannot travel to the Middle Ages, which makes medievalisms more difficult to recognize and dispel. Successful projection has two elements: A conception to be projected, and a blank canvas on which the projection is displayed. The main focus of this chapter will be on the “blank canvas” element as the notion relates to fighting and violence in the Middle Ages, principally in a knightly context – for if the canvas is not blank, then it cannot serve as projection surface. Since this projection is the basis for the valence, it needs to be addressed before valence can be discussed. The popular image of medieval fighting is that it was a determining and formative element of the social and political structure; fighting was a prerogative of the male nobility, epitomized by the noble knight, and Louise D’Arcens, “Introduction – Medievalism: scope and complexity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1. 3 Ibid, 4. 4 Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo MI: Arc Humanities, 2017), 81. 5 Or of course a negative valence – but a negative valence is not of concern for the definition of medievalism used here, though it has other ideological implications. 2

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the nobility’s rule rested on their individual skill at, and readiness to use, violence.6 Their rule was buttressed by a universally obeyed moral code shared among a homogenous populace in an environment of stability. While there is neither the space nor the place to rewrite a complete history of the knight, the objective of this chapter is to show that every element of this view applies only up to a point. The second section of this chapter focuses on fighting; and the third section on the social context more generally. In several instances, I shall show that artifacts which are today commonly termed “medieval” actually date from Modern Times. The conclusion should not be that medieval times were “better,” or “more woke.” The conclusion must rather be that we are failing to understand the drivers of the Middle Ages, and indeed, in some instances, medieval thinking appears back-to-front, to deny and reshape reality. The paradigm shift to the modern is marked by a change in this dynamic. B. The Feudal Order A distinguishing feature of the Middle Ages was the feudal order, sometimes also equated to feudal law. Both terms have become controversial, especially in British and American historiography, mainly under the impression of Elizabeth Brown’s article The Tyranny of a Construct and Susan Reynolds’ Fiefs and Vassals.7 For the purposes of this chapter, I shall bypass the issues at the heart of both Brown’s and Reynolds’ critiques and instead use a functional definition: “fief” and “enfeoffment” shall refer to the delegation of the secular aspects of rule.8 The vassal’s job was to mediate his lord’s rule with respect to an asset belonging to the lord, and placed in the responsibility of the vassal.

Kline, “Participatory Medievalism,” 82; Andrew Lynch, “Medievalism and the ideology of war,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens, 135-50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 137-8. 7 Elizabeth Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” The American Historical Review 79.4 (1974): 1063-88; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). No new paradigm has established itself, and there are several competing theories engaged in a dialogue of the deaf – see Christoph Haack, Die Krieger der Karolinger (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020), esp. 6-9. 8 Haack, Die Krieger der Karolinger, 101-3. 6

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This asset was typically land, but it could be any income-generating asset or office, such as a ferry, a ford, a bridge, a market, or a court of law; the vassal was entitled to the revenue from the asset, and owed his lord money or services in return. He was also responsible, at his own risk and benefit, for the maintenance and further development of the asset, and his position was bolstered by a right of ownership.9 Medieval government was not yet specialized; “rule” included the functions of internal security (now seen under the heading “police”), 10 external security (military), justice, fiscal (i.e. tax collection), as well as economic and infrastructure development: roads, bridges, ferries, ports, markets, water, mills, storage barns, and so on. Though the working assumption is that lords and vassals were lay male individuals, ecclesiastical princes (bishops, abbots, and abbesses) could both hold and award fiefs. A corporate entity – a town or city, or an incorporated rural population – could also be both vassal and prince, holding and awarding fiefs.11 C. Medievalisms and Escapism Medievalism as an academic genre has been popular for decades, and has in recent years become a popular genre as well, treated in publications too numerous for this chapter to review properly.12 In the matter of fighting, medieval settings are popular in video games, such as the gorgeously illustrated Assassin’s Creed series. There are also several modern organized activities that draw on hand-to-hand medieval fighting, with varying degrees of historical identification, e.g.

This process of economic development, and the feudal order tools used to implement it, can be observed in William Marshal and Isabel de Clare’s development of the Lordship of Leinster in the early 1200s: Billy Colfer, “Monastery and Manor: William Marshal’s settlement strategy in Co. Wexford,” in William Marshal and Ireland, eds. John Bradley, Cóilín Ó Drisceoil, Michael Potterton, 249-67 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2017). 10 In the context of towns see e.g. B. Ann Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany (New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 34-5 and passim. 11 Jürg Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting: Social Advancement in the Early Modern Age,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 3:1 (2015): 139-81, 143-44. 12 See Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe (New York NY: HarperPerennial, 1995), 2-3; Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages: American Neomedievalism in A Knight’s Tale and Timeline,” Interactions 18.1 (2009): 43-56, 43-7. 9

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the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), medieval fantasy or historical live-action role-play (LARP), Battle of the Nations (BotN), historical re-enactment, or Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). HEMA especially relies on the late medieval to early modern fencing manuals, Fechtbücher, for information on historical practice, and will for that reason primarily be referenced here13 – it is also the community I participate in and am therefore most familiar with. But projection is not inherent to the activities, and certain historical aspects, such as the actual risk of injury or death, financial consequences, or social stratifications, are deliberately and consciously glossed over or attenuated. In their ideal manifestations, and without prejudice to their occasionally high academic value, these pastimes might be called recreational or hedonistic medievalisms;14 from an ideological point of view, they are play or at worst (and in my view harmless) escapism. D. Time Frame Modern representations of the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500) mostly borrow the material culture from the end of this period, and, from grand buildings to impressive weaponry, much survives.15 This placement is true even where – as in the various Arthur or Robin Hood saga re-makes – the historical reality (if it existed at all) lies far earlier, with a correspondingly different and less photogenic material culture. It is also the period about which we know most, and the period in which various concepts associated with medievalism, such as knighthood, chivalry, feudalism, etc. are placed.

13 Eric Burkart, “Limits of Understanding

in the Study of Lost Martial Arts,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 4:2 (2016): 5-30, 7; Jack Gassmann, Jürg Gassmann, Dominique Le Coultre, “Fighting with the Longsword: Modern-day HEMA Practices,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 5:2 (2017): 115-33; Kline, “Participatory medievalism,” 75, though Kline focuses on SCA and does not include BotN or HEMA. 14 Kline, “Participatory Medievalism,” 77; also Utz, Medievalism, 17-8, 23-4 – though on a cold and rainy day, the hedonism of some re-enactments tends to the masochistic. 15 Stuart Aislie, “Strange Eventful Histories: the Middle Ages in the cinema,” in The Medieval World, eds. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, 163-88 (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2001). 59

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II. Fighting, Ruling, and Money A. Knights, Fighting, and Ruling It is correct that the Middle Ages saw a close connection between fighting and ruling. Modern would-be emulators of the knight seize on this, conceiving him as a philosopher-prince in the Platonic mold (incidentally misunderstanding Plato, who subordinated the fighting to the ruling classes). The knight exercised his right and privilege to bear arms in the pursuit of honor, justice and fairness, disdaining the mere pursuit of money, but he would also take by force what he deemed rightly his.16 Only, the reality was very different, and shows a non-violent dance of close cooperation and litigation. The nobility, for their own power, income and prosperity were highly dependent on the prosperity and success of the agricultural population in general, and both the demesne and manorial administrations worked closely with the peasantry, sharing tools, being flexible with rents when times were hard, or pre-financing a farmer’s infrastructure improvements.17 The records do not bear out the common view of the Middle Ages as a time of constant war and violence.18 Violent crime was not by orders of magnitude worse than today,19 and field battles were rare.20 It has to be borne in mind that there was no dedicated police force. Rulers were expected to deploy their retinues to control brigandage as well as marauding wolves and wild boar. In the towns, militia defended the walls in wartime, and in peacetime citizen patrols maintained order – so unlike Çetiner-Öktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” 50, 53. Stefan Sonderegger, “Active Manorial Lords and Peasant Farmers in the Economic Life of the Late Middle Ages: Results from New Swiss and German Research,” in Peasants, Lords, and State, eds. Tore Iversen, John Ragnar Myking, Stefan Sonderegger, 292-318 (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Erwin Eugster, “Adel, Adelsherrschaften und landesherrlicher Staat,” in Geschichte des Kantons Zürich I, ed. Roger Sablonier, 172-208 (Zurich: Werd, 1995), 175; J. A. Rafter, “The Trends Toward Serfdom in Mediaeval England,” CCHA Report 22 (1955): 15-25; Wickham, Medieval Europe, 126-9. 18 Warren C. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1; Lynch, “Medievalism and the ideology of war.” 19 Brown, Violence, 4-5. 20 The main military fixtures were raids and sieges, situations in which actual fighting is ideally avoided: Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe 3001500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 135; Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 71. 16 17

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today, where the exercise of state violence is reserved to dedicated armed forces and police corps, in the Middle Ages, every citizen and free man was expected to be in arms. Bearing them was a privilege, but it was mainly a chore. And litigation was common; the records are replete with peasant collectives in interminable court cases with their lords about something or other. The disputes have the flavor of a mutual jockeying for position, with neither side threatening the other’s existence or status, and only playing for marginal advantage.21 Knights were not above suing the village corporation to claim a villager’s right to graze the common.22 The transition from an agrarian subsistence economy to a money economy was one of the salient features of medieval economic history; agriculture remained the most important sector,23 but wealth creation was increasingly driven by specialization, value-added processing, trade, and finance – activities from which knights were barred. This was the domain of the burgher, and both wealth and power shifted. In Carolingian times, lay and ecclesiastical princes were their central locus; by the end of the Middle Ages, guilds, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and patricians held the wealth, and vied for power.24 The knight oppressing his peasants manu militari no doubt occurred, but was neither the rule nor the model for success. His basic job most of the time was a combination of agricultural co-op manager, Old West sheriff, community organizer, and county councilor for roads. B. Knights and Money Being a knight was not cheap, and he was allowed income only from status-appropriate sources. The income from his fief typically only yielded bare maintenance; to make real money required extra effort, but at the same time, the knight was barred from engaging in the high valueadded, steady income businesses that made his merchant and tradesmen subjects much richer than him. William, Lord of Hemricourt, a minor Scott L. Waugh, “Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England,” The English Historical Review 100:401 (1986), 811-39. 22 Stefan Sonderegger, “Begehrte Weiden und Wälder am Berg,” Histoire des Alpes – Storia delle Alpi – Geschichte der Alpen 24 (2019): 43-64, 52-3. 23 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York NY: Penguin, 1976), 29. 24 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 133-4. 21

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late thirteenth-century nobleman around Liège in Belgium, was fortunate in that his wife ran a lucrative wool business, which allowed him to maintain himself in style and pay his many tournament losses.25 What exactly being a knight meant is still subject to controversy, and changed by time and place. More generally, it is unclear what constituted nobility.26 It was not until Modern Times that nobility was derived solely from ancestry. In the Middle Ages, the issue was murky; knighthood was closely related to office, but whether knighthood was a prerequisite for or a consequence of office is not in all cases clear. The republican North Italian city-states in the fourteenth century still subscribed to the Holy Roman Empire’s (hereafter HRE) principle that judicial appointments were reserved for knights. They solved the problem by quickly knighting commoners elected to judicial positions, to enable them to take up their posts.27 A plum job was to be appointed to a college (Chorherrenstift), the supervisory board monitoring and auditing the business side of an ecclesiastical institution like a monastery;28 or he could marry money – a sufficiently rich dowry could even gloss over the bride’s lack of nobility.29 However, the main status-compatible source of income was ransom and spoils, whether from tournaments or campaigns, though of course, the risk went both ways.30 Modern literature gladly deals with the tournament context, and it was certainly financially important; William Marshal rose to fame and riches on the tournament circuit, much as a modern sports star.31 But modern scholarship tends to gloss over knights’ spoils Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 155; the anecdote was written up by one of William’s late fourteenth century descendants, Jacques de Hemricourt (Œuvres, ed. C. de Borman (Brussels: Kiessling and Imbreghts, 1910), 1702). 26 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 197-8; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 147-8. 27 Trevor Dean, “Knighthood in later medieval Italy,” in Europa e Italia: Studi in onore di Giorgio Chittolini, 143-53 (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2011), 146-7. 28 Erwin Eugster, “Klöster und Kirchen,” in Geschichte des Kantons Zürich I, ed. Roger Sablonier, 209-40 (Zurich: Werd, 1995), 227; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 148. 29 Sven Rabeler, Niederadelige Lebensformen im späten Mittelalter (Würzburg: Gesellschaft für fränkische Geschichte, 2006), 80; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 147-8. 30 Keen, Chivalry, 154. David Crouch, Tournament (London and New York NY: Hambledon and London, 2005), 96-8. 31 The History of William Marshal, trans. Nigel Bryant (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 2-4 and passim 39-79; David Crouch, “William Marshal in exile,” in William Marshal and Ireland, eds. John Bradley, Cóilín Ó Drisceoil, Michael Potterton, 29-40 (Dublin: Four Courts, 25

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income from military ventures, though it features prominently in contemporary literature.32 Political organization of both monarchical and republican polities from the Central Middle Ages on increasingly favored salaried bureaucrats instead of enfeoffed knights as mediators of rule. Apart from offices that were reserved to nobility in the secular administration of Church property (Stiftsadel), knights’ traditional peacetime role as the “middle management” of large polities vanished. To maintain their financial independence, they had to rely on physically and financially risky military gig-work. By the end of the Middle Ages, autonomous knights as a class had become impoverished, absorbed into town patriciates, or mediatized, and politically and militarily marginalized.33 C. Commoners and Fighting Throughout the Middle Ages, commoners fought – it was a fundamental tenet of the feudal order that the defense of the commonwealth was a matter for the entire free population. Whether this is understood as city militias, or feudal levy, or voluntary call-ups, substantial numbers of nonprofessional commoner infantry were a constant in medieval warfare. 34 They were regularly well kitted out, with both offensive and defensive

2017), 30; Crouch, Tournament, 95-8; Thomas Asbridge, The Greatest Knight (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 119-26; Keen, Chivalry, 88-9; Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 21-3; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 164-5; Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 80. The film A Knight’s Tale plays on the modern sports comparison: ÇetinerÖktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” 50. 32 E.g. Keen, Chivalry, 154, acknowledges in passing that warfare is one of the acceptable ways to riches for the nobility, but in other, much longer passages (88-9, 229-33) deals with the question of booty and spoils disparagingly. The late thirteenth century Castilian Siete Partidas address spoils extensively – collection, appraisal, entitlement, royal prerogatives, reparations, exemptions, division, prizes, etc.: Jürg Gassmann, “The Siete Partidas: A Repository of Medieval Military and Tactical Instruction,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 8:1 (2020): 33-58, at 44-53. Also Aldo A. Settia, Rapine, assedi, battaglie: La guerra nel Medioevo (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2003), 71; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 164. 33 Eugster, “Adel,” 191-2; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 148-50; Peter Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” History Compass 5:2 (2007): 507-24, 517. 34 Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 134-5 and passim; Jürg Gassmann, “A Well Regulated Militia,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 4:1 (2016): 23-52, 35-6. 63

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arms.35 Their equipment was their own responsibility, and they knew how to use it.36 While the iconic military training event, the jousting tournament, was increasingly reserved to the nobility,37 the immensely popular shooting competitions were open to all on an equal basis.38 The drive to disarm commoners was a feature of mainly eighteenth century absolutism, not of the Middle Ages.39 And they were effective; the various town militias were instrumental in securing the expansion of Castile into Moorish territory in Iberia.40 Lombard city militias beat the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, and militias drove the Ghibelline-Guelph conflict;41 the rebellious towns of Flanders beat the knights of King Philipp IV of France at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (Courtrai) in 1302, and at Arques in 1303; Hussites, Scots, and Swiss defeated knightly attackers in various battles.42 Regula Schmid, “The armour of the common soldier in the late middle ages,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 5:2 (2017): 7-24; Gassmann, “The Bolognese Societates Armatae,” 2123, 217. 36 B. Ann Tlusty, “Martial Identity and the Culture of the Sword in Early Modern Germany,” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books, eds. Daniel Jaquet, Karin Verelst, Timothy Dawson, 547-570 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 550; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 162. 37 Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 148. The tournament features prominently in A Knight’s Tale, though the setting – 1370s France – saw very few tournaments compared to the Southern Germany of the putative hero, Ulrich von Liechtenstein (Barber/Barker, Tournaments, 41-4, 49-62); ironically, a key plot device of the film, the need for Ledger’s character to prove nobility (Çetiner-Öktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” 51), was not yet de rigueur before the fifteenth century: Barber/Barker, Tournaments, 185. 38 Initially crossbows, later (also) firearms: Jean-Dominique Delle Luche, “Jours de fête,” Questes 31 (2015), 81-107; Tlusty, Martial Ethics, 203-5; there are also reports of noble women participating in private competitions – ibid; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 142. 39 Gassmann, “A Well Regulated Militia,” 36-7; Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 87-8. 40 James F. Powers, A Society Organized for War (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA, 1988). 41 Settia, Rapine, assedi, battaglie, 207-9; Gassmann, “The Bolognese Societates Armatae,” 200-1. 42 Kelly DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), Courtrai 1302: 9-22; Arques 1303: 23-31; Loudon Hill 1307: 49-57; Bannockburn 1314: 66-85; Morgarten 1315: 188-9; Laupen 1339: 129-36; Matthew Bennett, “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry,” in Medieval Warfare 1000-1300, ed. John France, 171-83 (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2006 = Armies, Chivalry and Warfare, ed. M.J. Strickland, 304-16 (Stamford CT: Paul Watkins, 1998)), 173 (306); Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 80. 35

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True cavalry existed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but mounted fighters were never militarily dominant.43 As at any time in history, military success depended on combined arms – the image of serried ranks of knights on massive steeds and in plate armor sweeping all before them in a steamroller charge is a fantasy. The fighters classed as (noble) knights and the equally equipped and capable (non-noble) men-at-arms or sergeants were certainly elite fighters and highly effective at fighting mounted; learning to manage a war-horse took long, intensive and structured training.44 But only a small proportion were actually noble; also, they fought on foot at least as often as mounted, depending on the tactical situation and their commanders’ wishes, and as mounted troops were always vulnerable to disciplined infantry.45 Fighting was also obviously not reserved for Christians; at least in the Middle Ages proper, Jews were not generally disarmed, and participated actively and properly armed in the town’s defense.46 A key text in the Fechtbuch corpus is that of an author referred to simply as “Lew the Jew,” written in Bavaria in around 1460. Not much is known about the work’s author or its ownership history. Textual analysis reveals that the Lew Fechtbuch fits comfortably into the Fechtbuch tradition, drawing on earlier works and serving as a source for later works. There is nothing in the later tradition to suggest Lew’s Fechtbuch was in any way “tainted” by his

Bennett, “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry,” 175-8 (308-11); Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 71-2; Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” 511-5. 44 Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 72-3, 80-1; Michael Prestwich, “Miles in armis strenuus: The Knight at War,” in Medieval Warfare 1000-1300, ed. John France, 185204 (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2006 (= Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1995): 201-220)), 197 (213); Bennett, “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry,” 177 (310). 45 Bennett, “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry,” 179-80 (312-3); Prestwich, “Miles in armis strenuus,” 186-9 (202-5); Gassmann, “Mounted Combat in Transition,” 72, 80. 46 Markus J. Wenninger, “Von jüdischen Rittern und anderen waffentragenden Juden im mittelalterlichen Deutschland,” Ashkenas 13:1 (2003): 35-82; J.A. Watt, “The Crusades and the Persecution of the Jews,” in The Medieval World, eds. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, 146-62 (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2001), 147; Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 175-85; Sara Offenberg, “Sword and Buckler in Masorah Figurata,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 9:1 (2021): 1-32, on 7. 43

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being Jew, or that a Jew engaging in fencing or writing a Fechtbuch was remarkable.47 D. Sophisticated Medieval Fighting as Leadership While popular media until a few decades ago adhered to the nineteenthcentury view of medieval fights being nasty, brutish, and long,48 recent productions – e.g. Game of Thrones with its two skillful female sworders, Arya Stark and Brienne of Tarth, or the magnificent and reference-laden rapier duel between Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin on the Cliffs of Insanity in the 1987 Princess Bride – more realistically make the occasional nod to the finesse and sophistication of medieval fighting, especially fighting with swords.49 Ideological medievalism eagerly picks up on this aspect, as it turns the knight from a mere ruffian into a thinking man’s fighter. One-on-one fighting in the putative style of the medieval duel takes a prominent place in popular media, whether it is light saber altercations in Star Wars, video game match-ups, the wand duels in Harry Potter, or the fights in Game of Thrones. No doubt popular media have been a strong driver in increasing participation in HEMA – there has even been a burgeoning of courses in “light saber fencing.” Academics working on the Fechtbücher, however, stress that the reality of historical fighting is essentially unknowable.50 Daniel Jaquet, “The Collection of Lew the Jew in the Lineage of German Fight Book Corpus,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 5:1 (2017): 151-62; Wenninger, “Von jüdischen Rittern,” 53-4. Master Ott, another Fechtbuch author from the first half of the fifteenth century, was a baptised Jew in Habsburg service. Also Offenberg, “Sword and Buckler in Masorah Figurata,” 7-9. 48 E.g. Egerton Castle, Schools and Masters of Fencing (Mineola NY: Dover, 2003), 5. 49 Gassmann/Gassmann/Le Coultre, “Modern-day HEMA Practices,” 115-33. Though many still get it wrong: In Ridley Scott’s 2005 Kingdom of Heaven, Liam Neeson tells Orlando Bloom never to use a low ward, but to use posta di falcone – not only is the term anachronistic for the setting, the advice is tactically wrong: Jacob Henry Deacon, “La posta di falcone and la porta di ferro: Representations and receptions of historical fighting practices in medieval media and contemporary popular culture,” in The Middle Ages in Modern Culture, 90-104. Eds. Karl C. Alvestad and Robert Houghton (New York NY: Bloomsbury, 2021), 90. 50 Jacob Henry Deacon, “Prologues, Poetry, Prose and Portrayals: The Purposes of Fifteenth Century Fight Books According to the Diplomatic Evidence,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 4:2 (2016): 69-90, 69-70; Deacon, “La posta di falcone”; Burkart, “Limits of Understanding,” 17-21; Gassmann/Gassmann/Le Coultre, “Modern-day HEMA 47

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But where ideological medievalism and even the more evolved popular media go wrong is that both tend to see fighting purely as a question of prevailing in single combat.51 Partly, this is true – in one-onone jousts or the taking for ransom in battle, individual prowess was a business proposition. But an attentive study of the Fechtbücher suggests that our forebears saw fighting mainly as one element in a comprehensive education in civics and leadership; modern research points to fencing being seen as training in decision-making, exploiting windows of opportunity, situational awareness, and filtering out noise and deception, all while physically stressed and at risk of physical integrity.52 This is how burghers’ interest in sophisticated fighting needs to be understood; it was not about fighting itself, since everybody fought. It was about leadership. With the increasing importance of cities, burghers advanced into ruling roles, and as they advanced into ruling roles, so they assumed the corollary responsibility of military leadership.53 The new literary genre of the Fechtbücher catered to this market.54 In practicing this meta-fighting, burghers were not “aping” their “social betters;” they did so because advanced fighting was simply another responsibility associated with ruling. At no point in the Middle Ages were fighting skills considered a prerogative of the nobility55 – that fencing manuals from Early Modern times refer to fencing as a “knightly” or “noble” art is an early form of medievalism. Practices,” 116; Jürg Gassmann, Samuel Gassmann, “Mos geometricus v. Reality: Quantity, Quality, Time and Information in Combat Simulations since the Middle Ages,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 7:1 (2019): 173-202, 192-3. 51 For popular media, this is a systemic issue – reality must not get in the way of a good story. Even though it would be more realistic (see Nicholson, Medieval Warfare, 136-7), there is little appeal in a hero who wins his battle by superior planning and staff work – Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” 513; storylines regularly focus on the struggle of the heroic and as a rule male individual: Aislie, “Strange Eventful Histories,” 173-7. Also Deacon, “La posta di falcone,” 91-2, who points out that medieval literature too focuses on single combat. 52 Gassmann/Gassmann, “Mos geometricus v. Reality,” 175-80, 198; Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 550-1. 53 Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 549; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 156; Wickham, Medieval Europe, 198-200. 54 Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 547; Deacon, “Prologues, Poetry, Prose and Portrayals,” 701; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 165-6. Laura Bernardazzi is currently researching courtly epics for mentions of techniques explained in the later Fechtbücher. 55 Burkart, “Limits of Understanding,” 6-7; Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 549. 67

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E. Brawling and Duelling Another medievalist trope is dueling, whether in the form of self-help, trial by ordeal, or as a duel of honor. Violent self-help was still a free man’s primary avenue of recourse in the defense of his assets, whether that was his property or his honor. 56 But violence was not gratuitous. In the event of a lethal outcome of a brawl, German courts took meticulous care in determining whether the perpetrator had used proportionate force. An established criterion was that when wielding a sword, a thrust was considered aggression, so a brawler who killed his adversary with a thrust was guilty of homicide. This probably explains why German Fechtbücher such as Joachim Meyer’s early sixteenth-century Kunst des Fechtens include techniques to deflect thrusts and defend without thrusting.57 In the Central Middle Ages, the Church opposed all forms of trial by ordeal as inherently irrational58 – the Church hierarchy felt the Lord had better things to do than sort out grievances among mere mortals, especially not in a set-up that by definition condemned one of the participants to endanger his soul through perjury. Having said that, judicial duels among commoners take a prominent place in late medieval Fechtbücher. Extraneous sources add a wealth of context: The medieval judicial process did not mandate outcomes lightly; in a similar vein, an instruction to resort to judicial duel was hedged by cumbersome procedure, lengthy preparation, and the possibility of diversion.59 Ideological medievalism emphasizes the sword as the primary dueling weapon, drawing on the sword’s mystique and nobility; however, the Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 56-7; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 141; women too brawled and were violent, though the social situations and their choice of weapons meant that they were less likely to feature in court records: Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 156-8. 57 Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 100. 58 Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 548; Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 107; Malte Prietzel, “Schauspiele von Ehre und Tapferkeit,” in Das Duell, eds. Ulrike Ludwig, Barbara Krug-Richter, Gerd Schwerhoff, 105-24 (Konstanz: UVK, 2012), 118. 59 Cornel-Peter Rodenbusch, “Libellus de batalla facienda: Judicial Combat in Catalonia from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 8:1 (2020): 2544, at 27-9; Marcus Coesfeld, “Lohnkempen im Spätmittelalter: Soziale Außenseiter als Tragsäulen der Rechtspraxis,” Soziologie Magazin 6:2 (2013): 54-66, 60, Prietzel, “Schauspiele von Ehre und Tapferkeit,” 107-120. 56

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primary medieval judicial dueling weapon was the club.60 A particularly curious instance is the marital duel portrayed in Hans Talhoffer’s midfifteenth century Fechtbücher; in it, husband and wife are clad in slick leather bodysuits. The husband is set in a pit and is armed with a club, the wife roams, armed with a weighted sling. His objective is to drag her into the pit, hers to pull him out of it.61

Fig. 1. Hans Talhoffer, Cod.icon. 394a (Codex Württemberg), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich, Germany, Fol. 126v.

Noble duels of honor were a separate matter. By no means was the nobleman autonomous in a decision to duel, he required his lord’s leave. Liege lords did not relish the prospect of seeing the men they relied on frivolously risking their lives. This is exemplified by the well-documented 1445 duel between Jacques de Lalaing and Giovanni di Bonifacio in the Ghent of Philipp the Good, Duke of Burgundy; once the participants received permission, a long period of preparation, consultations, and negotiations on rules ensued. The eventual duel was a public spectacle overseen by the lord himself and designed to showcase the legitimacy of

Ariealla Elema, “Tradition, Innovation, Re-enactment: Hans Talhoffer’s Unusual Weapons,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 7:1 (2019): 3-25, 6-7; Rodenbusch, “Libellus de batalla facienda,” 29; Prietzel, “Schauspiele von Ehre und Tapferkeit,” 119. 61 Elema, “Hans Talhoffer’s Unusual Weapons,” 18-20. 60

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the ruling structure; the duelists were as much cogs in the machinery as they were protagonists.62 On balance, the ideological medievalism conception that the duel of honor was the ultimate manifestation of male autonomy rings hollow – it probably has more to do with the late nineteenth century duel.63 As so many medieval institutions, the duel was heavily regulated, with a strong emphasis on societal involvement. III. The Background – Some Notes on Medieval Society A. Status, Social Network and Identity To the extent we can reliably assimilate ourselves to the thinking of our medieval forebears, they measured their status by myriad external attributes: family status, sex, order of birth, parents’ marital status at time of birth, own marital status, profession, church or civic offices, court appointments, children’s marriages, age, cash wealth, fiefs held, and so on.64 Medieval society was one of inequality; an individual’s ambition was to further elevate him- or herself by acquiring attributes to positively differentiate themselves from their fellows. These external attributes defined an individual’s social network,65 and the groups within that network to which an individual belonged anchored and to a large extent defined their identity. Extended family, village, alp or commons corporations, guilds, sodalities, governing councils, and so on overlaid and overlapped each other, and were largely selfgoverning, their rules having a far greater influence on an individual’s daily life than princely law – which, incidentally, made it very difficult for authority to enforce policies in a society-penetrating manner. Some Prietzel, “Schauspiele von Ehre und Tapferkeit,” 106-14; see also Rodenbusch, “Libellus de batalla facienda,” 35-41 – the strictness of the formalities meant that any envisioned fight might easily be denied. 63 See Tlusty, Martial Ethic, 105-10, on the discontinuity between medieval dueling practices and the duel already of Early Modern times. 64 Guy Halsall, “Subject, Individual, Exclusion: Some Theoretical Reflections and Frankish Applications,” in La construction sociale du sujet exclu (IVe-XIe siècle): discours, lieux et individus, eds. Sylvie Joye, Cristina La Rocca, Stéphane Gioanni, 15-26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 16; John Tolan, “The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the EuroMediterranean World,” Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): 148-66, 153. 65 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 205-06. 62

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groups, especially craft guilds, merchant networks, or monastic orders, were highly “internationalized,” with an ethnically and linguistically diverse membership and strong tradition of long-distance travel. The social network provided physical and financial protection as well as status. Medieval law meted out punishments that deprived individuals of their social network only with great reluctance and under cumbersome procedures designed to ensure societal buy-in to the casting out of one of its members.66 But medieval society was not static – the vagaries of economic failure and success and of nature conspired to engender social mobility: Warfare and misadventure, floods and droughts, as well as endemic and epidemic diseases took a high toll, extinguishing some family lines and making room for risers.67 B. The Floating Populace Medieval men and women were intrepid travellers.68 Moving around, even over great distances, was common, but itinerant individuals without a link into the feudal order – herrenloses Gesindel – were seen as problematic. This included circus and other performers,69 among them also peripatetic sword-fighters, who earned their money as dueling champions-for-hire (Lohnkempen), organizers of fencing displays, or fencing trainers.70 It was probably in an effort to differentiate themselves from these disrespected and status-less folk that fencing masters sought accreditation – and therewith integration into the feudal order – as guilds, as the Marxbrüder (Brotherhood of St. Mark’s) did in 1487 and the Freifechter in the late sixteenth century.71 When Bologna in 1256 purchased all the city’s slaves and freed them, the city’s societates armatae were mobilized to anchor these newly freed, unattached individuals in the city’s civic and military structures, and Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 145. Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 150. 68 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 139-40. 69 Coesfeld, “Lohnkempen im Spätmittelalter,” 59; “gypsies” were identified as black: Valentin Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 30:1 (2003): 1-17, 11. 70 Coesfeld, “Lohnkempen im Spätmittelalter,” 57-59; Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 550; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 165. 71 Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 554-5. 66 67

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prevent them from becoming a floating – and uncontrollable – armsbearing constituency.72 Even though travelling folk were always suspect, they were an integral and invaluable part of medieval life, culture, society, and economy. Their risqué personae injected a frisson of excitement, a touch of the exotic into the daily humdrum. And again, thanks to travellers of all descriptions and their stories, local folk were exposed to different levels of the foreign, strange, and alien. C. Ethnicity Ethnicity was not just a matter of physiognomy or skin color; clothing, hairstyles, language, gestures, or dietary practice were all ethnically and socially distinctive, with formal or informal rules about who was allowed or expected to do what, and what not.73 Following Galen, a complexion balanced between the extremes was preferred; Albertus Magnus associated a very white complexion with effeminacy, barbarianism, and slow intelligence.74 The sources suggest that complexion was derived from the classification by humors, not the other way around – i.e. a “phlegmatic” person could be perceived as pale, and a “sanguine” person as dark, regardless of their actual complexion. Only in Modern Times did the definition of complexion shift to the observable.75 Medieval society was not insulated from ethnic diversity.76 A palette of ethnicities was more rare in an inland village than in one of the Jürg Gassmann, “The Bolognese Societates Armatae of the Late 13th Century,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 2:1 (2015): 195-231, 199 and 225. 73 Halsall, “Subject, Individual, Exclusion,” 22; in the thirteenth century, skin color or complexion was wrapped up with the theory of humors: Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” 3-7; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Liber de genuinis coelestium, terrestrium et inferarum proprietatibus rerum (Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter, 1601), Lib. XIX, Cap. VIII, 1147-8. 74 Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” 8-9; Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, ed. Hermann Stadler (Münster: Aschendorff, 1920), Lib. XX, Tract. 1, Cap. 11, 1305; a black complexion is associated with a long and graceful body. 75 Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” 13-4. In contrast, compare the values ascribed to complexion in Lionhead Studios’ Fable series: Kline, “Participatory Medievalism,” 84. 76 By contrast, most medievalist productions in modern popular culture are based on what Young calls “normative Whiteness”: Helen Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2016), 67, 71-6. 72

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burgeoning trading ports from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, especially after long-distance trade picked up again around the Millennium,77 but iconography regularly featured different ethnicities.

Fig. 2. Hans Baldung, Dreikönigsaltar, c. 1506: St. Maurice on the right with the Imperial standard of the HRE; St. George on the left; in the middle the Adoration of the Holy Three Kings (i.e. the Three Magi). bpk / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

Fig. 3. Paulus Hector Mair, Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica, fol. 141r. Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden Mscr. Dresd. C.94 Fecht-, Ring- und Turnierbuch (Public Domain Mark 1.0).

Cases in point are one of the Three Kings (or Magi), and St. Maurice. St. Maurice is probably an historical figure; supposedly born in southern Egypt in the mid-third century, he was a Christian, advanced to

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command the Roman Army Theban Legion, and was martyred in the lower Valais area of Switzerland in 287.78 Maurice’s career as a saint took off under King Henry I the Fowler in the tenth century. He eventually became patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss cantons of Valais and Appenzell Innerrhoden, numerous towns across Europe, as well as of soldiers, sword-makers, infantry, and so on. The sword of state, part of the regalia of the HRE, is identified with St. Maurice. There is no reason to assume Maurice was ethnically Sub-Saharan African (though he may have been); still, in medieval iconography he is invariably shown as black, and clad in magnificent contemporary armor. Innumerable depictions survive, both in folk art and from luminaries such as Lucas Cranach the Elder or the Dürer pupil Hans Baldung; his physiognomy is not cartoonish, but realistic. Significantly, depictions of St. Maurice from the later sixteenth century onwards no longer show him as black African. The other character typically shown as black African is one of the Three Magi.79 Thanks to a piece of twelfth-century political skullduggery, the Magi are styled the Holy Three Kings in the narrative tradition of the HRE, though the Gospels do not refer to them as kings, their number is not mentioned, and they were never canonized. Portraying one of them as black African symbolizes the homage by the secular rulers of all three known continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa) to the Savior, long before the Pope ever appeared on the scene. Again, his physiognomy in iconography is realistic. Unlike St. Maurice, his ethnicity does not change in Modern Times.80 But not only in religious iconography do we find ethnic diversity. An example relating to fighting are the lavish illustrations in Paulus Hector Mair’s Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica of around 1540, in which two of the plates show a black figure as one of the contestants, dressed in the Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” 10. Groebner, “Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?” 10 – who of the three is identified as black (Caspar, Melchior, or Balthazar) changes by tradition. 80 Ralph Heringlehner, “Heilige Drei Könige: Was hinter der Legende steckt,” in Mainpost 23rd December 2008, < https://www.mainpost.de/ueberregional/kulturwelt/kultur/heilige-drei-koenige-was-hinter-der-legende-steckt-art-4891277 > (accessed 14th December 2020); Alois Döring, “Drei Könige,” in Internetportal Rheinische Geschichte, < http://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/Persoenlichkeiten/drei-koenige-/DE-2086/lido/57c697b3d2b761.11135223 > (accessed 14th December 2020). 78 79

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same style as the other figures – there is no rationale for doing so, not in the weapons featured, nor in the techniques demonstrated. Mair was a councilor in the southern German city of Augsburg, home to the Fugger banking family and so very well connected internationally, but there is nothing in Mair’s personal biography that suggests he himself had international connections.81 D. Religion I – Jews In Roman Catholic Europe, religious rituals were an integral part of daily social and business life, so an inability to participate excluded individuals from embedding themselves in social structures. Only in international ports were the legal system and society adapted to non-Catholic visitors, contracting partners, and residents. Jews were in a special position – as non-Catholics they could not participate “normally” in civic life, but Jewish communities and individuals, with ecclesiastical blessing, were accorded a special status in law, which alternately protected and endangered the individuals.82 Jewish businessmen in transactions with Christians also adopted the custom of swearing the all-important, contract-sealing oaths on Christian saints, a device that was not without debate among Talmudic scholars, but did not trouble their Christian counterparts.83 Jewish communities existed throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, and there was not yet the universal separation into ghettos; this, See also Tlusty, “Martial Identity,” 559-61. The illustration is not unique – Olivier Dupuis recently rediscovered a previously unknown 1561 manuscript by Joachim Meyer where one illustration also for no obvious reasons shows a modishly clad black fencer (Munich, Bayerisches National Museum NMB2465_61v): Olivier Dupuis, “A New Manuscript of Joachim Meyer (1561),” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 9:1 (2021): 73-87; the illustrations, Part 2, are accessible online: https://doi.org/10.36950/apd-2021-004. 82 Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, “For in Every City and Town the Manner of Behaviour of the Jews Resembles that of their Non-Jewish Neighbours,” in Intricate Interfaith Networks in the Middle Age, ed. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, 1-22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 20; Tolan, “Legal Status of Religious Minorities,” 149; Watt, “The Crusades and the Persecution of the Jews,” 145-6; Wickham, Medieval Europe, 206-7; Alice Tavares, Vivências quotidianas da população urbana medieval, master thesis University of Lisbon, 2007, 169; generally on the relations among Christians, Jews and Muslims in Portuguese town charters ibid. 161-189. 83 Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, “‘And in Most of Their Business Transactions They Rely on This:’ Some Reflections on Jews and Oaths in the Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe,” in On the Word of a Jew: Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust, eds. Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart, 36-61 (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2019). 81

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along with the obligation to wear a yellow badge, additional property and business restrictions, and so on, gained wide application only after the Papal Bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555. So during the Middle Ages, the Jewish and Christian communities were in most places intermingled; there must have been a fair amount of casual interaction, since religious leaders in both communities deplored the liberality of the exchanges, sought to coax their respective flocks into isolationism, and promoted artificial visible markers of communal identity;84 the mantra-like repetition of the exhortations testifies that their efforts were largely in vain.85 In the project to oust the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem, Christians and Jews also had a goal both could support. Jewish representations of Jews as knights illustrate a cross-cultural appeal of the knightly imagery,86 which can only have resulted from social mingling. Besides, there is considerable evidence of Jews in knightly offices.87 Again, the proposition is not that medieval Christian society was religiously open-minded and tolerant; the historical record is too replete with everyday humiliations to full-scale pogroms for such a proposition to be persuasive, nor was the Jewish community under any illusions about Christian inclusion or benevolence.88 But it does show that medieval Christians consciously interacted with an “other” on a more or less daily basis, and in between bouts of spontaneous or calculated whipped-up madness, did so openly and uncowed by their religious leaders. It cannot be argued that they were “innocent” of any “other,” or “naturally” kept separate. E. Religion II – Islam The relations with Islam had a slightly different flavor. While Jewish communities were spread around Europe’s towns and cities, there were

Tolan, “Legal Status of Religious Minorities,” 151. Shoham-Steiner, “Manner of Behaviour of the Jews;” Tolan, “Legal Status of Religious Minorities,” 153-5. 86 Sara Offenberg, “A Jewish Knight in Shining Armour,” The University of Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought 4 (2014): 1-14. 87 Wenninger, “Von jüdischen Rittern”; Offenberg, “Sword and Buckler in Masorah Figurata,” 7, 9. 88 Offenberg, “A Jewish Knight in Shining Armour”; J.A. Watt, “The Crusades and the Persecution of the Jews.” 84 85

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few regions where Christian and Islamic communities mingled: on the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, and the Balkans.89 But in the mind of ideological medievalism, the key encounter between Christian Europe with Islam is the Crusades. Here, again, modern historiography disappoints the ideologists. Both contemporary Muslim chroniclers and Christian strategists saw the Crusades not primarily in religious or ideological terms, but in military ones; the Mediterranean was a single theatre of war, where the Crusades were just one front, and Christian aggression was simply the transition from the strategic defensive to the strategic counter-offensive.90 As an aside, the pro domo ideological framing of the Crusades allowed Pope Eugene III in his 1st December 1145 exhortation to the Second Crusade to decree that vassals no longer needed their lord’s consent to pledge a fief in order to raise funds for participation in the Crusades. 91 The Crusade proviso was soon forgotten, and this fundamental change to feudal law opened the floodgates to the mobilization of the value of land and the stealthy acquisition of fiefs by wealthy commoners.92 The Frankish polities in Outremer were indeed imported features, but they merely added one further complication to an already mindbogglingly complex hodge-podge riven by tribal, ethnic, and sectarian divides among and between populations and rulers; Sunni, Shia, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Jewish, Nestorian, Maronite, Druze, Alawite, Ismaili, Sufi, Yezidi, Turkic, Kurd, Arab, Greek, Turkmen, Armenian, Mamluk and others were (and mostly still are) indigenous to the region, some having arrived there only shortly before the Crusaders. The autobiography of Usama ibn Munqidh, Arab-Syrian gentleman, relates his encounters with Franks in Outremer during the first half of Wickham, Medieval Europe, 58-60, 117-8, 145-46; Daniel G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 46, 54, 61. Society on the Iberian Peninsula included both Jewish and Muslim minorities, where neither group was homogenous: Tavares, Vivências quotidianas, 161-189. 90 The other two being the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily/North Africa – Paul Chevedden, “The Islamic View and the Christian View of the Crusades: A New Synthesis,” History 93:2 (2008): 181-200; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, 215. König focuses on historiography, but also emphasizes that it is already wrong to conceive of either “Europe” or the “Arabic world” as homogenous entities (1 and passim). 91 Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici Imp., ed. G. Waitz, MGH – SS rer. Germ. 46 (Hanover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1912), 57. 92 Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 151-2. 89

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the twelfth century. While there was official enmity and serious fighting between the respective principalities, there was also friendship and exchange on a personal level, and the old in-country hands’ shared exasperation with the uncouth and ideologically blinkered new arrivals from Europe.93 Muslim rulers did not have a problem hiring European fighters, nor did their European mercenaries have qualms about fighting for them;94 in Joanot Martorell’s late fifteenth-century novel, his eponymous hero Tirant lo Blanc loyally serves many a North-African Muslim prince (although he never loses sight of his ultimate, though anachronistic mission to save Constantinople),95 as did the historical eleventh century Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as “El Cid”.96 It worked the other way around as well: Muslim mercenaries were a fixture in the Iberian kingdoms; the English King Richard I the Lion-Hearted brought a Saracen body-guard back from the Third Crusade; and the thirteenth century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II also kept a Saracen body-guard raised in his native Sicily.97 F. Sex and Gender Women of course were not held equal with men at any time during the Middle Ages, whether socially, economically, legally, or in any other respect, and their status was clearly lesser.98 Still, the Middle Ages brought a significant change to Antiquity, and there are in the sources enough references to fighting females to belie the ideological medievalist notion that fighting was a gender-defining prerogative and attribute. Usāmah Ibn-Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman & Warrior in the Period of the Crusades, trans. Philip K. Hitti (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163-4. 94 E.g. in Iberia and North Africa: Michael Lower, “The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries of Thirteenth-Century North Africa,” Speculum 89:3 (2014): 601-31; Hussein Fancy, The Mercenary Mediterranean (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 2016), 75-97. 95 Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc, ed. and trans. David H. Rosenthal (New York NY: Schocken, 1984). 96 Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43. 97 Nicholson, Medieval Warfare, 43; Fancy, The Mercenary Mediterranean, 65-6, 75-97; Frederick II also granted knighthoods to his Muslim soldiers (ibid. 72). 98 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 186-95; Pauline Stafford, “Powerful Women in the Early Middle Ages: queens and abbesses,” in The Medieval World, eds. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, 398-415 (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2001), 405. 93

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In Roman law and society, women were practically non-existent. It was a unipolar world, centered on the pater familias, who technically had power of life and death over all members of his household, regardless of age. The status of his children differed from those of slaves only in that the sons would in turn become pater familias on the patriarch’s death. The Middle Ages were a bipolar world – underdeveloped as it was, the female pole formed a defined counterpoint to the male pole, and genders were no longer a matter of degrees of non-masculine, but on a spectrum between the masculine and feminine.99 Clerics – who could not hold fiefs, should not spill blood, and were supposed to be celibate – did not fully gender as masculine.100 The emergence of a distinct female pole is evident in many exemplars: Canon law had by the millennium firmly established the principle that the bride is no longer the father’s to sell or give, but her own consent, freely given, was (technically) a constitutive requirement of a valid marriage, encapsulated in the pithy phrase consensus facit matrimonium [marriage is formed by consent].101 That the relevance of the female pole was not merely an aspirational program promoted by Church intellectuals is also illustrated by the courtly literature of the time, e.g. Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Vrouwen dienest [“Service of Ladies” or “Serving my Lady”] of 1255.102 A family’s daughters were key to social advancement – daughters would not normally marry men of lower status, so sons could only rarely marry up; but it was perfectly acceptable for a son to marry a daughter of lower status, especially if she brought a generous dowry. The

Halsall, “Subject, Individual, Exclusion,” 22-3. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, “Introduction: Rethinking the Medieval Clergy and Masculinity,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities, ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, 1-15 (New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4. 101 In the Decretum Gratiani of 1140 (Corpus Iuris Canonici, Decreti Pars Secunda, Causa XXIX, Quaestio I: Item consensus itriusque matrimonium facit) – Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1955), Col. 1091. Translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 102 Barber/Barker, Tournaments, 49-51. In the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, Heath Ledger claims to be Ulrich von Liechtenstein (Çetiner-Öktem, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” 4952) – though Ledger wears plate armor, which was only produced a century or more after Ulrich’s death. 99

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daughter’s family could now assimilate themselves to her husband’s social circle, making daughters the avenue for the family’s rise.103 While we have some and occasionally good information for royal or religious women or such special cases as Joan of Arc,104 we rarely catch glimpses of the lives of more ordinary women, especially in a fighting context. An intriguing example is the MS I.33 from the second half of the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, probably from southern Germany.

Fig. 4. Liber de Arte Dimicatoria, MS I.33, Royal Armouries, Leeds, UK, Fol. 32r

The illustrations feature exclusively non-masculine gendered persons: monks, and a woman referred to as “Walpurgis.” Each illustration presents a ward or action with arming sword and buckler – a buckler is a Gerhard Fouquet, “Stadt-Adel: Chancen und Risiken sozialer Mobilität im späten Mittelalter,” in Sozialer Aufstieg: Funktionseliten im Spätmittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Günther Schultz, 171-92 (Munich: Boldt/Oldenbourg, 2002), 189-91; Gassmann, “Honour and Fighting,” 170-1; similarly though in a different context Stafford, “Powerful Women in the Early Middle Ages,” 402-4. 104 Queens regent, whether during the minorities of their sons or in their own right (as e.g. Mathilda of Tuscany or Eleanor of Aquitaine), were important fixtures in the medieval landscape; see e.g. Stafford, “Powerful Women in the Early Middle Ages.” Joan of Arc has been a popular figure in modern film and stage: Aislie, “Strange Eventful Histories,” 166-8. 103

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steel or steel-bossed solid wooden shield in the size of a large dinner plate, which is principally meant to protect the sword hand, but can also be used aggressively.105 Bucklers are often seen in a “civilian” context, but they are definitely a fighting tool. Burghers on watch might have worn a buckler to accompany their sword, or travellers of all walks of life, who needed to be able to defend themselves on the highways, where brigandage was a constant risk.106 While there is nothing in MS I.33 to indicate that “Walpurgis” was an abbess, abbesses did hold an odd place in the medieval order. Under feudal law, clerics could not hold fiefs; but, by way of exception, ecclesiastical princes – bishops, abbots, and abbesses – could hold secular fiefs in the same manner as lay princes. The Abbess of the Fraumünster in Zurich, an Imperial city, for a period held the Reichsvogtei, i.e. represented the emperor opposite the governing council of nobles.107 As Imperial princes, ecclesiastical princes had the same rights and powers as lay princes, and could in turn grant fiefs. Since clerics could not hold fiefs, these sub-fiefs had to be entrusted to knights; abbesses were therefore liege lords to and in command of fighting noblemen.108 Many women had to hold the fort while their husbands were at court, on campaign, or even on Crusade, so it is highly probable that they were involved in organizing and leading the military defense of their family

Daniel Jaquet, “Les arts martiaux au féminin: La representation des femmes dans les livres de combat,” in Combattantes: Une histoire féminine de la violence en occident, ed. Martial Poirson, 32-45 (Paris: Seuil, 2020), 34. 106 As with the changing ethnicity of St Mauritius, women disappear from fight books in the sixteenth century, to reappear only in the twentieth century: Jaquet, “Arts martiaux au féminin,” 33-34, 37, 43; Julia Gräf, “Fighting in women’s clothes: The pictorial evidence of Walpurgis in MS. I.33,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 5:2 (2017), 47-72. Another series of Fechtbuch-style sword and buckler illustrations is found in a 1304 Jewish bible probably also produced in Southern Germany and now kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, though the figures there are (Jewish) males: Offenberg, “Sword and Buckler in Masorah Figurata.” 107 Eugster, “Klöster und Kirchen,” 229. 108 See c.27 of the capitulare missorum (Louis the Pious, 819; No. 141, Capitularia regum Francorum I, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH – Capit., Vol. 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), 291): Ut vassi nostri et vassi episcoporum, abbatum, abbatissarum et comitum … herbannum rewadient [That our vassals and the vassals of bishops, abbots, abbesses and counts … should join the call-up]; Stafford, “Powerful Women in the Early Middle Ages,” 411; Jürg Gassmann, “Abbesses and Their Fighting Men: From the Carolingian Capitularies to the Libri Feudorum,” (Acta Periodica Duellatorum, forthcoming). 105

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fiefs.109 In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early thirteenth century Willehalm, the military situation is so dire that Gyburc and her womenfolk don armor and weapons to defend the city. The epic discusses that this denotes an unusual situation of grave distress, but the women assert that they are perfectly capable of fighting, and them doing so is not seen as a dissolution of the natural order of things, nor does it dishonor the women or shame the men.110 In actual history, we also have the example of Isabel de Clare, daughter of Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, and of Aoife McMurrough, heiress to Diarmuid McMurrough, King of Leinster. Married to William Marshal, Isabel in 1200 in William’s absence led her husband’s English and Norman knights, her father’s Welsh fighters, and her mother’s and grandfather’s Gaels in the successful defense of the Pembrokes’ main stronghold Kilkenny Castle, forcing King John into a humiliating compromise.111 Similarly, Jeanne de Belleville (1300-1359) led Breton rebels and the family’s retainers in devastating raids on French forces, in revenge for King Philippe VI’s judicial murder of her husband, Olivier de Clisson.112 A later, somewhat different example is Christine de Pizan (~13641430). Her Venetian father, a physician and astrologer to King Charles V of France, ensured she was comprehensively educated. She married a French courtier, but was widowed in 1389. Without other income, she turned to writing, and became a noted poet. She was also an author in J. F. Verbruggen, “Women in Medieval Armies,” Journal of Medieval Military History 4 (2006): 119-136, trans. by Kelly DeVries, on 125-9. 110 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, ed. and trans. Dieter Kartschoke, 3rd ed. (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2003), fifth book, 226,29-227,1 (p. 146), and further until chapter 232. I am grateful to Romana Kaske for the reference, which is further elaborated in her forthcoming doctoral dissertation Objekte des Krieges in Wolframs von Eschenbach Willehalm (Peter Lang, 2022). Further examples and references with Verbruggen, “Women in Medieval Armies,” 124-5. Also Albrecht Classen, “The Agency of Female Characters in Late Medieval German Verse Narratives,” in Totius mundi philohistor, eds. Malgorzata Delimata-Proch, Adam Krawiec, Jakub Kujawinski, 227-242 (Posnan: UAM, 2021). 111 The History of William Marshal, 1, 166-73; Colfer, “Monastery and Manor;” Crouch, “William Marshal in exile,” 29, 34-9; Asbridge, The Greatest Knight, xviii-xix and 308-9. Wives’ ability to integrate the allegiances of their own kinsmen and those of their husbands’ feudatories was always fraught (see Stafford, “Powerful Women in the Early Middle Ages,” 404) – that Isabel was able to overcome that is significant. 112 Just Roy, Olivier de Clisson: Connétable de France (Lille: Lefort, 1859), 29-34; Verbruggen, “Women in Medieval Armies,” 129-30. 109

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the newly developing genre of instructional works on military science, where – like her contemporary military-oriented male authors like Honoré Bouvet, Geoffroi de Charny, or Jean de Bueil – she wrote in the vernacular, and focused on a complex of issues including just war, legitimate violence, acceptable profiteering, leadership, and honorable conduct (sometimes encapsulated by the term “chivalry”).113 G. The Middle Ages and Technological Change The common view of the Middle Ages is one of stasis – ideological medievalists see this as positive, reflecting social and moral stability; but there is also a negative view of the era, that religion-mediated superstition and irrationality prevented social and especially technological change. Both views are quite wrong. The Middle Ages were a period of dizzying political, economic, social, and technological change.114 Technological advances in metallurgy and armaments of course had a direct influence on fighting. The remarkable feature here is not primarily the exquisite refinement of exceptional pieces; it is rather that medieval workshops, aided by intensive exploitation of water power, turned out prodigious amounts of high-quality armor and weapons. Nearly every step of e.g. sword-making, from smelting to forging, furnishing, finishing, and sharpening, was in the hands of a specialist. Early medieval smiths understood the difference between iron and steel, and also understood the importance of carbon, but they lacked the means to control the processes involved; by the Central Middle Ages, through an archeologically visible process of trial and error, smiths were able to produce all-steel blades from welded-together rods of serendipitously acquired steel.115 The introduction and rapid improvement of the blast furnace from the fourteenth century on enabled smiths to smelt quantities of steel with a precisely calibrated carbon content.116

113 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 194-5; Christine recommended to noble wives to familiarize

themselves with Vegetius’ advice: Verbruggen, “Women in Medieval Armies,” 124. 114 Wickham, Medieval Europe, 121-40; Frances & Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (New York NY: HarperPerennial, 1995). 115 Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, 62-4. 116 Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, 200-3; Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 66-8. 83

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With the blast furnace came plate armor, supplementing and replacing mail.117 A finely engineered and meticulously executed carapace of different qualities of scientifically specified pieces of steel protected the fighter’s body while ensuring optimum agility.118 This late medieval technology served as template for modern astronauts’ space suits.119 IV. Conclusion A. Review There is much that ideological medievalism gets partly right: The gender focus in the Middle Ages was on the masculine – but the masculine newly had to contend with a host of other, more fluid genders. Complexion was a relevant feature – but medievals “saw” complexion as determined by internal factors, not the other way around, and overall valued a balance between extremes. Fighting and ruling were linked – but the meanings of both terms, and the nature of their linkage, were far more complex than ideological medievalism allows. The problem is not whether they are right or wrong – it is that their points of argument are irrelevant. One facet that emerges clearly is that for medievals, office trumped all else – abbesses were both women and clerics, but their office was as secular princes, and so they were liege lords of fighting knights; if a judge had to be a knight, and the candidate was a commoner, then the solution was not to change the requirement or exclude the candidate, but to sheep-dip the commoner into knighthood on appointment.

Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, 57-8; Prestwich, “Miles in armis strenuus,” 191-2 (207-8). 118 Daniel Jaquet and Vincent Deluz, “Moving in Late Medieval Harness: Exploration of a Lost Embodied Knowledge,” Journal of Embodied Research, 1(1), 2 (2018): (20:49); Prestwich, “Miles in armis strenuus,” 192 (208). The popular but nonsensical image of knights having to be hoisted onto their horses with cranes was first used by the American satirist Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); the British knight Sir Lawrence Olivier used it in his 1944 film Henry V. For all their other faults, medievalisms and anachronisms, recent medieval-themed films mercifully do not perpetuate this trope. 119 Referring to the Aouda.X suit: Matthew Ponsford and Nick Glass, “The spacesuit inspired by medieval armor, made for walking on Mars,” CNN 30 th January 2014, < https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/30/tech/innovation/the-spacesuit-inspired-bymedieval-armor/index.html > (accessed 14th December 2020). 117

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Medieval fighting, too, needs to be seen in this context. Fighting was associated with ruling, but rulership was not the result of a social Darwinian struggle determined by fighting;120 rather, for commoner and nobility alike, the obligation to fight, and the appropriate manner and circumstances of that fighting, was a consequence of rulership. More pointedly, an individual’s autonomy did not increase as he rose in status – if anything, the reverse was the case. Even if our medieval forebears’ thinking may seem strange to us, they were not from another planet – the sources paint a vivid picture of people who were, overall, rational, inquisitive, curious, pragmatic, funloving, adventurous, calculating, emotional, and generous, and had a healthy sense of boundaries as well as loyal opposition to authority. B. The “Real” Middle Ages One might criticize that the situations described in this chapter were selected arbitrarily and from disparate times and places, so failing to present a coherent picture. That is correct as an observation, but as a critique misses the point. There is no reference date for the representative Middle Ages – change was a constant; similarly, there was no geographic homogeneity, with sometimes enormous differences even over short distances. We seem to find ourselves faced with a Heisenbergian uncertainty principle, in that we can approach the probable reality of one element of the Middle Ages only at the cost of oversimplifying or ignoring others. There is no way (I do not think) to logically reconcile the infuriatingly baffling contradictions of the Middle Ages. Anyway, that was not the objective of this chapter; rather, the objective was to show that at whatever point in time or place or in respect of whatever subject-matter we approach them, once we drill past the superficial, the Middle Ages were highly contoured and multifaceted, not allowing for the blank canvas required for the projection of medievalisms. In 1159 King Henry II of England had his adversary, King Louis VII of France, trapped in Toulouse, which Henry claimed for himself. Being at the height of his power, Henry could easily have captured Toulouse and Louis, but since Louis was his liege lord, Henry abandoned the siege and withdrew; the legitimacy of Louis’ office as Henry’s liege lord (which was also the source of Henry’s power among his own vassals) trumped Henry’s superior might: Wickham, Medieval Europe, 9-10. 120

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C. Ideological Medievalism Ideological medievalism implicitly or explicitly promotes the notions of the ennobling worth of fighting; of an identity founded on an emotionally appealing and historically rationalized criterion; and of out-grouping, demeaning, or denying their right to “belong” to individuals or groups based on their personal attributes, thoughts, beliefs, or choices. These “findings” are then not represented as the choices of the individual propounding them, but as truths and even historically validated truths; trappings of objectivity camouflage the ideological agenda. My intent here was to show that these artifacts are neither truths, nor validated, nor historical; the supposed past is an ideologically constructed one. Beyond the parlor game of debunking myths about the Middle Ages, this realization forces individuals to confront the true sources of the ideology: The Romantic precursors of totalitarianism in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century.121 This is why it is so important for modern historians, academic and amateur, to provide compelling contours, texture, and complexity to the medieval canvas; a nuanced surface cannot readily serve for projection. Medieval individuals’ status and identity were a composite of so many finely differentiated attributes that no two could be equal (nor did they want to be). This precluded an overarching concept of identity, and removed the hurdles to interacting with the “different.” The layered and interlocking nature of an individual’s social network and group memberships belies the modern tendency to seek identity in one attribute, such as “race” or “nationality,” and so paint a black-and-white image of in-group vs. out-group, of “goodies” and “baddies.”122 The Enlightenment’s concept of equality rested on freeing the individual from all external identity-defining attributes; Romanticism retained this new concept of equality, but sought to undo the Enlightenment’s radical and emotionally shattering deumbilication of the indivi-

See here also the contribution by Leland Grigoli in this volume. It has most recently become less (morally or commercially) acceptable to define real groups – former wartime enemies, or certain ethnicities or religions – as such “outgroups.” In The Lord of the Rings and to some extent Game of Thrones, they are non-human; in Star Wars, they are robots or “clones.” This de-humanization removes the moral dimension to the wholesale slaughter of the out-group – Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, 25. 121 122

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dual by re-introducing as sheltering womb a single identity-defining attribute (e.g. nation, culture, class, Volk).123 The in-group/out-group thinking of ideological medievalism is a rear-guard action in this nineteenth century Enlightenment-Romanticism argument; its protagonists are in thrall to the very ideological concepts they most emphatically reject. Conversely, the modern concepts of gender, class, or identity are useful as analytical tools, but when analysis in turn drifts into the ideological and seeks to posit these attributes as identity-defining, or produces narratives of moral failing, regression, backwardness, or oppression, they are just as counter-historical, easily attacked by ideological medievalisms, exploited to discredit academic history in general, and to cloak ideological medievalism in iconoclastic, “PC” and “hive mind”-defying respectability.124 More accurate representations of medieval material culture and ephemera in popular media are well and good, but may even entrench various medievalisms.125 D. The Seductions of Ideology I shall close this chapter with references to Sir Karl Popper, Jewish British knight of Austrian extraction, paladin for constitutional liberal (in the European sense of the term) democracy and the open society, and to one even “better,” the British lord (and German social democrat), the Baron of Clare Market in the City of Westminster, Ralf Dahrendorf. In his last book, Die Versuchungen der Unfreiheit [The Seductions of Being Unfree], Dahrendorf argues that there is an attraction to surrendering freedom, to the liberation from the hard work of critical thinking. He refers to Popper’s dictum “arresting political change is not the remedy; it cannot bring happiness. We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realised on earth. … For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost.”126

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941). Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, 81-3. 125 See Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” esp. 517-8, who points out that many ahistorical depictions in popular media actually reflect disagreements in academic historiography. 126 Popper, The Open Society, 200; Ralf Dahrendorf, Versuchungen der Unfreiheit (Munich, C H Beck, 2006), 65. 123 124

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Modern liberal democracy is a compromising, slogging, unglamorous affair – grey, lukewarm and uninspiring when compared to the gay frivolity, rousing passions, and the pomp and pageant of the Middle Ages. That makes it difficult to be inspired or passionate about the drudgery of voting, or about contourless coalition governments spawning colorless leaders.127 But that is the price of living in a society which puts no gender, class, or other identity-derived expectational constraints on the individual, i.e. where an individual has not only the right and freedom, but also the obligation and burden of constructing their own identity and making their own choices. Following Popper (and Erich Fromm), ideological medievalism is to be situated on the fascist-tending, alt-right end of the spectrum,128 but not primarily by its more or less anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, misogynistic and generally supremacist and intolerant stance; these may manifest quite attenuated.129 It is because ideological medievalism rejects the burden of choice modern society places on the individual, which brings with it freedom, risk, and change. Instead, its adherents define their identity in emotionally manipulative terms where stasis is virtue, and change represents threat, decline, decadence, and decay. They take comfort from surrendering choice. Ideological medievalism is counter-Enlightenment, an intellectualized looking for love in all the wrong places, if not outright reactionary Dark Enlightenment. The reality of our individual historical past educates our personality as much as the reality of our society’s historical experiences informs our culture. It is just as pointless to revere (or condemn) these realities as it is to deny them. These past realities of course influence, enable or impede our future potentiality, and we need to draw from them as much strength and as many lessons as we can; but they do not determine our future potentiality – they shape, but do not and must not be allowed to

Dahrendorf, Versuchungen der Unfreiheit, 76. Popper, The Open Society, 9-10; Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 217 and passim. 129 Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, 80-1. It also needs to be borne in mind that while one stream of Nazism had a morbid fascination for things medieval, official Nazism saw itself as radically modern and disdained the Middle Ages (see Utz, Medievalism, 47) – Romantic “germanistic” historiography saw feudalism as a degeneration of true German freedoms rooted in Migration Era tribal structures (Haack, Die Krieger der Karolinger, 1922); Nazi anti-Semitism and the murder of handicapped were conceived as medical science-mandated hygiene measures, not a mere dealing with a cultural “other.” 127 128

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determine our identity. On both a personal and societal level, it is our daily obligation to cultivate their development. There is a superficial contradiction in the dedicated – professional or amateur – researcher using the most modern reference tools, materials technology, and communication means, to meticulously establish and recreate the historically correct dress, to then transform into the homo ludens, taking joy in the silliness and thrill of dressing up in it to revel in the company of like-minded lunatics.130 But so long as we are able to separate the two from any claim to commandment or moral truth, they are just harmless hedonism, part of what makes life fun.

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Dark Medieval Times: Violence and Darkness in Black-Metal Medievalism Dario Capelli*

I. Introduction Metal music1 is one of the most particular, vivid, and vibrant forms of music and it consists of an incredibly wide spectrum of subgenres, often very different from each other in melodies and harmony. This genre ranges from the energic warmth of heavy metal to the hammering sounds of thrash metal, from the technical virtuosity of progressive metal to the dark tunes of extreme metal. The same point applies to the themes, which range from euphoria to pain and suffering, from the search for a sense in life to total blasphemy. Metal studies are a relatively young, but incredibly productive research field, also thanks to its high degree of interdisciplinarity. Some key studies are the articles by Kennet Granholm2 and Dean Swinford3 – focussing on the (neo)pagan influences on black metal and neofolk music, and pestilence and death in black metal, respectively – or the 2019 volume Medievalism and Metal Music Studies, edited by Barratt-Peacock and Hagen.4 DILL, University of Udine, Italy. “Metal music” is here intended as hypernym for the whole genre, presenting many subgenres like “heavy metal,” in the strict sense, or “black metal,” the focus of this article. 2 K. Granholm, “Sons of Northern Darkness. Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk Music,” Numen 58 (2011): 514-544. 3 D. Swinford, “Mask of the Medieval Corpse: Prosopopoeia and Corpsepaint in Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,” Studies in Medievalism 26 (2017): 237-257. 4 R. Barratt-Peacock and R. Hagen, ed. Medievalism and Metal Music Studies. Throwing Down the Gauntlet (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2019). *

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This last volume allows giving a short mention to medievalism, which is nowadays having just as much success and attractiveness. It would be utopic to summarise all the subjects which have been under its lens; for the purpose of this article, the studies made by Elliott5, Jón Karl Helgason6, Birkett and Dale7, and Meylan and Rösli8 are of wide relevance. In varying degrees, medievalism scholars frequently deal with the relationship between music and the Middle Ages. Some also focus on metal music, furnishing reflections on its activism on the political and social levels, but rarely examining how metal musicians, fans, and market see and re-elaborate the Middle Ages and their not infrequently accentuated “dark side.” This article will focus on one of the most extreme shades of metal music, black metal, where music, noise, and cacophony are often blended, and where political correctness is a priori banished. However, even black metal is not monolithic: bands can resort to both symphonic arrangements and distortions, and lyrics may contain satanic references (the element which constitutes even today the most widespread stereotype of the whole scene), white nationalist proclamations, meditations, and sometimes farewells for the departed. The aim of this analysis is to present how the dark and violent (pseudo-)medieval scenarios are depicted in black metal, in order to outline possible similarities and differences in contents, representations, and messages of the Middle Ages on the part of different bands. In the first paragraph, a short story of black metal will be sketched as an introduction; secondly, darkness and war will be discussed in relationship with their application in black metal lyrics, melodies, and performances. In the third, and last final part of this essay, some particularly relevant and influential groups will be presented as case studies, with a focus on the differences and the similarities between their ways to intend and play black metal. A. B. R. Elliott. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Brewer, 2017). 6 Jón Karl Helgason. Echoes of Valhalla. The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas. Translated by J. V. Appleton (London: Reaktion, 2017). 7 T. Birkett and R. Dale, ed. The Vikings Reimagined. Reception, Recovery, Engagement (Boston and Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019). 8 N. Meylan and L. Rösli, ed. Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies. Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). 5

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II. The Origins of Black Metal Black metal is usually divided into two waves by scholars and musicians, both originating in Northern Europe. In the 1970s, Scandinavia and the British Isles saw the birth and the rise of many metal subgenres, an incredibly fast development if one considers that the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (late 1970s) raised as a reaction to the blues and hard rock influences on the early 1970s heavy metal music9. The following decade proved the veritable golden era of metal, and many groups which were to inspire black metal were already active, famous, and influential. The British group Black Sabbath were unquestionably one of the most authoritative models: whereas other coeval groups like Motorhead are usually classified as “hard [rock] & heavy [metal],” Black Sabbath are one of the first bands to be considered “pure” metal and offer an immediate link, thanks to their name, with esoterism and occultism. The cover of their homonymous debut disc (1970) shows a human figure with long hair and a black dress standing in a Gothic-like10 landscape near the fifteenth-century Mapledurham Watermill, in Oxfordshire. The seven tracks in the album confirm these medieval-like atmospheres, full of secrecies and on the border between reality and a shadowy dream: “What is this that stands before me?/Figure in black which points at me” (Black Sabbath); “Misty morning, clouds in the sky/Without warning, the wizard walks by/Casting his shadow, weaving his spell” (The Wizard11). Some years later, two other relevant movements, thrash metal and punk, made their way into the spotlight. Even if different in melodies, they share quick and dogged riffs, as well as scorn for society. Aggressivity and war are two main modes of expression: punk expresses them with songs like Blitzkrieg Bop, one of the genre masterpieces recorded by Ramones for their self-titled debut disc (1976). In the track, some teenagers are enjoying a concert, when the singer exclaims, “Let’s Popular bands like Iron Maiden and Saxon are perfect examples of the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal.” 10 (Neo)Gothicism and its rewritings have been part of the rock scene since the 1960s, with gothic rock bands like the Doors and Bauhaus. Main features of this subgenre are melancholic lyrics and sounds, as well as a peculiar dress code, both inherited by stylistic evolutions like gothic metal, which obtained huge international success. 11 The track is also highly influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. 9

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go shoot’em in the back now!” In fact, the first draft of the lyrics read as “They’re shouting in the back now!,” as affirmed by Tommy Ramone in an interview,12 thus the violent language of the final version must be understood in a symbolic way, as a charge of adrenaline and enthusiasm exploding as a bullet in the teenagers’ bodies while they are at the concert. An unfortunately not metaphoric brutality is at the core of Angel of Death, stunning hit of the Californian band Slayer, one of the “big four of thrash metal” together with their compatriot Anthrax, Megadeth, and Metallica. First track of Reign in Blood (1986), Angel of Death is the narration of the atrocities committed by Josef Mengele, a German medical doctor at Auschwitz, who was dubbed “the angel of death” for his obsession with eugenics and for his sadistic tests on detainees. The very first lines of the song express the band’s typical total lack of reticence concerning crimes against humanity13, violence, and death: “Auschwitz, the meaning of pain/The way that I want you to die/Slow death, immense decay/Showers that cleanse you of your life.” Given these preambles, it should not come as a surprise that the birth of the first wave of black metal is strongly tied to punk and thrash metal. The name of the new subgenre comes from Black Metal (1982), second album of the English band Venom, which jettisoned the group to an incredible mediatic fame. The ingredients for this success are simple: punk and metal sonorities brought to the extremes, sharp vocals, and lyrics about violence, satanism as the supreme refusal of modern society, and darkness. First-wave black metal originated in this casting of molten dark metal and, according to Cronos (Venom’s frontman and bassist), it was intended as an unholy union of speed, thrash, and power metal, 14 that is, a mutual contamination between these existing subgenres, rather than a new subgenre itself. Venom are relevant not only for the naming R. Hughes 2014, “The Story Behind the Song: Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones” (Louder, Classic Rock, 2014), www.loudersound.com/features/story-behind-the-song-blitzkriegbop-by-the-ramones (accessed July 13, 2021). 13 The band has always rejected any apologetic aim when speaking about this and other tracks with harsh contents. See D. Epstein, “How Slayer’s Controversial Angel of Death Changed Thrash Band Forever” (Rolling Stone, 2016), www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-features/how-slayers-controversial-angel-of-death-changed-thrash-band-forever192311/ (accessed July 13, 2021). 14 See A. Valentini, “La nascita del metallo nero: Black Metal dei Venom” [The Birth of Black Metal: Venom’s Black Metal] (Rumore, 2018), https://rumoremag.com/2018/09/10/ venom-black-metal/ (accessed July 13, 2021). 12

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of black metal, but also for a new way to perceive metal: they are one of the first bands to make use of nick- and stage-names, with references to mythology, occultism, and other similar fields, in order to be perceived as “evil,” “strong,” or just “manly.” This is a fundamental trait of modern black metal, as if the on-stage persona of the musician is radically different from their everyday self15. These new traits spread throughout Europe, together with a continuous search for dirtier and rougher sounds, sometimes closer to radio background noises than to music. Famous examples of the first wave are the Swiss band Celtic Frost (which marked the transition from death metal sonorities to black metal ones), and the Greek Rotting Christ, famous for their use of – both ancient and modern – Greek, but also of other languages, both ancient (Aramaic or Sanskrit) and modern (Rumanian or Hebrew). While this first wave was reaching remote shores, a new music form was already eager to make its way from Norway to the rest of Europe. In 1984, a young man of Sámi origin, Øystein Aarseth, joined, with the nickname Euronymous, a recently formed band, Musta (“black” in Finnish). Shortly after, the band changed their name to Mayhem, as a tribute to Venom’s song Mayhem with Mercy, released three years earlier as part of the album Welcome to Hell. Mayhem revealed their own idea of black metal in their first demo, Pure Fucking Armageddon (1986): a vortex of extreme roughness and insane speed, with a dark and menacing tone pervading the whole disc; the voice of the singer,16 due to the low quality of the audio, reminds of the growl of a ferocious wild animal. The lyrics are similar to those of the first-wave black metal and of death metal, but brought to the extreme: “Witchcraft, blood and Satan/Meet the face of Death/Blood/Fire/Torture/Pain/Kill” (Carnage), the chant echoing like a war drum before a battle. The band confirms this manifesto with the first full-length De Mysteriis dom Sathanas17 (1994), whose cover evokes the Middle Ages with the This aspect is perfectly explained in Swinford “Mask of the Medieval Corpse,” especially in the section (90-91) about Per Yngve Ohlin/Dead, member of Mayhem. 16 It has never been clarified who was the singer in the demo, but either Euronymous himself or Jørn Stubberud/Necrobutcher allegedly recorded the vocals. 17 The title is doubtlessly written in macaronic Latin, but it serves well the aim to give a halo of solemnity and mystery to the album. See Swinford, “Mask of the Medieval Corpse,” 242. 15

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cathedral of Trondheim, built on the grave of king Olaf II and whose construction work lasted from 1070 to the 14th century. This choice does not imply a return to the past since, as expressed in Pagan Fears – fourth track of the disc – “The past is alive,” an exhortation to abandon modernity and its failures, and rediscover a distant and purer time. Echoes from the Middle Ages (or a revisited idea of them) are indeed present since the first song, Funeral Fog, when a Transylvanian priest is about to conclude a Mass immersed in the fog. This is just the beginning of a journey in time and darkness, with pearls like From the Dark Past and Buried by Time and Space as major legs of this obscure epic, culminating in the title track and the last song of the disc, a satanic ritual celebrated among “the elder ruins” using a “book/made of human flesh.” Mayhem’s album had such an impact that many Scandinavian bands opted for this new second wave, preferring it to the first one. One of the cornerstones of this conversion is the first disc of the Swedish band Dark Funeral, The Secrets of the Black Arts (1996), whose cover is a tribute to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monastery Graveyard Under Snow (1818). Friedrich is one of the major German Romantic painters and he is famous for his symbolic landscapes, condensing as diverse elements as Christianity, paganism, eternity, death, and secrecy. The disc cover maintains the run-down apsis of the Gothic church painted by Friedrich, but this is now pictured standing above the remains of a fortification. Snow gives way to a gloomy nocturnal landscape and some hooded characters leave the scene in a procession. Notably, the “dark age” introduced in the first instrumental track (The Dark Age Has Arrived) is a mixture of medieval glory and obscurity, a new era dominated by the devil. As such it is the opposite of the band’s idea of modernity: spinelessness, illuminated by technology, and Christianity as a lifestyle model. Bands like Mayhem, Dark Funeral, and other milestone musicians that will be presented in the next paragraph, have emphasized the medieval element in black metal much more than the first wave. Black metal itself was the ideal den for extreme and controversial contents, and, as will be shown shortly, its appeal has deep roots. III. A Successful Poker The Middle Ages, darkness, and violence have been sharing a strong connection with metal music since the origins of the genre as the black 102

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sheep of rock music. Such a quadrilateral system is but one of the last fruits of an older tradition of rewritings of the Middle Ages, dating back to the 19th century18. In addition, during the 1960s and the 1970s, many students and political movements added pressing points to the social debate (like ecology, human rights, religious freedom, and corruption), giving birth – even inside the rising metal scene – to many forms of protest toward a modern “pre-packaged society.”19 These movements were not always linked to a historical appreciation of the Middle Ages, but they undoubtedly increased the feeling of estrangement from society. In particular, the discontent with and abandonment of Christianity, seen as both a senseless and corrupted system, and as a non-European invention, gave birth to strong sentiments of nihilism and individualism or even to movements likened to satanism. One of the most iconic materialisations of such anti-Christian feelings is, in fact, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Contrary to popular belief, this Church only considers Satan as a symbol, not as a god, and LaVey always saw the “atheistic religion” he founded as a magical parody and critique of Christianity. He considered himself a moderate man and branded “satanic rock” music and violent forms of satanism (e.g., Charles Manson) as deranged.20 Another form of refusal of the Christian doctrine brought to the revival of ancient cultural roots, albeit sometimes with no historical foundation, far from post-WWII

I. Haywood, Bloody Romanticism. Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 17761832 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 99 highlights that the fascination offered by the so-called “spectacular violence” was already opposed by authors like William Wordsworth, who, in the preface to the second edition to his Lyrical Ballads ([1798] 1800), wrote: “The human mind is capable of excitement, without the application of gross and violent stimulants.” M. Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica [Flesh, Death, and the Devil in Romantic Literature] (Milano and Roma: La Cultura, 1930) dedicates a long part of his analysis to some themes, authors, and texts of this less known and conventional side of European Romanticism, too. 19 See C. Hoad, “Explainer: The Politics of Heavy Metal” (The Conversation, 2017), https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-politics-of-heavy-metal-87999 (accessed July 13, 2021). 20 See W. Harrington, “Anton LaVey – America’s Satanic Master of Devils, Magic, Music and Madness” (Church of Satan from The Washington Post Magazine, February 23, 1986) www.churchofsatan.com/interview-washington-post-magazine/ (accessed July 13, 2021). 18

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consumerism, which led many to embrace neopagan cults.21 This revival of the Norse myths had, and is still having, great success, but, in a similar way to LaVey’s satanism, the more it enlarged its horizons and roots in new lands and cultures, the more it contaminated itself, losing its original traits and sometimes becoming paradoxically hilarious22 and object of parodies.23 Ivar Bjørnson, frontman of the Norwegian band Enslaved, has recently criticised some “conservative” black metal bands and artists with these frank words: “It angers me that black metal went on to be a pissing contest when it can be a much more exciting art form.” Bjørnson has actually revealed one of the pillars of the so-called “third wave of black metal”, a still largely debated label24 including those bands, like Wolves in the Throne Room, A Forest of Stars, and Agalloch, whose musical base originates from the fusion of black metal, post-rock, and atmospheric music and whose lyrics tend to focus on considerations over oneself, nature, mysticism, and philosophy. For these reasons, these bands are often considered “post-black metal,” “avantgarde black 21 See also S. von Schnurbein, Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism

(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), and F. Ferrari, “Riletture mitologiche e nuove religioni: il neosciamanesimo di Brian Bates,” in Riscrittura e attualizzazione dei testi germanici medievali, [“Mythological Reinterpretations and New Religions: Brian Bates’s Neo-Shamanism,” in Rewriting and Updating of Medieval Germanic Texts] ed. M.G. Cammarota and R. Bassi (Bergamo: Sestante, 2017), 29-50, who focuses on Brian Bates, an English scholar, author of some successful novels about neo-shamanism. 22 See Mills, “‘Aggression, but Also Fragility’: How Norwegian Black Metal Grew Up.”” (The Guardian, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/02/how-blackmetal-grew-up-norway-ulver-enslaved-emperor-ihsahn (accessed July 13, 2021). 23 See K. Farrugia, “I Custodi dell’Acciaio Inox: Language as an Interface Between the Global and the Local in Italian ‘Heavy Metal Demenziale,’” in Multilingual Metal Music: Sociocultural, Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics, eds. R.-L. Valijärvi, C. Doesburg and A. Digioia, 153-170 (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2021) for an interesting analysis of this late phenomenon, with the Italian band Nanowar of Steel as main case study. 24 I have found a wide number of discussions and entries on Reddit and other forums on what the “third wave” should be and what bands could/should be part of it, and I believe that this still ongoing debate is indicative of how this label has not been approved and fully determined yet by the black metal scene. Just to give some examples, see (accessed July 13, 2021) www.reddit.com/r/Metal/comments/107gb3/can_we_get_a_list_of_ third_wave_black_metal/ (first post in 2013), www.reddit.com/r/BlackMetal/comm ents/4gxofh/what_are_the_third_wave_classics_so_far/ (first post in 2016), and https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackMetal/comments/mhahas/third_wave_black_metal/ (first post in 2021). I would like to thank Carlo Turra/Enyalios, vocalist of the Italian black metal band Inféren, for the fascinating talk on the “third wave.” 104

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metal,” and so on, in relation to the fact that the “original” black metal core has been overcome for new musical horizons. In sum, during the first years of the black metal scene, the Middle Ages became the ideal antithesis to modernity: it was not difficult to identify the Middle Ages with an era of strong values, in which a single person could count more than in an anonymous modern world,25 and in which – in particular in Northern Europe – Germanic paganism was still a linchpin of society. The Middle Ages were also seen as a dark and remote time, and this remoteness can be interpreted in a precise way: like a shadow veiling someone’s eyes, it is in profound opposition to modern society and its will, through science and knowledge, to classify and schematise the whole universe. This patina cannot be removed, unless one is allowed, like in some rituals, to become worthy and access a new knowledge system. It is impossible to outline with precision all the elements which influence a single metal musician’s understanding of the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly, there are as many “metal Middle Ages” as the metal musicians, each one influenced by their own readings, their political, ethical, and religious views, and the message they want to convey with their songs. It must be said, on the other hand, that sometimes these influences can be easily identified, like classical mythology and Gothicism for Dani Filth (frontman of the English band Cradle of Filth), who combines medieval-like horror, classical deities, and occultism with his unique black-gothic metal style26. While making music and lyrics, band members influence each other, giving a peculiar connotation to their band and the music they play. For example, heavy metal bands, together with power metal groups, prefer to bring listeners to remote and fantastic medieval-like scenarios, full of dangers which are overcome in the name of justice or a greater good. Emblematic is Holy Diver, title track of the first album (1983) of the E.g., the res gestae of knights and kings, who are still famous even after centuries or millennia. 26 Dani Filth proudly considers his band as a “gateway to literature” for their younger fans: “Now, we have parents thanking us for keeping their offspring away from bullies and drugs and getting them into literature. Another thing we’re seeing is parents actually getting their kids into music.” See D. Fletcher, “Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth Says His Extreme Metal Music Is a Gateway to Literature” (Dallas Observer, 2019), https://www.dallasobserver.com/music/cradle-of-filth-talks-literature-and-the-positive -influence-of-extreme-metal-11641727 (accessed July 13, 2021). 25

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American band Dio, whose frontman and founder, Ronnie James Dio27, is considered one of the most influential metal artists and the “improver” of the sign of the horns28. In the music video, Dio, representing the hero of the tale, wanders among the ruins of a Gothic building, with a sword in his hands and wearing animal leathers. His antagonist is a robust man, who looks like a stereotypical barbarian and who holds a big doubleheaded axe. Power metal inherits from heavy metal an epic halo and is characterised by powerful sonorities and lyrics exalting concepts like the war against evil or a tyrannic enemy. Italy is the homeland of one of the most successful power metal groups, Rhapsody, now Rhapsody of Fire, which produced some of the genre cornerstones like Emerald Sword. Contained in the second disc, Symphony of Enchanted Lands (1998), the song catapults the listener into a fantastic world and makes them support a heroic and genuine warrior looking for an emerald sword capable of defeating his enemy, the “black lord.” In another masterpiece, The March of the Swordmaster (released within the 2002-disc Power of the Dragonflame), Rhapsody make use of a Renaissance melody, Pierre Attaignant’s Tourdion,29 for the refrain. The skill which brought a bassedanse motive to be transformed into a base for the hero’s march against his enemy is undeniable and the new refrain gains a sort of mystical and fantastic aura. The previous examples have shown how the Middle Ages (or a medieval-like scenario) perfectly suit metal narratives of wars and valiant men, who become a sort of modern epigones of medieval knights. “Metal empowerment” starts when one rejects modern comforts, which often tend to become golden cages, and set themselves a goal, even if it could Real name Ronald James Padavona (1942-2010). English singer of Italian origin, he used this nickname inspired by Johnny Dio (real name Giovanni Dioguardi), an American gangster of Italian origin himself. In his career, Ronnie James Dio was the frontman of historical metal bands of the caliber of Black Sabbath and Rainbow. 28 Dio explained many times that this sign does not conceal subliminal messages; it was made by his Italian grandmother as protection against the “malocchio” (a sort of hex). The horn sign was first used by Dio in 1975 ca., when he became singer of Rainbow, but became popular when Dio joined Black Sabbath in 1979. See the interview for Rock Scene Magazine cited in the final sitography. 29 Attaignant’s Tourdion has also been re-elaborated by the Italian folk composer and musician Angelo Branduardi (born in 1950) in two circumstances, in 1979 and in 1998. Branduardi is one of the most important Italian folk musicians, playing and reworking tens of medieval and Renaissance motives which are nowadays part of the Italian folk patrimony. 27

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be seen as stupid, childish, or impossible by other people. Different musicians and bands give different examples of “modern comforts,” like internet, mass media, the occidental lifestyle, etc. Through these chains, modern kings and queens “blind your eyes then steal your dreams,” as written in one of Black Sabbath’s milestones, Heaven and Hell, contained in the 1980 homonym disc. All good warrior of metal should fight these contemporary evil tyrants and get back their own lives outside the cage. However, it may happen that evil and good can be switched if coned from an uncommon point of view. In viking metal, a thematic (more than an actual musical) subgenre focussing on medieval Scandinavia, its culture and history, as well as on Icelandic sagas,30 Christianity is portrayed as an alienating innovation which leads to the eradication of the traditional Scandinavian culture, to its substitution with a pacific and alien mentality, and to the chagrin of the Germanic bellicose spirit. Therefore, opposing Christianity (or trying to resist to it) is seen as a positive element. The clash of these two opposing ethics goes back to Bathory’s Hammerheart (1990), held to be the very first release of viking metal: in One Rode to Asa Bay, the ten-and-a-half-minute concluding track, and in its video, the new faith is presented as mild-mannered and caritative in words, but actually violent against the fading pagan world. The statues of the gods are replaced with crosses, the missionaries and converted people erect a church, and warriors returning home from a viking raid are disoriented by this sudden and enormous change. Viking metal has evolved in two directions, with the first one praising the old faith as a rediscovery of Scandinavian roots, and the second one going on with the irreconcilable opposition between monotheism and polytheism. Many second-wave black metal artists declared their refusal of Christianity for both political and religious reasons. This blind aversion resulted, especially in Norway, in the arson of many “stavkirker,” seen as emblem of the conversion and of the first phase of Christianity in Scandinavia. The most famous of such attacks was the arson of the In this case the adjective “viking” mirrors the erroneous use of the term as ethnonym, which still persists today. For details on this topic, see The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement, ed. Tom Birkett and Roderick Dale (Boston and Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019). It should also be pointed that not seldom the label “viking metal” is preferred for business aims, with some bands (such as Amon Amarth) refusing to be associated with it (“a ‘lazy’ tag” in Lach, 2019). 30

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Fanfoft church on June 6, 1992, by Vark Vikernes, at that time bassist of Mayhem, aka “Count Grishnackh” and also part of the one-man band Burzum (another fundamental second-wave band). Vikernes used a photo of the burning church as cover of his LP Aske (“ash” in Norwegian), released in 1993.31 Vikernes was later arrested and jailed for other acts of arson and for the murder of Euronymous,32 which took place in circumstances which have not yet been fully clarified.33 The hate for anything “mainstream” and for society typical of the socalled “Black Metal Inner Circle”34 was later shared by other bands. Black metal, in the most extreme shades of its second phase, is a musical war against everything and everyone, against God, mankind, society, and even other metal genres and even against itself. In other words, it is the triumph of individualism and misanthropy, of the hate of light as emblem of good and the exaltation of darkness. In order to understand how these elements penetrated into the scene, one should consider that in German black metal (and sometimes in other cognate subgenres, too), when something or someone “ist Krieg,” this does not mean “is war” in the literary sense, but that it is cool and that it deserves respect. Nargaroth, an important German one-man band, named its tribute-disc to black As a publicity stunt, the first 1000 copies of the LP were sold together with Zippo lighters decorated with the disc cover. 32 Already considered a key figure in life, after his death Euronymous became a real “unholy patron” of second-wave black metal. See D. Swinford, “Black Metal Medieval King: The Apotheosis of Euronymous Through Album Dedications,” in Medievalism and Metal Music Studies. Throwing Down the Gauntlet, ed. Ruth Barratt-Peacock, Ross Hagen (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2019), 137-144, for posthumous Euronymous’ “canonisation,” dedications to him on different albums, and his obscure label, Deathlike Silence Productions. 33 Vikernes spent only fifteen years in prison and was released in 2009. While in jail, he continued to play and record: Burzum’s most emblematic album, Filosofem, was indeed published in 1996, followed by four other discs. 34 This “Circle” should have consisted of a group of different black metal artists, with Euronymous as charismatic leader, who took pleasure in killing, burning churches, and committing other crimes against society. Vikernes, who was considered to be part of the group, explained on his website in 2004 that the Circle was only one of Euronymous’s strange ideas, invented “because he [Euronymous] wanted to make people believe there was such a thing” and that, once media understood that the group was but an invention, they ceased to publish articles about it. In addition, the crimes committed in those years have always been attributed to single people, not to groups. See “A personal review of Gavin Baddeley’s book Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship and Rock’n’Roll” (Burzum.org, 2004), http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/lucifer_rising_review.shtml. 31

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metal Black Metal ist Krieg (A Dedication Monument) (2001). Thereby, Kanwulf, the frontman, wanted to pay homage to black metal and, at the same time, remember that he was and is “war.” Needless to say, the Middle Ages could hardly be linked to all these gloomy aspects. Nevertheless, the Middle Ages, as well as their modern rewritings, are ubiquitous in black metal: they are perceived, in the first place, as the epoch before the real barbarity of modernity, and as a phase of continuous wars against the other (invaders, rivals or unbelievers, but also homosexual and transexual people), and, secondly, as the age of chivalry and of constant military evolution.35 The cover of Black Metal ist Krieg represents Kanwulf as a menacing figure holding a long sword and a dagger, while on his 1999 album’s (Herbstleyd) cover he rides a horse while holding a small round shield in front of a forest. Vikernes, Euronymous, Immortal, and other artists and/or bands used photos showing them with swords, maces, axes, helms, armours, and chain mail in order to project their musical alter-egos as evil. Similar examples could be multiplied, not to mention references to castles, towers, ruins, knights, and so on. It is peculiar to note how the Late Middle Ages do not fit perfectly in the black metal scene: it is almost extremely rare to find artists posing in photographic sessions with arquebuses or similar weapons. There are, of course, exceptions, like the covers of Panzer Division Marduk (1999) and Frontschwein (2015), both released by the Swedish Marduk, containing modern armoury such as tanks, hand grenades, and machine gun bullets. These and other exceptions, however, have not undermined the cliché of the black metal musician, which remains closer to the abovementioned cold-steel models. IV. Some Case Studies After the historical and stylistic introduction to black metal and a first analysis of its links with the Middle Ages provided above, the following discussion will concentrate on some relevant black metal bands in order Concerning violence and revenge and their “legalization” in medieval contexts, see W.C. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), who analyses violence from the Franks to the Hundred Years’ War, and Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller, ed. Kate Gilbert and Stephen D. White (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), focusing on different declinations of violence. 35

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to survey the perception of the Middle Ages in their discs and the relationship between this era, darkness, and violence. These bands represent perfect case studies, since they have long been constituting a musical, textual, and stylistic model for tens of other groups, and because they have created their own peculiar way to decline violence and darkness in the black metal medievalism. The first case study is the Norwegian band Darkthrone: founded in 1987 from the ashes of a previous project, and with 18 released full lengths, Darkthrone are one of the most enduring, productive, and influential black metal bands. As a matter of fact, their first works are pure death metal, while the conversion to black metal came after some internal disputes, which led the bassist Dag Nilsen to leave the band and to a real “crusade” against the death metal, which did not fit their music attitudes anymore. A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992), their second disc,36 marks their adhesion to black metal, as shown by the aggressiveness of the first track (Kathaarian Life Code) which can be assimilated to hammer blows violently reducing a wall to dust. Particularly interesting for this analysis, in a disc entirely dedicated to both musical and conceptual darkness and violence, is the title track A Blaze in the Northern Sky. It opens with an invitation to listen, a recall of the oral dimension of the first medieval Germanic texts37: “Hear a haunting chant/Lying in the northern wind/As the sky turns black/Clouds of melancholy/Rape the beams/Of a devoid dying sun/And the distant fog approaches.” These first lines alert the listener to an imminent danger and make them uneasy. Darkness, violence, death, and fear are their companions in this journey, but before these unfortunate people can realise it, the narrator calls back their attention: “Coven of forgotten delight/Hear the pride of a northern storm/Triumphant sight on a northern sky.” The setting is obviously somewhere in the cold Northern Europe, probably in Scandinavia. The meanings of the “forgotten delight” and of the “triumphant sight” are soon explained: “It took ten times a hundred The album is “eternally” dedicated to Euronymous, the “king of black/death metal underground,” as written on the disc artwork. This dedication is indicative of the switch between the two subgenres, which occurred before the release. 37 See, for example, the first line of the Hildebrandslied: “Ik gihorta đat seggen” [“I heard that saying”]. Text from Ausgewählte althochdeutsche Sprachdenkmäler [Selected Old High German Language Monuments], ed. Richard Kienast (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1948). 36

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years/Before the king on the northern throne/Was brought tales of the crucified one,” a passage which catapults the listener back into the Scandinavian Middle Ages, and reveals that the “forgotten delight” is paganism, substituted and dismantled by a new religion coming from afar: “Coven of renewed delight/A thousand years have passed since then/Years of lost pride and lust.” The “triumphant sight” consists of the return of the pagan faith, which re-emerges at the end of the second millennium, after 1000 years of decay and ruin. In the final section, the narrator calls his fellows to arms, like a military chief would have made with his followers: “Souls of blasphemy/Hear a haunting chant/We are a blaze in the northern sky/The next thousand years are ours!” These last words are targeted at a few adepts, who will be able to burn the sky as Surtr, the fire giant at the end of Ragnarök: as the mythical fire will mark the birth of a new world, the blaze in the northern sky will be the first act of a new pagan era. With A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Darthrone became a sort of unholy John the Baptist of black metal, announcing the arrival of a greater and mightier musical era, which was not in fact long in coming. Two years later (1994), another Norwegian band, Satyricon, published its first disc, Dark Medieval Times, on whose black and white cover a muscular warrior stands out with his axe on a massive horse. These two figures stand against a spectral and foggy landscape dominated by a gigantic and sinister stronghold, the “Taakeslottet” of track 7. The cover is, once again, a first revealing sign of the band’s idea of the Middle Ages, explicated in the lyrics of the title track, although short and simple: The blades are sharpened They will all learn Yes, destroy your dream Your desert of dreams It’s undeserved For dark medieval times […] Desert of dreams Eternity in your dreams Here you are Dark medieval times. It is not easy at all to understand what these dreams are meant to signify, but, considering the context, they may be the human desires in a 111

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modern and consumerist world. The return to the Middle Ages passes, in this case, through the cold steel of blades and a total eradication of the modern lifestyle. The reward for this fight will be an obscure and unknown (pseudo-)medieval era, but, as the recurring melodies in the album make clear, this seems to be the ideal which black metal rebels long for. The sharpness and harshness marking black metal skilfully alternate with the sounds of the acoustic guitar and of flutes, increasing the nostalgia for a time when these instruments resounded in great halls, a time which seems so far and impossible to reach that it triggers an otherwise incomprehensible hate in the musicians. In 1996 the German band Desaster38, founded in 1988, published its first studio disc: A Touch of Medieval Darkness (1996), a milestone in the German metal scene, a unique mix of black and thrash metal sonorities, where the most interesting track is In a Winter Battle. Here the band sings about viking raids39 made during the late Germanic Iron Age (popularly known as the “Viking Age”40) and what shines through the track is a strong disdain of Christianity and its adepts. Moved by anger and hate, the raiders do not hesitate to destroy and burn churches, and to kill innocent people with their red-painted swords. Desaster’s attempt at a “historic re-enactment” is fused with their will to get rid of the Christian faith, no matter how much blood will be spilled: Let the blood flow This is the hour of revenge […] Unleash the unholy storm Celebrate a rebirth in the night Destroy all the sacred Destroy all the blessed And build the next kingdom again. Written according to the German spelling, the band name is a tribute to Total Desaster, a song recorded by another German band, Destruction, for the 1984 demo Bestial Invasion of Hell. 39 While listening to the song, the listener does not immediately realise who the violent men in the song are. Only the passage “On dragonships they come to the coast” allows to identify them as viking raiders because of the “drekar” they travel on. In spite of several descriptions of adorning dragonheads (especially in sagas and in skaldic poems), there is no archeological evidence of them. 40 See M.J. Driscoll, “Vikings!,” in The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement, eds. T. Birkett and R. Dale,19-27, for some reflections on the dating and on the name itself of this historic period. 38

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The self-representation of these “prophets” is rather stereotyped and contaminated by different influences, such as Romanticism, 20th-century rebellion movements, and racism. It is also interesting to point out that the viking raiders in In a Winter Battle seem to be only interested in destroying churches and killing Christians as revenge, a very black metal (and maybe toxic manly) version of history. Both Satyricon and Desaster are part of the ‘90s European black metal canon and in those years (together with other groups, like the already mentioned Dark Funeral) their impressive lyrics, music, and shows determined what an entire subgenre would have been for the following years. Before presenting the last case study, it must be noted that, if, on the one hand, many bands (but also many labels) linger on stereotypes and on the “presumed” tastes of the metal audience, and reelaborate history, myths, and events to their liking, on the other hand, there are also many groups (especially in the so-called “ultraunderground,” usually far from commercial success and fanservice needs) that carefully research the topic of their tracks before entering in the studio. This is the case of Sühnopfer, a French one-man band, leaded by Florian Denis/Ardraos, a skilful drummer known for his past experience with Peste Noire41. In 2014 Sühnopfer published Offertoire [Offertory], a 50-minute-long disc with seven tracks which immediately gained the critics’ praise. Two tracks, in particular, are linked by a common scenario: Les légendes de l’ours [The Legends of the Bear] and Chevalier maudit [Damned Knight], both connected to the Château de l’ours, a stronghold now in ruins, whose building is dated by the majority of chroniclers to the reign of Philippe II (1180-1223), while others consider it to be much earlier (1065)42. The two songs are based on some of the several legends circulating about the castle, some of them concerning even its building, which is attributed to Humbaud, the illegitimate son of an unknown aristocrat. Humbaud was known as “the bear,” because he allegedly ruled over a One of the most important French black metal bands, Peste Noire, self-referencing as a “national-anarchic” formation, are widely known for their nationalist and not-politically correct contents. 42 See G. Laconche, Légendes et diableries de l’Allier (Bourbonnais) [Legends and Devilish Facts of Allier (Bourbonnais)] (London: Verso, 1994), 121-141, for further information on the castle and its legends. I would like to thank Ardraos for this bibliographical advice. 41

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valley where Saint Teresa calmed a demonic bear down and people were afraid of him because he reportedly owned a bear as a pet. The most famous tale on the castle is probably the one about Odille de Montluçon, so called from the name of the town, in the heart of France, where Ardraos was born, too. Before leaving for a crusade, Archambaud, count of Montluçon, gave custody of his castle, of his wife Ermengarde, and of his sixteen-year-old daughter Odile to his squire, Raimbaud. The count died during the crusade and, shortly after, also his wife died. On the same night of the lady’s death, Raimbaud raped Odile and, to hide his crime, he narcotised her and, pretending she was dead, buried her among the ruins of the castle of Lignerolles. However, Odille was not dead and eventually gave birth to a boy, who grew up as a savage and enjoyed scaring shepherds with a bear skin.43 Henceforth, the old castle had been named with the modern name. The tale has a happy ending, since the boy, with the help of a hermit, managed to rehabilitate his mother, and have the squire hanged for his crimes. A second famous story is the one of the damned knight Humbald, whose castle, lying in the most savage cleft of central France, was considered to be a hideout for outlaws and evil spirits, who gathered there every night. Humbald was madly in love with the beautiful Odile, who refused him many times. Humiliated and angry, Humbald tried to menace Odile’s father to have her yield to him. The girl decided to sacrifice herself and married her violent suitor. After many years, Humbald left for a crusade with his squire, Raoul, who was also in love with Odile. After two more years, a pilgrim from the Holy Land reached the castle and announced that the two men were dead. In fact, Humbald was alive and prisoner of the sultan of Lebanon; he fell in love with the sultan’s daughter, and, for her, he abandoned his title, his faith, and his loyalty. Thanks to Humbald’s help, the Muslims obtained a great victory, Transformations and/or disguises as wild animals were popular topoi in the Middle Ages. These changes could have been voluntary or effects of a curse, and they were sometimes seen in a Christian perspective or as propaganda against sinful lands. See L. Houwen “Howling Wolves and Other Beasts: Animals and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages,” in Animals, Animality, and Literature, ed. Bruce Boeher, Molly Hand, Brian Massumi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 43-56. See V. Samson, Les Berserkir: Les guerriers-fauves dans la Scandinavie ancienne, de l’âge de Vendel aux Vikings (VIe-XIe siècle) [The Berserkers: The Beast-Warriors in Ancient Scandinavia, From the Vender Period to the Vikings (6th11th Century)] (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2011), for a specific focus on the berserkers. 43

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and Saladin himself allowed Humbald to marry his beloved and to return to France for one year. In the meanwhile, Odile had discovered that Raoul was alive, too, and that he had become a noble knight. Thinking that her husband was dead, she married her new love, but at the wedding banquet Humbald showed up in armour and with two sinister figures. The three men killed Raoul and closed Odile in a tower, with only a bear skin as cover. Humbald, in his heart, was still in love with Odile, but the thought that she would have never forgiven him made him mad. After six months, a sweeping storm hit the castle, which collapsed; only some walls and the tower of Odile were left standing. The legend ends with the woman welcomed in paradise and with Humbald in hell. Thanks to accurate research on the legends and on the historical past of the castle, in Les légendes de l’ours Ardraos conducts the listener into a forest enshrouded in fog, as a modern skilled storyteller. Here a path takes them to the tower, a solitary, but proud and superb bastion: Après de mauvaises charrières escarpées En une place que nul trébuchet ne peut atteindre Apparaît la tour maîtresse fièrement dressée sur les rocs L’hiver les vents s’y déchaînent et soufflent leur amertume Et même les charognards n’osent toucher aux cadavres pendus aux créneaux. This first scene presents a different way to imagine the Middle Ages and their relationship with darkness and violence: the narration is more plausible than in the other case studies, the fog creates a sinister effect, and the hanged bodies are distant echoes of brutal executions. Phantasms and remote legends infest the tower, still echoing the clashes of ancient battles and the cries of the narrator, who comes there to seek some peace from the outer world. Chevalier maudit is another reconstruction of Humbald’s legend, mixed with the first tale, and in which the focus lies on the young lady’s sufferings: Puis ils entendirent conter l’histoire De la dame qui y fut jadis séquestrée Mise dans un sarcueil et plongée dans ce tombeau Vivant des heures inquiétantes de deuil et de tristesse Depuis le retour de son seigneur, fantôme décharné Ayant assouvi sa vengeance sur son traître fiancé. 115

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With Offertoire, Ardraos wants to present a disc which is not easy to comprehend, but that perfectly enlightens the musician’s passion for and his desire to pay homage to the legends of his homeland, with a peculiar re-interpretation of the Middle Ages in which violence and darkness are indispensable co-stars. V. Conclusions In conclusion, the link between black metal and a dark and violent representation of the Middle Ages is extremely close and marked, not only regarding music and texts, but also visual effects and concepts. Black metal offers a real quarry of case studies for scholars of the Middle Ages and medievalism alike, since its already vast and diverse repertoire becomes richer and richer every year, a sign that the metal scene, even lacking many of those codified milestones which made it incredibly successful, is certainly productive and dynamic. In particular, Sühnopfer’s case reveals that some groups prefer not to resort to popular and easily expendable stereotypes concerning the Middle Ages, but to research local legends and historical events. This artistic choice aims to disseminate and endorse domestic folklore, and it brings forth stimulating case studies. The very richness and variety of black metal, together with the technical difficulties posed by uncommon (and sometimes harsh) melodies and lyrics, could prevent a deeper analysis, but overlooking it would mean ignoring a considerable share of the music market and its relationships with medieval history, literature, and arts.

Bibliography Barratt-Peacock, Ruth and Hagen, Ross, ed. Medievalism and Metal Music Studies. Throwing Down the Gauntlet. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2019. Birkett, Tom and Dale, Roderick, ed. The Vikings Reimagined. Reception, Recovery, Engagement. The Northern Medieval World: On the Margins of Europe. Ed. C. Larrington et al. Boston and Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. Brown, Warren C. Violence in Medieval Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

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Driscoll, Matthew James, “Vikings!.” In The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement, ed. Tom Birkett and Roderick Dale, 19-27. Boston and Berlin: de Gruyer, 2019. Elliott, Andrew B. R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century. Medievalism. Ed. K. Fugelso and C. Jones. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017. Farrugia, Karl. “I Custodi dell’Acciaio Inox: Language as an Interface Between the Global and the Local in Italian ‘Heavy Metal Demenziale’.” In Multilingual Metal Music: Sociocultural, Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics, ed. Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi, Charlotte Doesburg, and Amanda Digioia, 153-170. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2021. Ferrari, Fulvio. “Riletture mitologiche e nuove religioni: il neosciamanesimo di Brian Bates” [“Mythological Reinterpretations and New Religions: Brian Bates’s Neo-Shamanism.”] In Riscrittura e attualizzazione dei testi germanici medievali [Rewriting and Updating of Medieval Germanic Texts], ed. Maria Grazia Cammarota and Roberta Bassi, 29-50. Bergamo: Sestante, 2017. Gilbert, Kate, White, Stephen D., ed. Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of William Ian Miller. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Granholm, Kennet. “Sons of Northern Darkness. Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk Music.” Numen 58 (2011): 514-544. Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism. Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Houwen, Luuk. “Howling Wolves and Other Beasts: Animals and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages.” In Animals, Animality, and Literature, ed. Bruce Boeher, Molly Hand, Brian Massumi, 43-56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Jón Karl Helgason. Echoes of Valhalla. The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas. Translated by J. V. Appleton. London: Reaktion, 2017. Kienast, Richard, ed. Ausgewählte althochdeutsche Sprachdenkmäler. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1948. Laconche, Gilbert. Légendes et diableries de l'Allier (Bourbonnais) [Legends and Devilish Facts of Allier (Bourbonnais)]. London: Verso, 1994. Meylan, Nicolas and Rösli, Lukas, ed. Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies. Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives. Acta

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Scandinava: Cambridge Studis in the Early Scandinavian World. Ed. S. Brink. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica [Flesh, Death, and the Devil in Romantic Literature]. Milano and Roma: La Cultura, 1930. Samson, Vincent. Les Berserkir: Les guerriers-fauves dans la Scandinavie ancienne, de l'âge de Vendel aux Vikings (VIe-XIe siècle) [The Berserkers: The Beast-Warriors in Ancient Scandinavia, From the Vender Period to the Vikings (6th-11th Century)]. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2011. Schnurbein, Stefanie von. Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. Swinford, Dean. “Mask of the Medieval Corpse: Prosopopoeia and Corpsepaint in Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.” Studies in Medievalism 26 (2017): 237-257. –––. “Black Metal Medieval King: The Apotheosis of Euronymous Through Album Dedications.” In Medievalism and Metal Music Studies. Throwing Down the Gauntlet, ed. Ruth Barratt-Peacock, Ross Hagen, 137-144. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2019. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. London: Longman and Rees, [1798] 1800. Sitography (last accessed: September 27, 2022) Epstein, Dan. “How Slayer’s Controversial Angel of Death Changed Thrash Band Forever” Rolling Stone, 2016. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-slayers-controv ersial-angel-of-death-changed-thrash-band-forever-192311/. Fletcher, David. “Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth Says His Extreme Metal Music Is a Gateway to Literature.” Dallas Observer, 2019. www.dallasobserver.com/music/cradle-of-filth-talks-literature-andthe-positive-influence-of-extreme-metal-11641727 Harrington, Walt. “Anton LaVey - America’s Satanic Master of Devils, Magic, Music and Madness.” Uploaded on Churchofsatan.org from The Washington Post Magazine, February 23, 1986. www.churchofsatan.com/interview-washington-post-magazine/. Hoad, Catherine. “Explainer: the politics of heavy metal.” The Conversation, 2017. https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-politi cs-of-heavy-metal-87999. 118

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Hughes, Rob. “The Story Behind the Song: Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones.” Louder, Classic Rock, 2014. www.loudersound.com/features/story-behind-the-song-blitzkriegbop-by-the-ramones. Lach, Stef. “Amon Amarth: Don’t Call Us Viking Metal.” Louder, Metal Hammer, 2014. https://www.loudersound.com/news/amon-amarthdon-t-call-us-viking-metal. Mills, Matt. “‘Aggression, but Also Fragility’: How Norwegian Black Metal Grew Up.” The Guardian, 2020. www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/02/how-black-metal-grewup-norway-ulver-enslaved-emperor-ihsahn. Reddit. Three discussions on the “third wave of black metal.” www.reddit.com/r/Metal/comments/107gb3/can_we_get_a_list_o f_third_wave_black_metal/ (first post in 2013), www.reddit.com/r/ BlackMetal/comments/4gxofh/what_are_the_third_wave_classics_ so_far/ (first post in 2016), www.reddit.com/r/BlackMetal/ comments/mhahas/third_wave_black_metal/ (first post in 2021). Valentini, Andrea. “La nascita del metallo nero: Black Metal dei Venom.” [The Birth of Black Metal: Venom’s Black Metal] Rumore, 2018. https://rumoremag.com/2018/09/10/venom-black-metal/. Vikernes, Varg. “A personal review of Gavin Baddeley’s book Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship and Rock’n’Roll.” Uploaded on Burzum.org in 2004. www.burzum.org/eng/library/lucifer_rising_review.shtml. Youtube. “Rock Scene Interview: Horns and Grandma.” Uploaded in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWAUWh2Tj44. Discography Bathory. Hammerheart. Berlin: Noise Records, 1990. Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath. London: Vertigo, 1970. –––. Heaven and Hell. Burbank: Warner Bros. Records, 1980. Branduardi, Angelo. Cogli la prima mela [Catch the First Apple]. Leipzig, Polydor, 1979. –––. Futuro antico II. Sulle orme dei patriarchi [Ancient Future II. In the Footsteps of the patriarchs]. London: Emi, 1998. Burzum. Aske. Oslo: Deathlike Silence Productions, 1993. –––. Filosofem. Hadleigh: Misanthropy Records, 1996. Dark Funeral. The Secrets of the Black Arts. Stockholm: No Fashion Records, 1996. 119

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Darkthrone. A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Heckmondwike: Peaceville Records, 1992. Desaster. A Touch of Medieval Darkness. Arnstein: Merciless Records, 1996 Destruction. Bestial Invasion of Hell. Independent, 1984. Dio. Holy Diver. Chicago: Mercury Records, 1983. Marduk. Panzer Division Marduk. Beaurainville: Osmose Productions, 1999. Marduk. Frontschwein. Dortmund: Century Media Records, 2015. Mayhem. Pure Fucking Armageddon. s.l.: Funny Farm, 1986. –––. De Mysteriis dom Sathanas. Oslo: Deathlike Silence Productions, 1994. Nargaroth. Herbstleyd. Mügeln: No Colours Records, 1999. –––. Black Metal ist Krieg (A Dedication Monument). Mügeln: No Colours Records, 2001. Ramones. Ramones. New York: Sire Records, 1976. Rhapsody. Symphony of Enchanted Lands. Hamburg: LMP, 1998. –––. Power of the Dragonflame. Hamburg: Limb Music, 2002. Slayer. Reign in Blood. New York: Def Jam Recordings, 1986. Sühnopfer. Offertoire. s.l.: Those Opposed Records, 2014. Venom. Black Metal. Wallsend, Neat Records, 1982.

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Crusading as Damnation, Killing for Salvation Crusading Ideology and Ludonarrative Dissonance in Dante’s Inferno Juan Manuel Rubio Arévalo*

I. Introduction “At the midpoint on the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost.” This is one of the possible translations for the beginning of Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poem, the Divine Comedy. Incidentally, it is also the way in which Visceral Games’ 2011 video game Dante’s Inferno begins, as the quote serves as background of a panoramic shot of the forest itself. However, after this point, the poem and the game part away into radically different paths. In the original poem, Dante begins with a description of the forest and eventually encounters a series of animals: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Nothing of that follows in the 2011 re-interpretation. There, the camera shifts to Dante, who, in this case, is not a fourteenth-century poet but a latetwelfth-century crusader, while he stiches a cross-shaped piece of cloth to his chest depicting a series of events related to the Third Crusade. The introduction focusses on the Acre massacre, in which some two thousand Muslim prisoners were beheaded by the crusading army of king Richard I on August 20, 1191. The cries of the victims highlight the cruelty and barbarity of the carnage that is unleashed by Dante himself. The radical change from speculative poet to blood-thirsty crusader is the key narrative variation that sets the thematic difference in both pieces. While the poem seeks to “explore the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as Creator of the Universe and the human *

Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Hungary/Austria.

Juan Manuel Rubio Arévalo

being as a creature of God,”1 Dante’s Inferno offers a personal redemption story that both criticizes extremist violence in the context of the War on Terror, while also exalting violence as a spectacle. Here, the player must traverse the nine circles of Hell in pursuit of Beatrice, who has been kidnapped by Satan, while eviscerating all enemies in his path, a key feature of the hack-n-slash game genre. A poet could hardly make a suitable protagonist to this kind of adventure. Despite being inspired by a medieval poem, and being set in a medieval world, Dante’s Inferno has very little to do with the Middle Ages themselves. Since the nine circles of Hell constitute an encased environment, one could argue that was it not because the original material was composed in the fourteenth century, the game could potentially take place at any moment in history. Hence, the Middle Ages serve as a pretext or narrative plot device2 that excuses the violence to be unleashed by the player by using what Elliott calls banal medievalisms3 both about the crusades and the period, as present through the bloody crusader, the hypocritical bishop, the heartless feudal lord,4 not to mention the total abandonment of the poem’s themes. This results in a clear ludonarrative dissonance between the condemnation of “medieval” violence of the narrative, and the spectacle of killing in the gameplay. This chapter will explore the reasons and logic behind this ludonarrative dissonance. By attempting to replicate the success of the ultraviolent hack-n-slash genre popularized by God of War in the first decade of the 21st century, the game portrays the crusades as strictly hypocritical and fanatical endeavours, so it can be narratively used as justification for the spectacular violence to be displayed by this hypermasculine Dante, with whom the player is to feel identified. 5 The Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante, the Divine Comedy (Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55. 2 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 17. 3 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017). 4 Weisl and Stevens have further argued that the medieval origin of the poem is lost further by the game’s combination of Orphean themes and science fiction elements. See Angela Jane Weisl and Kevin J. Stevens, “The Middle Ages in the Depths of Hell: Pedagogical Possibility and the Past in Dante’s Inferno,” in Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, ed. Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2014), 176. 5 Oliver Chadwick, “Courtly Violence, Digital Play: Adapting Medieval Courtly Masculinities in Dante’s Inferno,” in Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2014), 148–61. 1

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result is a Dante who is no longer a poet, but a crusader condemned to Hell due to his many sins while crusading, who must also, through the same violence, redeem himself and his beloved, altering the basic redemptive arc of the original poem. This paper is divided in three sections. The first one will approach Dante’s Inferno through its narrative, by focusing on the change made to Dante’s and Beatrice’s relationship, and the implications that this brings to the portrayal of the crusades as analogous to contemporary religious violence. The second one will analyse this title through its gameplay, aesthetic design, and level design, to highlight how the intention of copying God of War determined the banal use of medievalisms about the crusades, while also leading to ludonarrative dissonance. Some final reflections are offered at the end as conclusions. II. Crusading as Damnation: From Redeemed to Redeemer Like its source material, Dante’s Inferno is a redemption story, but with a different focus. In the original poem, the relation between Beatrice and Dante is clearly stated in the first canto, where Dante is lost in the woods of error, which he is only capable of escaping once he meets Virgil, who has been sent by Beatrice in order to rescue the poet and to take him in his journey through the three realms of the afterlife.6 The poem is full of symbolism and allegories: the forest where Dante finds himself represents sin, the animals possibly signify various vices like appetite, violence, and fraud, while Beatrice represents theology and wisdom.7 As Kirkpatrick argues, Dante’s journey through hell is a progression in which he gets “an advancement in understanding the values which God asserts and that the damned have attacked.”8 This progression in understanding is seen through the various levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, as, for example, when Virgil explains to Dante why the sins punished in lower Hell (violence and fraud) are so insulting to God (Inferno 11:1-27). However, Dante cannot come to this enlightenment by himself, since he must be guided first by Virgil, as an embodiment of

Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighiery: Inferno, Robert M. Durling, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17. 7 Durling and Martinez, 1:13, 34, 36. 8 Kirkpatrick, Dante, the Divine Comedy, 57. 6

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classical knowledge, and, more importantly, by Beatrice, who, as a representation of theology, sets this travel in motion.

Fig. 1. Dante meets Death, the game’s first boss, screenshots from my personal gameplay.

In Dante’s Inferno, instead of having Beatrice rescue Dante, it is Dante who must physically rescue and redeem both Beatrice and himself from the depths of Hell, placing the full agency of the events in the hands of the player. In the Commedia, Dante never explicitly states why he is in the forest. Although the poet claims that he “abandoned the true way” (Inferno I, 10), he does not describe any specific actions that led him to this fate. A reason for this literary void might be found in man’s fall from grace into sin, which is one of the text’s central ideas9 and which probably did not need further explanation for a medieval audience. For the original author, man has both a corruptible/mortal and incorruptible/immortal nature,10 hence sin is always a potentiality within humanity which cannot be escaped or avoided without divine intervention. Dante’s journey is not one that he takes voluntarily, it has been divinely ordained for him: not only is he unable to escape the forest until Virgil appears, sent by Durling and Martinez, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighiery: Inferno, 1:3. Vicente Ángel Álvarez Palenzuela, “Innovación Intelectual: De La Escolástica al Humanismo” [Intellectual Innovation: From Scholastics to Humanism], in II: El Mundo Medieval [II: The Medieval World], ed. Emilio Mitre Fernández, Historia Del Cristianismo [History of Christianity] (Editorial Trotta, 2004), 593–95. 9

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Beatrice as an agent of God,11 but, even if he wanted to, he can’t avoid going through the realms of the afterlife. This is a stark contrast from Dante the crusader, who is in full agency of both his damnation and redemption. He clearly states so during the first boss battle in the game, Death herself, who claims that Dante must face “everlasting damnation for his sins”, just for the crusader to answer back that he will redeem himself (after trying to rebuke Death by appealing to the Church’s promise of indulgence, fig. 1). The portrayal of the crusades is fully dependant on this inverted redemption story and the goal of providing Dante with agency. Dante’s timid and often cowardly personality in the poem made him a challenging video game protagonist, as Servitje has noted,12 point that was already highlighted by developer Tom Wilson, who expressed that the issue of agency was key in changing Dante from speculative poet to crusader.13 In Dante’s Inferno, the protagonist is no longer a timid poet, but a strong, intolerant, fanatic, raging, and sinful “holy warrior” who tainted Christian teaching with the blood of innocents, offering a clear reason for the descent into Hell. While the poet in the forest embodies humanity’s fallen state, Dante the crusader represents all vices that the game associates with religious violence: he is lustful, greedy, gluttonous, violent, cruel, a cheat and a liar (to which we can add the contemporary sins religious intolerance and fanaticism). With the exception of limbo and heresy, he is easily associated with each one of Hell’s circles; in Dante’s Inferno, human nature is replaced by crusader sinfulness. Of course, this is not to say that the only way of remediating the Inferno into video game form is through the figure of the warrior; Claudia Rossignoli has compared Dante’s Inferno to other games inspired in the medieval poem that do not revolve around combat, such as Limbo (Playdead, 2010).14 However, contemporary attitudes around religious violence within the context of the War on Terror favoured this transition. Kirkpatrick, Dante, the Divine Comedy, 58. Lorenzo Servitje, “Digital Mortification of Literary Flesh: Computational Logistics and Violences of Remediation in Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno,” Games and Culture 9, no. 5 (2014): 375–76. 13 Timothy J. Welsh and John T. Sebastian, “Shades of Dante: Virtual Bodies in Dante’s Inferno,” in Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2014), 162. 14 Claudia Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife: Dante’s Otherworlds in the Gaming Age,” Games and Culture 15, no. 7 (2020): 825–49. 11 12

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Amy Kauffman has defined neo-medievalism as “not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism,”15 meaning that portrayals of the period that we see today in media do not seek to reference the medieval past directly, but previous renditions of the period. A good example is the impact that Braveheart’s portrayal of the Scots influenced how they were rendered in games like Age of Empires II (Ensemble Studios, 1999) and Medieval II Total War (Creative Assembly, 2006). Dante’s Inferno is interesting because it constitutes a sort of ludonarrative palimpsest in which a neo-medievalist rendition of the crusades is written on top of an unrelated medieval source, with everything covered in a difficult to reconcile gameplay experience. In this sense, both the way the poem is used and the crusading narrative portrayed fall into what Elliott calls banal medievalisms.16 As several authors have noted, after 9/11 the crusades have made a comeback in public discourse, often used as the cause of, or analogous to, the War in Terror, as well as being adopted by right-wing xenophobic movements who try to equate them to contemporary immigration into Europe from the Middle East and Africa.17 In all these cases, Elliott convincingly argues how the use of the crusades have nothing to do with the actual historical event, instead they “serve a particular function in holding up a commonly accepted idea about the past which can then be used to critique the present.”18 Amy S. Kaufman, “Medieval Unmoored,” in Defining Neomedievalism(s), Karl Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism, XIX (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 4. 16 Meaning that their “banal” and daily use have flattened them out of their historical reference, allowing them to be deployed for multiple, and often contradictory, purposes and ideological goals. Elliot, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, 16–17. 17 Hilary Rhodes, “Medievalism, Imagination and Violence: The Function and Dysfunction of Crusader Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Political World,” in The Crusades in the Modern World:, Mike Horswell and Akil N. Awan, vol. 2, Engaging The Crusades (New York: Routledge, 2020), 41–57; Jonathan Phillips and Mike Horswell, “Introduction: Engaging the Crusades,” in Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, Mike Jorswell and Jonathan Phillips, vol. 1, Engaging The Crusades (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–6; Daniel T. Kline, “Introduction: ‘All Your History Are Belong to Us:’ Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages,” in Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15–30; Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, chaps 4–8. 18 Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, 16. 15

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In its appeal to a 21st century audience, Dante’s Inferno criticises contemporary religious violence within the context of the War on Terror by portraying the crusades as embodiment of all negative notions popularly ascribed to the Middle Ages, such as intolerance, ignorance, and violence. In this sense, Dante the crusader is useful for the game’s redemptive arc, for it allows the player to begin at the lowest moral point imaginable in this banal medievalist setting, allowing for the redemption arc to take place. That the portrayal of the crusades in media has depended on the political context is hardly surprising, authors like Lorraine Stock19 and Nicholas Haydock20 have shown how events like the World Wars, the decolonization of the Middle East and the Vietnam War impacted the way in which the negotium crucis was represented in film. In the same way, the game appeals to previous medievalist ideas about the crusades to convey its message about religious violence in the 21st century. This becomes even more evident if one takes into account that the game has very little to do with crusading itself. The events that took place in the Holy Land during the siege of Acre serve as the catalyst of Dante’s agency that leads to his damnation: the player does not take part in the events of the crusade (besides the short tutorial), and the game offers no exploration of the phenomenon. That Dante is condemned not only because he is a crusader, but because he is a proper “medieval religious fanatic” is a ludonarrative non-negotiable fact. It is key to recall that this way of understanding the wars of the cross has a historiographical origin. In discussing the various ways in which the crusades have been approached by scholars and popular memory, Kristin Skottki states that “there is no clear-cut, consistent difference between academic historical studies, or in this case, Medieval Studies (Mediävistik) and historical culture or, in this case, medievalism (Mediävalismus).”21 This

Lorraine K. Stock, “Now Starring in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and Television Series,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and the Christian-Muslim Clashes, Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 97–122. 20 Nickolas Haydock, “Introduction: ‘The Unseen Cross Upon the Breast.’ Medievalism, Orientalism and Discontent,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and the Christian-Muslim Clashes, Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 11–14. 21 Kristin Skottki, “The Dead, the Revived and the Recreated Past: ‘Structural Amnesia’ in Representations of Crusade History,” in Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to 19

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is not to say that misconceptions about the past have the same weight or validity as knowledge born out of rigorous historical research, but that, more often than not, the latter is based to some extent on the former, considering that historiographical tendencies are themselves influenced by larger contemporary social and political dynamics.22 In this way, the revived past (memories, imaginations, re-enactments) and the recreated past (historical reconstructions) feed and influence one another.23 The causes, dynamics, and intentions behind the crusades are complex and hotly debated among scholars, and the ways they have been remembered and interpreted has itself been subjected to historical change. In his 2011 book, Christopher Tyerman analysed the ambiguous and often contradictory historiographical legacy of the crusades, where he shows how different authors’ approaches, beginning in the Middle Ages, have been influenced by personal convictions, political affiliations, ideological preferences, etc. This can be seen in Reformist writers who characterized it as the papal manipulation of ignorant devotion,24 or Michaud, in the early 19th century, portraying them as a form of French national historical prowess and a first endeavour to “civilize the East.”25 The crusades’ conflicted memory has allowed for it to be used and interpreted by multiple and often contradictory agendas and perspectives,26 as Haydock exemplifies with academic reactions to Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005).27 It is common to see the crusades portrayed in media as the result of ignorance, hypocrisy, and fanaticism. This tradition has a long historiographical basis. As mentioned, Reformation writers disagreed the Twenty-First Century, Mike Horswell and Jonathan Phillips, vol. 1, Engaging The Crusades (New York: Routledge, 2018), 111. 22 Skottki, 114–15. 23 Skottki, 110. 24 Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 38–47. 25 Tyerman, 105–14. 26 Louise D’Arcens, “The Crusades and Medievalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the Crusades, ed. Anthony Bale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 248. 27 In his 2007 book, Nickolas Haydock explores how Kingdom of Heaven generated contradictory reactions from scholars Jonathan Riley-Smith and Khaled Abou el-Fadl, with the former one claiming that it fed into Al-Qaeda’s vision of the West, and the latter stating that it taught people to hate Muslims. See: Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007), 134–64. 128

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with the indulgences and thought of the crusaders as naïve and credulous,28 although they saw merit in the Christian holy war as a way of armed resistance against the growing threat of the Ottomans.29 With the wane of Turkish power and the coming of the Enlightenment, a more damning image of the crusades appeared, which criticized them on religious, moral, and cultural grounds30. For the French philosophes, like Voltaire, analysing the crusades was a way of criticizing the Church and the nobility; the crusades were irrational and pointless, and the crusaders boasted “giddy, furious, debauched and cruel minds.”31 Although 19th century romantic scholars attempted to rehabilitate the crusades under the lens of nation and empire, the mid-20th century saw them recondemned by authors like Runciman calling them “the last of the barbarian invasions” in his A History of the Crusades.32 It is not my interest here to claim which tradition is more accurate; the crusades were not simply “a long act of intolerance in the name of God,”33 nor a chivalrous defence of Christianity in a larger “clash of civilizations,”34 nor the longlost cause of contemporary religious tensions in the Middle East.35 In any case, large-budget depictions of the negotium crucis in media seem to be closer to Voltaire than to Michaud. In Assassin’s Creed (2007), when the player assassinates Muslim scholar Jubair al-Hakim, who in the game is a Templar operative, he asks: “Is it not ancient scrolls that inspire the crusaders? That fill Salah ad-Din with a sense of righteous fury? Their texts endanger others, bring death in their wake.” Likewise, Frankish “hostility and fanaticism” lead to a growing zealotry from the side of Lee Manion, “Renaissance Crusading Literature: Memory, Translation, and Adaptation,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed. Anthony Bale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 232–47. 29 Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 40–42. 30 Erna Oliver and Jacques Theron, “Changing perspectives on the Crusades,” HTS: Theological Studies 74, no. 1 (2018): 5. 31 Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 79. 32 Nickolas Haydock, “Introduction: ‘The Unseen Cross Upon the Breast.’ Medievalism, Orientalism and Discontent,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Deppictions of the Crusades and the Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 16, 22. 33 Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 193. 34 Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 64–75. 35 Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, chap. 5. 28

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Islam in Saladin’s campaign in Age of Empires II (1999-2019). In Alexander Nevsky (1936), the Battle on the Ice is preceded by a religious ceremony carried out by the Teutonic Knights, who are shown as faceless demons, but which is absent on the Russian side, who behave like good patriotic Bolsheviks; and in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), crusaders cynically shout “God wills it,” while they attack unarmed caravans. As Elliott recalls, this interpretation comes from a larger idea of progress in which the medieval period is understood as backwards, violent, ignorant, and unrefined. The fact that “medieval” is often used to describe contemporary religious extremists is not gratuitous.36 As mentioned before, Dante the crusader’s agency, meaning his actions at Acre, is what dooms both him and Beatrice, which also serves as the moral low-point from which this modified redemption story begins. In the game version of the events, Dante is characterized as a fanatic who rejoices in the killing of Muslims, whom he calls heretics.37 Furthermore, through the main character, crusading is associated with a broader range of sins. When Dante breaks the vow of celibacy he made to Beatrice before departing, by sleeping with a prisoner woman, the latter is condemned, since she waged her soul with Satan that Dante would keep his promise. Later, while in the circle of gluttony, a flashback shows how Dante, like his father, rejoiced in luxury, abundant food, and in captured women, which could imply that behind his zealous violence there was also hypocritical greed, a common trope in productions about the wars of the cross (fig. 2). He is also a liar and a traitor. When Francesco, Beatrice’s brother and Dante’s fellow crusader, takes responsibility for the massacre leading to his unjust death, Dante does nothing escaping the immediate consequences of his actions. All these moral flaws are directly related to the crusade. Dante is a lascivious cheater, who, thanks to captivity, leads a married woman to have sex with

Elliott, chap. 3. The lack of contact with Islam before the period of the crusades led to Western Christianity not having a clear idea about Islam and its teachings before the 12th century. While sources such as the Gesta Francorum show them as worshipers of Apollo, other authors, such as Guibert de Nogent, associate it with eastern heresies. For more, see: Dana Carleton Munro, “The Western Attitude towards Islam during the Period of the Crusades,” Speculum 6, no. 3 (July 1931): 329–43; The Deeds of God through the Franks: A Translation of Guibert of Nogent’s Gesta Dei per Francos, Robert Levine (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997). 36 37

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him in exchange for her freedom, and a coward who avoids responsibility for his blind rage and violence against people of other faiths.

Fig. 2. Like father, like son. Dante indulges himself, just like his father, screenshots from my personal gameplay.

Fig. 3. Dante justifies the killing of Muslims

Through this characterization of the protagonist, Dante’s Inferno sets a stage that is familiar to the player, without having to explore the crusades themselves. Because in modern media the creator and the viewer are not meeting face-to-face, the product must control the viewer’s 131

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interpretation through a structural arrangement of given and not-given information. Wherever information is not conveyed, the viewer, or the player in this case, is to fill it both through common shared ideas and guidance from the game, with the broader social context being the contingent factor that allows for this process.38 Ascribing all these moral failures to Dante allows the game to guide the player’s interpretation of the period to those same ideas about the crusades it is relying on in the first place, while also appealing to modern sensibilities about religious violence. In this sense, Francesco offers an interesting comparison to Dante. If Dante represents a “medieval ignorant crusader,” Francesco expresses the doubts and restraints ascribed to modern society by opposition: he shows scepticism to the bishop’s promise of remission of sin, explains to Dante why it is necessary to guard the prisoners of Acre, tries to stop Dante from sleeping with the Muslim woman, and, when the carnage begins, he attempts to physically stand in Dante’s way. Although he participates in the killing, he only does so reluctantly and as an act of self-defence. One particular scene will help exemplify the contrast between the “medieval” Dante against the “modern” Francesco. In the cut-scene “Boiling Anger,” while Francesco claims that the main objective of the crusade is to recover the Holy Land, Dante’s states that they went there to “kill these heretics” (meaning the Acre prisoners), emphasizing it by asking “since when are heretics worth a Christian life?” (Fig. 3.) The question is interesting because it is disconnected from what the narrative has stated to this point: in a previous flashback, Francesco explains that the prisoners are being used to negotiate the return of the relic of the True Cross, no Christian life is directly being risked here. The question is clearly rhetorical, with two obvious answers: for the 21st-century modern player, both lives are equally valuable, while for Dante, the medieval religious extremist, they are not. In this way, a barrier is built, separating Dante the crusader’s, which leads to the moral bottom the story depends on, and the avatar the player will control while searching for redemption. Only when this medievalist cloak starts to fall off can both the game and redemption truly begin, as Dante recognizes that crusading violence is irrational, fanatic, and false, as he himself Gretchen Barbatsis, “Reception Theory,” in Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, Ken Smith et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 277-281. 38

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recognizes: “The bishop said our cause was holy. Holy had nothing to do with it.” We can conclude then that Dante the crusader is useful for the game’s redemptive arc, since it places him in the lowest moral position imaginable within this banal medievalist world that the developers constructed. To do this, Dante’s Inferno uses a set of conventions39 about the crusades birthed from a historiographical tradition and popularized in media to facilitate the narrative redefinition of the relation between Dante and Beatrice, from redeemed poet to redeeming warrior. By giving Dante the agency behind this demise, i.e., the killing and multiple sins committed during this hypocritical and distorted application of Christian teaching, it also provides the player with the violent means for redemption. This, however, means that Dante’s Inferno is characterized by a sharp dissonance between what it wants to say about violence through its narrative, in relation to the experience it wants to provide through its gameplay.

III. Killing for Salvation: Dante’s Inferno’s Ludonarrative Dissonance If the reader is wondering why use a fourteenth-century theological poem about the spiritual journey to the realms of the afterlife to talk about contemporary religious violence, they would not be wrong in their suspicion. A way of grasping with this can be through Dante’s Inferno’s game-design, level-design, and gameplay mechanics. This approach makes it possible to argue that that the use of the original material and the portrayal of the crusades in the game came second to the game design. By this I mean that the type of game the developers seemed to want to make came before the medieval setting or its message, which resulted in a very sharp, although not fully unexpected, ludonarrative dissonance. By convention I mean a common language that allows for something to be represented in media beyond its simple resemblance with something else. For more, see: Keith Kenney, “Representation Theory,” in Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. Ken Smith et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 108– 9. and Andrew B. R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011), 180–83. 39

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When Dante’s Inferno came out, in 2011, it did so following the huge success of the God of War series, whose latest title, God of War III (2010) for the PlayStation 3, sold over a million copies in its first week,40 and this influence shows. Like Dante, God of War’s Kratos is a hypermasculine protagonist who eviscerates fantastical/mythological creatures in his battle against deities. Other gameplay elements like the fluidity of combat, the use of the camera, the skillset, and the in-game physics further highlight this correlation.41 The main difference between both titles is that one is set in the world of Greek mythology, while the other uses the Christian afterlife. Hence, it would not be surprising if the developers at Visceral Games were first and foremost concerned with attempting to copy the hack-n-slash genre popularized by God of War, with the setting coming in second. The level design and the strictly environmental use of the poem material reinforce this hypothesis. As Rossignoli has pointed out, the poem’s structure by circles/levels, the description of the spaces, and the progression of the narrative embedded the Divine Comedy with great gaming potential.42 Not only that, but the fact that Dante’s poem is possibly the most famous and detailed recreation of the Christian afterlife makes it an obvious candidate to make a God of War-like game with a Christian setting. The strict use of the original material in an environmental way, meaning used solely to create the gaming space, further reinforces this notion. As is expected, the levels follow the descriptions in the poem, with some deviations (like the circle of greed, which resembles a mine, or the eight circle, which is made of a series of fighting challenges). However, some oddities highlight the inconsistencies between the original material and the setting of the game. For instance, emperor Frederick II (1194-1250, canto X:118), Brunetto Latini (1220-1294, canto XV:28-33), or count Ugollino della Gherardesca (1220-1289, canto XXXII:13) are all found in Hell and in the poem, but all died after the Third Crusade. Another example is the often use of decontextualized citations, as when Dante calls to be saved from an unseen beast (in the Brett Walton, “God of War III Sales Pass One Million Units Worldwide,” VGChartz, 24 March 2010, https://www.vgchartz.com/article/7569/god-of-war-iii-sales-pass-onemillion-units-worldwide/. 41 Servitje, “Digital Mortification of Literary Flesh: Computational Logistics and Violences of Remediation in Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno,” 381. 42 Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife: Dante’s Other worlds in the Gaming Age,” 829. 40

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poem meaning the she-wolf, but the game seems to point to Satan) before descending into Hell, or much of Virgil’s dialogue that would make little sense to those unfamiliar with the poem. That Dante’s Inferno uses the Divine Comedy solely as the provider of the diegetic game-world is probably unsurprising. As I have tried to argue, despite being set in the Middle Ages, this is a title that has little interest in representing the historical medieval world; hence why the structure of Hell by circles is so helpful from a level-design. Nevertheless, when this is contrasted to the main gameplay mechanics, it is hard to imagine how else could this title have portrayed the wars of the cross. Ian Bogost introduced the concept of “procedural rhetoric” in order to explain how video game mechanics, by stating what a player can and cannot do and the consequences this entails, convey arguments;43 in Dante’s Inferno, the player does one thing almost exclusively: exert violence. As explored in the previous section, Dante’s damnation is the narrative tool through which the crusades are condemned under the contemporary lens of religious violence. However, by following God of War’s game design, violence is also the main way in which the player interacts with this environment. Dante constantly eviscerates hordes of demons in gory fashion, with special finish-off attacks in which the camera zooms in, so the violence can be seen better; even door-opening is done through stabbing demons in the chest. This is not optional: the player cannot advance without killing every single enemy the game launches at them. This prevalence of combat, acrobatics, and gore seems to clash with Dante’s Inferno’s narrative premise, constituting the game’s main ludonarrative dissonance: while Dante is condemned because of the violence while crusading (together with other sins), redemption is only achieved through killing (fig. 4). This dissonance is not always uncommon in games. René Glas has accurately noted that most action games use a heroic protagonist who kills hundreds of dehumanized generic enemies, something that under normal circumstances we would characterize as morally abhorrent.44 Ian Bogost, “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, Katie Salen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 117–40. 44 René Glas, “Of Heroes and Henchmen: The Conventions of Killing Generic Expendables in Digital Games,” in The Dark Side of Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth and Ashley ML Brown (New York: Routledge, 2015), 33–36. 43

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Fig. 4. Dante kills Minos, the judge of Hell, by splitting his head in two. Following God of War’s success, the hyper-violent cinematics and mechanics were key to the game’s marketing.

Fig. 5. Dante’s and the bishop’s design in the game’s cutscenes further convey the game’s understanding of the crusades.

However, I believe that the dissonance is particularly sharp in Dante’s Inferno if one pays attention to certain decisions in the way both characters and cutscenes were designed. For example, through the cutscenes’ colour-palette – which favours reds, oranges, and yellows – the game both establishes the mood of the background story and presents the crusades as essentially destructive, murderous, and openly 136

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diabolical.45 Take the case of the bishop preaching the crusade in Florence. His grin and pupil-less eyes give him a diabolical aspect that matches those of demons in the game. Also, the red colour of his robes, the fires of the pyre burning in front of him, and the rain drops, which, due to the dark lightening of the scene, are meant to emulate blood, foreshadow the cruelty to come; the fact that there is a cathedral in the background brings full circle the relation between crusading violence, hypocrisy, and damnation (fig. 5). This is a constant design choice: all characters that are linked to sins (Dante’s father, the bishop, or Dante himself) are shown pupil-less, in order to highlight their otherworldliness and set them apart from the fully human and blameless. In the flashback “Crusader Fever,” in which the bishop preaches the crusade to the people of Florence, his words “Your immaculate father (the pope) absolves you of all your sins” are juxtaposed with an image of an innocent woman and child about to be murdered by Dante. This contrast between word and image is interesting on two accounts: first, it highlights that the crusaders’ “salvation” was bought with the blood of the innocent; and second, the image of the woman and the baby seems to point to the Virgin Mary and Child, which would argue that the crusades were a twisted and false application of Christian teachings (fig. 6).

Fig. 6. An innocent woman and child are about to be murdered by Dante. The bishop’s words at the bottom reinforce the idea that the crusader’s “salvation” is bought with the blood of the innocent. The woman and child motif seems to point towards the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus. Herbert Zettl, “Aesthetics Theory,” in Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. Ken Smith et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 369–70. 45

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It might be true that this tension of a “good” protagonist who kills hundreds of enemies is recurrent in adventure games. However, different from other titles which display high levels of violence, such as The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) or Bioshock (2K, 2007), the condemnation of violence is consistent in every element of the narrative in Dante’s Inferno: from the plot to the visual rhetoric behind the cutscenes. Dante’s design can further elucidate this. Dante’s full clothing in the cutscenes clearly identifies him as a medieval figure, not only according to the setting but in his religious intolerance. However, the hypertrophied body of the avatar, although still covered by the crusader cross that reminds the player of the violence that led to Hell,46 is rather meant to identify the player with other hypermasculine characters like Kratos, which, as Servitjie has noted, goes hand in hand with the damsell-in-distress narrative that also hypersexualizes Beatrice.47 This helps provide the player with a more common type of killer that allows for the enjoyment of the overtly violent gameplay.48 In fact, Jonathan Knight, EA’s executive producer at the time, reasoned that the changes in Dante’s Inferno were meant to provide players with motivations and dynamics that are more easily recognizable than the theological ideas of the poem,49 the broader medieval context that birthed it and the crusades was clearly not a priority either. The purpose of mentioning these design choices is to highlight the logic behind Dante’s Inferno use of banal medievalisms and how it relates back to the ludonarrative dissonance. Judging by the similarities between Dante’s Inferno and God of War, the subversion of the redemption arc, the narrative and design constructed around the condemnation of the crusades, and the way in which the narrative clashes with the overtly Welsh and Sebastian have pointed out that Dante’s embroidery across his chest is a parody of the crusader cross which invokes the golden cloaks of the hypocrites, further reinforcing the fake notion of Christian violence. Welsh and Sebastian, “Shades of Dante: Virtual Bodies in Dante’s Inferno,” 168. 47 Servitje, “Digital Mortification of Literary Flesh: Computational Logistics and Violences of Remediation in Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno,” 373–74; Chadwick, “Courtly Violence, Digital Play: Adapting Medieval Courtly Masculinities in Dante’s Inferno,” 148–61. 48 Dorothee Hefner, Christoph Klimmt, and Peter Vorderer, “Identification with the Player Character as Determinant of Video Game Enjoyment,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science., no. 4740 (2007): 39–48. 49 Welsh and Sebastian, “Shades of Dante: Virtual Bodies in Dante’s Inferno,” 162–63. 46

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violent gameplay, it is possible to suggest that the objective behind the portrayal of Middle Ages and the crusades was to give players a familiar narrative that excuses the violence they are asked to engage with. In other words, in order to justify the spectacle of massacring hordes of enemies, which is the main selling point by replicating the God of War formula in a Christian environment, the game uses the wars of the cross to point to a reprehensible form of violence (religious violence) to be able to celebrate the player’s actions as different, despite the fact that it was violence itself that led to damnation in the first place. This is why Dante the crusader in the cut scenes is so different from Dante the poet, but also from Dante the demon-eviscerator: not only they look different, but the first one is fanatically violent, intolerant, ignorant, loud, immoral, and cruel, in other words, “medieval;” while the latter is righteously violent, regretful, heroically persistent, selfless, and looking for understanding and redemption. We can look at the way in which the crusades are used as part of the gameplay and of the level design as a final example. Dante is clearly a supporter of the crusades in the original material. In the fifth celestial sphere, Mars, Dante, and Beatrice meet both Cacciaguda, Dante’s ancestor who participated in the Second Crusade (Paradiso XV: 135-148), and Godfrey of Boullion, one of the leaders of the First Crusade (Paradiso XVIII: 46). Furthermore, Mary Alexandra Watt has proposed that the poem has a typological connection to the human lifespan, the cruciform church, and the physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the same way that the altar is placed in the crux of the cruciform church, Jerusalem is located in the centre of the world in medieval T-maps. Dante’s movement westward in the poem would also be downwards, since maps pointed to the eastern rising sun, signifying movement away from Jerusalem and the eastern-pointing altar.50 Hence, Dante’s spiritual journey from error to enlightenment is allegorically similar to the movement away and back to the altar and the Eucharist, and away and back to Jerusalem, both as pilgrim and crusader. This means that subtle exaltations of the crusades can be found throughout the narrative. This is not a place for a full review of Watt’s book, but some examples will help convey the idea. According to her, Dante beginning in “the middle Mary Alexandra Watt, The Cross That Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005), 3–4, 10– 11. 50

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of the road” at the foot of a hill is meant to represent Mount Zion, on top of which Jerusalem is built, from which he must move away.51 The city of Dis, with its towers and “mosques,” serves as an inverted Jerusalem, while also reminding the reader of the Muslim occupation of the Holy City.52 Finally, some of the damned, like Frederick II, Boniface VIII, and Guido da Montefeltro, are in Hell because they prevented the endeavour of recovering the Holy Land, be it because of dallying or because they chose to prioritize local political conflicts.53 If we accept Watt’s argument, it becomes abundantly clear that the Divine Comedy is not suitable for the narrative that the game proposes. The only way in which the game includes the crusades in the gameplay is by changing the inhabitants of the third sub-section of the seventh circle, where the violent are punished. In this part of Hell, those who were violent against God, art, and nature writhe in a burning wasteland, while fiery flakes rain on them (cantos XIV-XV). In the game, instead of being inhabited by blasphemers, usurers, and sodomites, a new type of enemy, called the “damned crusaders,” are introduced. René Glas has pointed out that generic and boss enemies can serve as a design tool that helps drive a game’s themes, section-divisions, and narratives.54 In Dante’s Inferno, the introduction of different type of demons reinforces the theme of the various circles: demonic babies in Limbo, seductresses in the circle of the lustful, heretics and pagan priests in the sixth circle of heresy, to name a few. Different from other demons in the game, the placement of the damned crusaders in this circle of Hell is narratively driven. Right before they appear, a flashback titled “They are not us” is played. In it, it is shown how it was Dante who began the massacre at Acre. Although Francesco tries to physically stop him, Dante overpowers him and leads the crusaders in the killing of their Muslim prisoners. As the carnage begins, Dante screams: “Fight with me crusaders! Spill the blood of the heathens! There is no shame. Their souls are already lost!” This scenario is a statement about the crusades themselves: indeed, in the seventh circle, the crusaders, whose souls are truly lost because of the massacre, Watt, 15–18. Watt, 22–23. 53 Watt, 24–25, 110–11. 54 Glas, “Of Heroes and Henchmen: The Conventions of Killing Generic Expendables in Digital Games,” 37–39. 51 52

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are once again fighting, not with, but against Dante. In this fight it becomes clear how the game attempts to show the violence engaged by the player as different from the one of the crusaders by forcing him to fight his previous comrades. While the former is celebrated, the latter, akin to contemporary religious violence, is understood as a negation of religious teaching. Virgil explicitly states this at the entrance to the subcircle, by claiming: “Violence may be done against the Deity by denying him in the heart.” The fact that Francesco, despite taking the blame and sacrificing himself to save Dante, is the final boss of this area (fig. 7), further stresses that nothing, including self-sacrifice, can atone for the sin of religious violence in Dante’s Inferno. IV. Conclusion This is not to say that the way in which Dante’s Inferno portrays the crusades has no historical basis. The crusades did indeed cause much death, suffering, and destruction; even some chroniclers of the First Crusade seemed shocked by the massacre that took place when Jerusalem fell in July 1099.55 However, more recent crusading historiography has attempted to show that the reasons for a person participating in crusading were ample and varied, including both economic incentives and religious devotion. They were neither a hypocritical outburst of religious intolerance, as they are often shown in popular media, nor a glorious defence of Christianity or “western civilization”, as contemporary extreme right-wing movements would like them to be. 56 My purpose with this paper has been to argue that Dante’s Katherine Allen Smith, “The Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem and Christ’s Cleansing of the Temple,” in The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. Elizabeth Lapina, Nicholas Morton (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 19-41. 56 Although this is not the place for a full bibliographical review, for some of the ideological motivations behind the crusades see: Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” in The Crusades: The Essential Readings., ed. Thomas F. Madden (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 31–50; Ane Bysted, The Crusade Indulgence: Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Marcus Bull, “The Roots for Lay Enthusiasm for the First Crusade,” in The Crusades: The Essential Readings, ed. Thomas Madden (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 172–93; Christoph Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror: Christianity, Violence and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Philippe Buc, “Crusade and Eschatology: Holy War Fostered and Inhibited,” MIOG 125, no. 1 55

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Inferno is a neo-medievalist palimpsest in which preconceived ideas about the past, modern sensibilities, and economic incentives led to a sharp case of “historiographical” ludonarrative dissonance. The game’s mechanic and visual stimuli, although in tension with one another, seek to offer a relatable gameplay experience, by narrating a version of the crusades that is familiar to both developers and players due to its recurrence in popular media and contemporary attitudes to religious violence. In this way, the game interacts both with the players’ imagination (popular ideas about the crusades) and their broader social context, to make narratively acceptable the actions that the gameplay asks from the player.57

Fig. 7. Dante battles with Francesco and his former comrades in the seventh circle of Hell. The fact that the fight takes place in the third sub-circle, violence against God, reinforces the idea that nothing can make amends for religious violence.

(December 2017): 304–38; Jay Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Jay Rubenstein, “Miracles and the Crusading Mind: Monastic Meditations on Jerusalem’s Conquest,” in Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition, ed. Samantha Bhattacharji, Dominic Mattos, Rowan Williams (New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 197–210. 57 Michael Brown, “Phenomenology and Historical Research,” in Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. Ken Smith et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 317. 142

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And yet, it is valid to ask if this game could have engaged with the crusades in a different way, considering the type of game it wants to be, without ending up glorifying them. The problem is that the crusades are a contentious historical topic, difficult to approach with media due to the polemics around them, their religious nature, their long historiographical legacy, and their misappropriation by racist and xenophobic political ideologies. I do not pretend to know how to use the crusades in games and avoid these many pitfalls. However, I believe that Dante’s Inferno serves as a good call to continue researching on how historical sources can be used in gaming to allow for an entertaining and nuanced approach to the past, while also avoiding the simplifications that may lead history to be weaponized by extremist political movements.

Bibliography Allen Smith, Katherine. “The Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem and Christ’s Cleansing of the Temple.” In The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, Elizabeth Lapina, Nicholas Morton, 19-41. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Álvarez Palenzuela, Vicente Ángel. “Innovación Intelectual: De La Escolástica al Humanismo.” In II: El Mundo Medieval, Emilio Mitre Fernández, 575–630. Historia Del Cristianismo. Editorial Trotta, 2004. Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” In The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, Katie Salen, 117–40. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Brown, Michael. “Phenomenology and Historical Research.” In Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, Ken Smith et al. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Buc, Philippe. “Crusade and Eschatology: Holy War Fostered and Inhibited.” MIOG 125, no. 1 (December 2017): 304–38. –––. Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror: Christianity, Violence and the West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Bull, Marcus. “The Roots for Lay Enthusiasm for the First Crusade.” In The Crusades: The Essential Readings, Thomas Madden, 172–93. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Bysted, Ane. The Crusade Indulgence: Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 143

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Chadwick, Oliver. “Courtly Violence, Digital Play: Adapting Medieval Courtly Masculinities in Dante’s Inferno.” In Digital Gaming ReImagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline, 148–61. New York: Routledge, 2014. D’Arcens, Louise. “The Crusades and Medievalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the Crusades, Anthony Bale, 248–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighiery: Inferno. Robert M. Durling. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Elliot, Andrew B. R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. –––. Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World. London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011. Glas, René. “Of Heroes and Henchmen: The Conventions of Killing Generic Expendables in Digital Games.” In The Dark Side of Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth and Ashley ML Brown, 33–50. New York: Routledge, 2015. Haydock, Nickolas. “Introduction: ‘The Unseen Cross Upon the Breast’. Medievalism, Orientalism and Discontent” In Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and the Christian-Muslim Clashes, Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risen., 1–30. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. –––. Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007. Hefner, Dorothee, Christoph Klimmt, and Peter Vorderer. “Identification with the Player Character as Determinant of Video Game Enjoyment.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science., no. 4740 (2007): 39–48. Kaufman, Amy S. “Medieval Unmoored.” In Defining Neomedievalism(s), Karl Fugelso, 1–12. Studies in Medievalism, XIX. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Kaufman, Amy S., and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.

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Kenney, Keith. “Representation Theory.” In Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, Ken Smith et al., 99–115. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Kirkpatrick, Robin. Dante, the Divine Comedy. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kline, Daniel T. “Introduction: ‘All Your History Are Belong to Us: ’ Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages.” In Digital Gaming ReImagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline, 15–30. New York: Routledge, 2014. Maier, Christoph. Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Manion, Lee. “Renaissance Crusading Literature: Memory, Translation, and Adaptation.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, Anthony Bale., 232–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Matthews, David. Medievalism: A Critical History. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Munro, Dana Carleton. “The Western Attitude towards Islam during the Period of the Crusades.” Speculum 6, no. 3 (July 1931): 329–43. Oliver, Erna, and Jacques Theron. “Changing perspectives on the Crusades.” HTS: Theological Studies 74, no. 1 (2018): 1–12. Phillips, Jonathan, and Mike Horswell. “Introduction: Engaging the Crusades.” In Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the TwentyFirst Century, Mike Jorswell and Jonathan Phillips, 1:1–6. Engaging The Crusades. New York: Routledge, 2018. Rhodes, Hilary. “Medievalism, Imagination and Violence: The Function and Dysfunction of Crusader Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Political World.” In The Crusades in the Modern World, Mike Horswell and Akil N. Awan, 2:41–57. Engaging The Crusades. New York: Routledge, 2020. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. “Crusading as an Act of Love.” In The Crusades: The Essential Readings, Thomas F. Madden, 31–50. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Rossignoli, Claudia. “Playing the Afterlife: Dante’s Otherworlds in the Gaming Age.” Games and Culture 15, no. 7 (2020): 825–49. Rubenstein, Jay. “Miracles and the Crusading Mind: Monastic Meditations on Jerusalem’s Conquest.” In Prayer and Thought in

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Monastic Tradition, Samantha Bhattacharji, Dominic Mattos, Rowan Williams, 197–210. New York: T&T Clark, 2014. –––. Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Servitje, Lorenzo. “Digital Mortification of Literary Flesh: Computational Logistics and Violences of Remediation in Visceral Games’ ‘Dante’s Inferno.’” Games and Culture 9, no. 5 (2014): 368–88. Skottki, Kristin. “The Dead, the Revived and the Recreated Past: ‘Structural Amnesia’ in Representations of Crusade History.” In Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, Mike Horswell and Jonathan Phillips, 1:107–32. Engaging The Crusades. New York: Routledge, 2018. Stock, Lorraine K. “Now Starring in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and Television Series.” In Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and the ChristianMuslim Clashes, Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risen, 97–122. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. The Deeds of God through the Franks: A Translation of Guibert of Nogent’s Gesta Dei per Francos. Robert Levine. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997. Tyerman, Christopher. The Debate on the Crusades. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Walton, Brett. “God of War III Sales Pass One Million Units Worldwide.” VGChartz, 24 March 2010. www.vgchartz.com/article/ 7569/god-of-war-iii-sales-pass-one-million-units-worldwide/. Watt, Mary Alexandra. The Cross That Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. Weisl, Angela Jane, and Kevin J. Stevens. “The Middle Ages in the Depths of Hell: Pedagogical Possibility and the Past in ‘Dante’s Inferno.’” In Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline, 175–86. New York: Routledge, 2014. Welsh, Timothy J., and John T. Sebastian. “Shades of Dante: Virtual Bodies in Dante’s Inferno.” In Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline, 162–74. New York: Routledge, 2014. Zettl, Herbert. “Aesthetics Theory.” In Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, Ken Smith et al., 365–84. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.

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French Cultural Exception: When King Arthur Does Not Cross the Borders Justine Breton*

According to the medieval legend, King Arthur was born in Britain before ruling over a large part of Western Europe. In the twelfth century Historia Regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain],1 a prose text written in Latin which established many of the bases for the legend, Geoffrey of Monmouth insists on the importance of Arthur’s territorial expansion.2 While travelling with his army to conquer Rome, the heroic king is stopped in his progression and forced to return to his island to chastise his nephew who is trying to usurp his power. Even though Arthur’s European travels are interrupted in this work, most of the following stories about the king, written by various authors throughout centuries, took this expansion idea and gave Arthur a growing kingdom. The legend which had been formed since, through countless rewritings and adaptations, has followed the same path as Arthur himself. Since its literary origin, the Arthurian myth appears as a moving object, continuously developing and expanding to new territories. It was first popularised by British and French texts during the Middle Ages, especially by Chrétien de Troyes’ romances in the twelfth century and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur three centuries later. The influence of these works can easily be found in Germany, Italy, or Spain, which

Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (INSPE, CEREP), France. All non-English titles have been given their corresponding title in English in square brackets or, if unavailable, a literal translation by the author. 2 See Siân Echard (ed.), The Arthur of medieval Latin literature: the development and dissemination of the Arthurian legend in medieval Latin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). *

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shows how the stories about King Arthur were able to travel and conquer audiences all over medieval Europe. With the expansion of Western culture throughout the world, through the long processes of conquest, appropriation, and colonisation, the Arthurian legend also travelled. The nineth and twentieth centuries, particularly, saw the adoption of these stories by the United States, with artists and authors creating new possibilities for the medieval king. Arthur and his knights of the Round Table have become characters for authors like Mark Twain, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), or John Steinbeck in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), before being largely used by every other media in every part of Western culture: theatre, radio, movie, television, publicity, etc. It then seems to be the very nature of the Arthurian legend to cross borders and to be adapted to different contexts, which incidentally is what allowed it to survive in such various cultures since the Middle Ages. King Arthur travelled through most countries, and political regimes, being used to symbolise both strict Christianity and religious tolerance, both monarchy and republic. Today, it is fully and equally appropriated by English authors, French artists, and U.S. filmmakers, who all together contribute in creating a worldwide Arthur.3 Kaamelott is one of these hundreds of retellings of the legend, which, as always, is adapted for a contemporary audience. From 2005 to 2009, this French TV series created by Alexandre Astier – who also interprets the main role of King Arthur – was broadcasted daily on M6, the first private national television channel in France – currently the most profitable and the third most watched network in French-speaking countries. Moreover, since then, reruns of Kaamelott have been broadcasted almost each week on one of the channels of the M6 Group, including on the digital terrestrial channels W9 and 6ter, and on the digital cable channel Paris Première. Even though no new episodes have been released since 2009, the series thus benefits to this day from a large and more or less stable fanbase.4 The impressive success encountered by In a huge bibliography on Arthuriana, and especially on contemporary retellings of the legend, we can simply mention a few references here: Kevin J. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays (Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2010); William Blanc, Le roi Arthur: un mythe contemporain [King Arthur: a contemporary myth] (Paris: Libertalia editions, 2016). 4 On Kaamelott’s controversial fanbase, see Vincent Bilem, “Pourquoi tout le monde déteste-t-il les fans de Kaamelott?” [Why does everyone hate Kaamelott’s fans?]. Numerama 3

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the series since its beginning has generated a transmedia universe, with the adventures of King Arthur and his knights developed through comic books, created by Alexandre Astier and Steven Dupré.5 And after 12 years since the end of the series, Kaamelott continued its story in 2021 with the release in France of a feature film entitled Kaamelott Premier volet [Kaamelott First Part], which will be the first part of a long-awaited trilogy. As this sole creation shows, King Arthur keeps inspiring contemporary artists, each of whom develops his or her unique vision of the story. However, in developing its specific retelling of the legend, Kaamelott goes against a long tradition depicting a king easily appropriated by different countries and cultures, in order to limit this interpretation to a French audience. As its title twisting the name of Arthur’s famous castle Camelot already indicates, Kaamelott proposes a parodic retelling of the Arthurian legend. It depicts a depressed but well-meaning king with good teaching skills, forced into power and saddled with a team of good-for-nothing – but deeply endearing – knights. Here, the enchanter Merlin is reduced to failing magic tricks, the knights mostly flee dragons instead of fighting them, and the quest for the Holy Grail cannot progress, since the members of the Round Table do not understand what they are looking for. Alexandre Astier, creator and director of the series, follows the general framework of the legend: Arthur is king of Britain and brandishes the sword Excalibur, he is married to Guenièvre,6 a queen also loved by the knight Lancelot, etc. But Astier also modifies certain parts of the story, for narrative purposes – for example, in Kaamelott, Lancelot is progressively corrupted by the evil Méléagant –, or, to correspond to production requirements – Arthur shares the bed of many official and (June 20th, 2020), www.numerama.com/politique/631845-pourquoi-tout-le-mondedeteste-t-il-les-fans-de-kaamelott.html (accessed August 20, 2020). 5 To this day, nine volumes have been published by Casterman editions: L’Armée du nécromant [The Necromancer’s army] (2006), Les Sièges de transport [The transportation seats] (2007), L’Énigme du coffre [The enigma of the chest] (2008), Perceval et le dragon d’airain [Percival and the bronze dragon] (2009), Le Serpent géant du lac de l’ombre [The shadow lake giant serpent] (2010), Le Duel des mages [The magicians’ duel] (2011), Contre-attaque en Carmélide [Counterattack in Cameliard] (2013), L’Antre du basilic [The basilisk’s lair] (2018), and Les Renforts maléfiques [The evil reinforcements] (2020). A tenth volume, Karadoc et l’icosaèdre [Karadoc and the icosahedron], has already been announced. 6 For the names of the characters, we follow the spelling used in the production of Kaamelott, even when English equivalents exist (Guenièvre/Guinevere, etc.). 149

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unofficial mistresses, without jeopardising his power: it was a way for the creator to include more female characters in a famously male-dominated story, as requested by the series’ executive producers. Thus, the story is adapted to its context of creation and to its creator’s vision. While largely presented as a humorous program, Kaamelott ventures to a progressively more tragic tone. It is composed of 416 episodes each between 30min to 52min: the first seasons are made of short comedy episodes, while seasons 5 and 6, with their long-format episodes, deal with darker themes like betrayal, suicide, and child mortality. The genre of the series hence crosses the limits of traditional television categories, adding heavy drama into what is apparently a comedy show, and developing the humorous elements of a legend frequently reduced to its tragic outcome. With its ambiguous atmosphere and its way of retelling a well-known story through a myriad of literary and movie references, Kaamelott constitutes a pure product of contemporary Arthuriana and post-modern culture, embedded in a worldwide conception of geek culture.7 It comes within the scope of a large Western legend and gives its own unique vision of a story developed since the Middle Ages. However, the study of this TV series also suggests that Kaamelott is first and foremost a French program. Even if it is based on several Arthurian texts, be they medieval or contemporary rewritings, the influence of French sources remains the most important in Kaamelott, as suggested by the key narrative roles played by characters like Méléagant and Lancelot, which are loosely inspired by the Vulgate Cycle and Chrétien de Troyes’s Knight of the Cart. Only broadcasted in France and in French-speaking countries, for numerous reasons including translation issues and content exclusivity, the series appears to be a very personal work created by Alexandre Astier for the French audience. It is only turned to the rest of the world – especially to the rest of Western culture – with great difficulties, and despite its topic and tendency to borrow from all over the world, Kaamelott struggles with the idea of opening this Arthurian court to foreign audiences. This paper will discuss the relation between global influence and French exclusivity in Kaamelott, in order to see how both Western geek culture and a large medievalist tradition are packed and shaped in the TV series to accommodate the French audience – and only the French audience. 7

See David Peyron, Culture geek [Geek culture] (Paris: FYP Éditions, 2013). 150

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I. The Heir to a Multicultural Diachronic Legend In his parodic retelling of the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, director Alexandre Astier draws his inspiration from several Arthurian sources, with sometimes contradictory plots or character developments. While in several interviews, Kaamelott’s creator claimed that he did not conduct any particular research in order to write his version of the legend, the TV series clearly resonates with various influences from some of the most famous retellings of the legend. It goes on to show that Astier’s ideas on this medieval story were deeply rooted, either knowingly or unconsciously: the legend of King Arthur has become, through centuries of rewritings and artistic adaptations, part of a Western general knowledge. Kaamelott is the product of this shared culture. As most Arthurian TV shows or movies today, it presents strong links with Thomas Malory’s fifteenth century Le Morte d’Arthur, starting with the general nostalgic atmosphere and the tragic descent that Kaamelott proposes. Malory’s text has been extremely popular in Europe – and, subsequently, in most Western countries – since its publication and printed edition by William Caxton in 1485, which might explain the huge influence this text still has on Arthuriana to this day. It is also the first medieval rewriting of the legend to have an anthological ambition, thus presenting not only the story of Arthur from his conception to his demise, but also many peripheral stories centred on his most famous knights. In a similar perspective, Kaamelott is clearly focused on the story of King Arthur, from his political journey to his inner transformation, but it also gives an important place to several of his knights. Thus, famous heroes like Perceval, and lesser-known knights and lords, like Léodagan de Carmélide or Lionel de Gaunes, all get to play some part in the story. Alongside Arthur’s adventures, Kaamelott develops specific plots regarding these secondary characters, inspired by medieval tradition or created for the purposes of the show. The influence of Le Morte d’Arthur on Kaamelott can also be indirect, as suggested by the way in which Arthur is portrayed as an educational figure within his royal court. In this particular aspect, and without naming it, the TV series seems to draw some of its narrative elements from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a 1958 rewriting of Malory’s text which became particularly famous for being the first description of

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Arthur’s childhood.8 Kaamelott heavily relies on the idea of the king becoming a teacher to his knights and to all the members of his court, which is an essential part of White’s retelling. In numerous episodes, Arthur explains the principle of the quest for the Holy Grail or transmits basic combat techniques to his inexperienced knights.9 He also directly teaches classes about military equipment and manoeuvres, or about knightly values, to the younger members of the court.10 Even though the king sometimes lacks the patience to face his students’ limited abilities, he always insists on explaining situations and giving his knights a chance to learn, evolve and prove themselves. In Kaamelott, Arthur is concurrently a politician, a strategist, and an educator, and all these functions are presented as the different sides of the global vision of kingship, directly inherited from T.H. White’s version of the legend. The magical metamorphoses that constitute the basis for young Arthur’s education in The Sword in the Stone are not used in Kaamelott, but the TV series maintains the importance of magic in Arthur’s life and reign. While his enchanter Merlin is presented as a failure, Arthur himself wields some magical elements, such as the sword Excalibur, given from the Gods to help him rule over Britain and which is covered in flames when the king holds it,11 and his ring which can control metallic blades, inherited from a Roman emperor.12 These elements accentuate the fantasy tone of the TV series, as is frequent in contemporary audiovisual adaptations of the legend.13 Kaamelott enters into the long tradition of Arthurian rewritings, and, as such, it already has strong links to previous medievialist works. It sometimes shares a tendency to epic with great movies like the famous Excalibur (1981), and borrows some of its themes or images: in Kaamelott, as in John Boorman’s movie, Guenièvre leaves the king in order to join The first volume, The Sword in the Stone (1938), served as the basis for Walt Disney’s 1963 animated movie and popularised this version of Arthur’s childhood. 9 Kaamelott, season 1, episode 100, “La Vraie Nature du Graal” [The true nature of the Grail]; season 3, episode 89, “Les Auditeurs libres” [The auditors]; season 4, episode 25, “L’Échelle de Perceval” [Percival’s squale]; etc. 10 Ibidem, season 2, episode 71, “Le Pédagogue” [The teacher]. 11 Ibidem, season 2, episode 52, “Excalibur et le Destin” [Excalibur and Destiny]. 12 Ibidem, season 6, episode 6, “Nuptiae” [Nuptials]. 13 See our study Le Roi qui fut et qui sera. Représentations du pouvoir arthurien sur petit et grand écrans [The Once and Future King. Images of Arthurian power in movies and television] (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). 8

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Lancelot in the forest, to enjoy a bucolic, even if brief, adventure. Both Boorman and Astier apply the motif of Tristan’s and Iseult’s adultery in the woods to the relationship between Lancelot and Guenièvre, and in both cases Arthur plays the part of a more mindful and realistic King Mark. These two adaptations, largely focused on the character of Arthur, do not present him as a fool and a cuckold, but as a betrayed man. Kaamelott even goes further in ensuring its hero’s central role: in Astier’s version, Guenièvre only leaves him when she catches him cheating with the wife of one of his knights, Mevanwi.14 Even though this Arthur has countless mistresses, his own laws forbid him from sleeping with a married woman, and Guenièvre herself feels betrayed by the king’s behaviour. As a consequence, it is only after being not only cheated on, but essentially replaced by another woman, that Guenièvre decides to leave Arthur and his court, in order to join Lancelot, who confessed his love for her earlier in the season. Together, they elope in the woods, while Arthur officially weds his new and formerly married conquest.15 Kaamelott thus uses the Tristan and Iseult motif, but complexifies it, as a way to present Arthur not as a fool – like King Mark –, but as an involuntary villain actively destroying his own court. The tragedy feels much more powerful with the character sabotaging himself, instead of being the unaware victim of someone else’s love. As we can see, this interpretation of the Arthurian legend shares traditional elements with previous movies and texts, but it presents them in a much more disabused way. Since Kaamelott was first introduced to the French audience as a short-format comedy, it has frequently been compared to another famous Arthurian parody: Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones’ Monty Python and the Holy Grail, released in 1975. The media quickly acclaimed Alexandre Astier a faithful successor to the spirit of the Monty Python, and dubbed Kaamelott the French version of their absurd retelling of the legend. Indeed, both Kaamelott and Monty Python and the Holy Grail depict the king and a handful of knights, engaged in an improbable quest for the Holy Grail that they do not fully understand. Each adaptation is filled with eccentric characters, from the “scientist” knight Bedevere for the Monty Python to the glutton Karadoc for Astier; and each group is somehow led by a charismatic King Arthur, who, despite his obvious weaknesses – one is literally unable to count to three, the other is afraid 14 15

Kaamelott, season 3, episode 100, “La Dispute, 2e partie” [The quarrel]. Ibidem, season 4, episodes 23 and 24, “L’Échange” [The exchange], parts 1 and 2. 153

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of snakes and of the dark – is the uncontested hero of the story. Both stories give the appearance of the Middle Ages and play on traditional stereotypes of the period, be it the cart of the dead in the plague-ridden village, or the frequent and barbaric torture which is considered a natural process in justice, for example. Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Kaamelott both insist on the dirtiness and the ignorance of peasants, and on the inflated feeling of superiority of the knights. The French TV series went further than a mere general resemblance, and proposed a brief and direct reference to the Monty Python movie in one of its episodes: as King Arthur is teaching military equipment and strategies to his pages and young knights, he is interrupted by Perceval, a naïve member of his Round Table, who attends the class, but does not understand that the catapult-replica hold by Arthur as an example is “only a model,” to quote the squire Patsy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The boundary between representation and reality is blurred for the character, just as in the British movie the king and his knights choose to blur this distinction. In a famous sequence, while they are “riding” to Camelot,16 King Arthur in the Monty Python movie is glad to welcome his knights to his castle, before being interrupted by his squire who reveals that the huge castle seen in the distance is only a painted prop, used in the production of the movie to give the illusion of a castle. Even though the purpose is different in each adaptation, they share this integration and revelation of the model as a way to play on fiction and reality. Moreover, both Kaamelott and Monty Python and the Holy Grail develop their Arthurian fiction through contemporary language and vocabulary, thus giving a very vivid and modern atmosphere to their story. Like all medievalist works, Kaamelott is a product of its own time before being a reflexive piece on the Middle Ages. Besides language, this is suggested by the fact that Alexandre Astier also includes in his TV series brief references to our contemporary situation, even though these remain limited. For example, after refusing to use the death penalty on prisoners, King Arthur thinks he can predict the future and states that this punishment is barbaric and will soon be abolished by civilised populations. The Western audience is here clearly tempted to see a Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an Arthurian movie famously deprived of horses, except for the brief scene of the historian’s murder. Instead, Arthur and his knights pretend to ride horses, mimicking the gestures of a rider while on foot, and their servants and pages bang two halves of coconut together to recreate the sound of horses galloping. 16

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reference to the political situation of the United States, in which many states still apply the death penalty to this day. Kaamelott differs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this matter, since Monty Python remained much more discrete on their political references in this movie – as opposed to their work on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for example. And even though both works started with a relatively low budget, Kaamelott seems to have exceeded its first ambitions: after six seasons and a growing TV-format, it is currently developed through comic books, movies, and a few derivative products, like two history books entitled Kaamelott: Au Coeur du Moyen Âge [Kaamelott: Inside the Middle Ages], and the printed edition of the episodes’ scripts. While the Monty Python moved forward after their Arthurian movie – especially because the production and directing of The Holy Grail was a huge disaster for them –, Astier exploits the Arthurian material to tell a much longer story. Additionally, the parallel frequently entertained by French media between Kaamelott and Monty Python and the Holy Grail fails to highlight the key creative difference between them. Indeed, the British movie is the result of a collective work, born from six equal writers – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin –, two contrasting directors – Gilliam and Jones –, and one animator for the numerous cut-out sequences – Gilliam. Even though this creative structure may have implied conflict between the group, especially during the filming of the movie, the finished result is a collective production. This shared and cooperative artistic process strongly differs from the creation of Kaamelott, which despite being an important TV series in terms of length and ambition is largely the result of one autonomous creator. II. A Series Born From a Singular Mind Even if Kaamelott’s production was influenced in its early stages by marketing directives, as mentioned earlier, it remains the outcome of one singular vision. Alexandre Astier put into the series an important part of himself, incorporating into the Arthurian legend elements he liked from other universes – and never mind if this mix resulted in obvious anachronism: the very principle of telling this medieval story through contemporary language allowed for a free play on temporality. Thus, interestingly, Kaamelott’s influences go beyond Arthuriana. Several episodes give clear references to fantasy works, such as the one entitled 155

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“Le Retour du Roi”17 [The Return of the King], following the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s third volume of The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955); or such as the episode “Arthur et les Ténèbres”18 [Arthur and Darkness] in which Arthur and his knights enter a dungeon to fight skavens, humanoid-rat creatures developed by the game Warhammer (1983). The characters frequently explore labyrinths and secret tunnels, reproducing the adventures proposed in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, even though in Kaamelott the actual exploration often results in failing quests. The TV series regularly nods to American and geek culture. For instance, during one of his missions, the knight Perceval brings back a light-sabre found on a mysterious sand-covered planet with two suns, in an obvious cross-over with the Star Wars universe.19 Alexandre Astier used Kaamelott as a way to reference things that he loves, including science-fiction texts, movies, and TV series. Following this principle, he proposed an episode paralleling the TV show Stargate SG-1, where the Lady of the Lake creates a circular stargate inside the royal court.20 However, Kaamelott is a comedy series before being an action-adventure one: here, the stellar portal does not lead to extraterrestrial planets, but to the castle’s courtyard and henhouse. The sci-fi attempt is quickly distorted by parody, in order to keep the focus on the down-to-earth adventures of Arthur and his knights. The result is that Kaamelott is a melting-pot of references, which mostly come from the director’s own interests. Alexandre Astier is not only a self-proclaimed geek,21 but he also grew up in the theatre world, and this heritage is made obvious in several of Kaamelott’s episodes.22 Hence, a two-part episode is entitled “Tous les matins du monde,”23 [All the mornings of the world] using the title of a 1991 play by Pascal Quignard, while other ones reference the play Cuisine et Dépendances [Cooking and Dependences] (1991), Kaamelott, season 5, episode 49, “Le Retour du Roi” [The return of the king]. Ibidem, season 1, episode 41, “Arthur et les Ténèbres” [Arthur and Darkness]. 19 Ibidem, season 3, episode 43, “Stargate II”. 20 Ibidem, season 2, episode 68, “Stargate”. 21 See the documentary Suck my Geek!, directed by T. Schulmann and X. Sayanoff (2007). 22 On Kaamelott’s inherently theatrical structure, see our paper “[Son du cor] Les marges de Kaamelott” [Horn sound: Kaamelott’s margins], in L’art des génériques [Télévision], [TV’s art of credits], eds. R. Hamus-Vallée and A. Vuillaume-Tylski, review CIRCAV n° 28, University of Lille (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019): 165-182. 23 Kaamelott, season 4, episodes 1 and 2, “Tous les Matins du monde” [All the mornings of the world], parts 1 and 2. 17 18

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written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri,24 or William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing25 (1600). As a clear product of geek and postmodern culture, and claimed as such, Kaamelott is an international object, born from numerous Western sources from different time periods, mixed together to form a new and original work. For this reason, Kaamelott appears to be both very familiar to the audience, since it is based on a well-known medieval legend and takes its inspiration from a shared global culture; and incredibly new, since it is presented in an original way, through parody and in a contemporary retelling. Put together, these various references do not make any sense, except that they all reveal certain parts of Alexandre Astier’s personal ethos and taste. As such, Kaamelott becomes a selective reflection of the early21st century Western culture, given through the prism of its creator’s likes and dislikes. Even though it is aimed at a wide French audience, this TV series remains a very personal work and the result of Astier’s own vision. It is necessary to focus on the director of the show to understand the particular outcome that is Kaamelott. Alexandre Astier is not a medievalist, nor has he any particular interest in the Middle Ages or in history – unlike, once again, certain members of the Monty Python, such as Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Kaamelott started as a 14-minute short film entitled Dies Irae [the day of wrath], presented in 2003 to several festivals, where it obtained four different prizes. It was directed by Astier and produced by Acting Studio, and it brought together many of the people that would eventually be a part of the Kaamelott adventure. For example, most characters of Dies Irae were unchanged in the TV series, with the same actors taking their roles back: Alexandre Astier was already playing King Arthur, Jacques Chambon was already Merlin, etc. Even though many aspects were developed and a few parts were changed, Kaamelott is the expansion of Dies Irae, and not a separate production. To create Dies Irae, and then the TV series, Astier gathered a group of friends and relatives, people he could trust and direct as he wanted. This “family-atmosphere” of Kaamelott has often been described and commented on, but let us only mention that most of Astier’s close nuclear family played a part in this show. Besides the part of Arthur, interpreted by Astier himself, the role of Léodagan, Arthur’s father-inIbidem, season 3, episode 57, “Cuisine et Dépendances” [Cooking and Dependences]. Ibidem, season 4, episode 73, “Beaucoup de bruit pour rien” [Much ado about nothing]. 24 25

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law, is played by his father, Lionnel Astier; Arthur’s mother-in-law is played by Alexandre’s mother, Joëlle Sevilla; Arthur’s mother is played by Alexandre’s step-mother; Arthur’s brother-in-law is played by Alexandre’s step-brother; and we could keep on enumerating these examples. Indeed, Astier also had his own children be a part of Kaamelott, with Jeanne and Ariane Astier playing Mehben and Mehgan, the daughters of one of the knights; Neil Astier playing a young Arthur in a flashback sequence; and Ethan Astier playing an imaginary son that Arthur dreams about. All these choices blur the frontier between the character of King Arthur and the creator Alexandre Astier. This personal environment extends behind the scenes, since Astier also had his family and friends be a part of the creation and production of Kaamelott: AnneGaëlle Daval, for example, is the mother of several of his children and was the chief costume designer on Dies Irae and the following TV series. Of course, not every role was attributed to a close relative, and important jobs were also given to professional technicians or actors. The essential part of Guenièvre, for example, was distributed to Anne Girouard through a casting process. In its writing and in its themes, Kaamelott corresponds to the specific vision of its creator, Alexandre Astier, who directed every episode and wrote most of them over a span of six years. During this time, he also wrote the first comic books inspired from the show. Since he has a musical training, Astier also decided to write, compose and perform the music of Kaamelott. It includes songs for its opening and closing credits, which are different for every season, but also background music, which becomes more and more important from the fifth season. The only exception lies in the last sequence of Kaamelott,26 since its theme, composed by Raymond Lefebvre, was inspired by the 1971 movie Jo, directed by Jean Girault. In this sequence, the character of Arthur, now deprived of his royal title and exiled to Rome, finds the villa in which he used to be happy with his first wife,27 before becoming king of Britain and paradoxically losing everything he ever loved. It is a nostalgic sequence, in which, for the first time, Arthur remembers the time he extracted the sword Excalibur from the rock as a child, and during which Ibidem, season 6, episode 9, “Dies Irae” [The day of wrath]. By creating a first wife for Arthur in Rome, Astier revives the mysterious 12th century Glastonbury inscription on King Arthur’s supposed tomb, which indicates that he lies with Guinevere, “uxore sua secunda”, “his second wife”. 26 27

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he finds the courage to fight again for his throne – a long-awaited sequel developed in 2021 in the first feature film Kaamelott. This choice of musical reference is not insignificant in the story of the TV series and its creator. Indeed, the movie Jo was centred on the character of Antoine Brisebard, a comedy writer interpreted by French actor Louis de Funès (1914-1983), of whom Astier is a huge admirer. In the final images of the TV series, Alexandre Astier even dedicated Kaamelott to Louis de Funès, thus highlighting the common points between them. Both are seen as jacks-of-all-trades full of energy and dedicated to their work, sometimes at the cost of their personal and professional relationships. Indeed, like Louis de Funès, Alexandre Astier is known in his professional world as a demanding man. As a director and a writer, he organises his scenes like a conductor with his orchestra.28 It is one of the reasons why Kaamelott is such a personal creation: it is the result of Astier’s mind, before being a retelling of the Arthurian legend. From a narrative point of view, both Astier and de Funès share a deep interest in ordinary French characters, that is to say, middle-class male characters with a short temper and a tendency to grumble and complain – basically everything that gives a bad reputation to French tourists. Kaamelott’s King Arthur corresponds to this definition: even though he is smarter than most of the other characters in the show, and even though he is selected by the gods to lead Britain and find the Grail, he remains a fallible character, prone to fits of passion and depressive states. Through the model of Louis de Funès, King Arthur becomes in Kaamelott a wellmeaning but failing hero, the result of a disillusioned 21st century who has to keep on fighting but cannot succumb to past utopian dreams. III. Make It as French as Possible While Kaamelott borrows to a great extent from a global and diachronic culture, and even though it is yet another reiteration of a shared Western legend, it is clearly aimed at – and restricted to – a French-speaking audience, following the principle of French Cultural Exception. This expression of “Cultural Exception” refers to a political concept born and developed in France in 1993, during the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations, as a way to consider cultural productions and Kaamelott, un livre d’histoire [Kaamelott, a history book] ], eds. Florian Besson and Justine Breton (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2018). 28

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works as objects different from commercial products.29 It implies protectionist measures to help local culture and limit the diffusion of foreign artistic works within a specific country. The idea is for one country to protect and promote its own culture, artists, and authors, before foreign ones, and it has been adopted – as a whole or partially – by several countries since. France, which has been particularly active on this topic since the 1990s, implemented, for example, an audiovisual law that requires television channels and radios to broadcast a large number of French productions. But airing time is not unlimited: as a direct consequence, this law reduces the part of foreign audiovisual imports, especially from the United States, which remains the first exporter of movies into Europe. This policy has regularly been seen as a series of chauvinistic measures, which keeps the French audience from most of foreign culture, and which in turn depreciates French creation by forcing it to evolve in a close environment. However, despite the laws developed through the concept of French Cultural Exception, the French audiovisual market remains largely dominated by American productions to this day,30 and cultural products from most European, as well as nonEuropean, countries still find a receptive audience in France. But for audiovisual creations, this foreign culture is mostly brought to France through translation: movies and TV series are almost systematically translated into French before being made available to the audience, be it in cinemas or for TV and multimedia release. Other countries adopt different strategies to diffuse foreign culture. The French movie Intouchables (2011) was, for example, remade several times to be adapted to other countries, including India – Oopiri (2016) –, Argentina – Inseparables (2016), the United States – The Upside (2019) – and South Korea – Man of Men (2019) –, each time with small variations in the story. Others easily broadcast foreign movies in their original language, but add subtitles in their local language, like Scandinavian countries. But France Sarah Walkey, Cultural Diversity in The French Film Industry: Defending the Cultural Exception in a Digital Age (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 30 See the data established each year by the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image animée (CNC): “Fréquentation des salles de cinéma en 2019” [Cinema visits in 2019], www.cnc.fr/professionnels/actualites/frequentation-des-salles-de-cinema-en-2019--deu xieme-plus-haut-niveau-depuis-53-ans--2133-millions-dentrees-en-2019_1104665#:~:te xt=Source%20%3A%20CNC.,des%20200%20millions%20d'entr%C3%A9es. (accessed August 20, 2020). 29

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currently has a very shut cultural strategy, which favours French productions and French translations.31 This restricted linguistic atmosphere partly explains the limited diffusion of Kaamelott outside of France. The TV series has trouble opening itself up to foreign audiences. Despite Kaamelott’s important success in France and French-speaking countries, especially Belgium and Quebec,32 it is not broadcasted in other countries, nor has it been adapted for different cultures. Following the release of the final seasons in France, several attempts have been made in European countries to translate the show. However, Alexandre Astier’s desire to remain at the heart of his creation, including abroad, became an issue in the translation process. For example, while adaptors and translators have suggested changing the title of the “Unagi” episodes in order to propose something more understandable for their own audience, Astier has always refused.33 As he explained repeatedly in different interviews, his purpose is not to make the show understandable or appropriate, but to tell his own story, the way he wants to. These episodes show the knights Perceval and Karadoc developing and practicing personal fighting techniques, all more absurd than the last – including attacking their opponents with dead leaves or a fennel. The Japanese word “unagi” designates a freshwater eel, a translation which apparently bears no resemblance with the knights’ attempts to develop weaponless martial techniques; but it is also a direct reference to a famous episode of the TV series Friends, in which Ross claims to have superior reactivity and ability to adapt to danger.34 Eager to maintain his own vision, Astier refused to have the show translated if it was not a literal translation – which to this day has always provoked rejection from foreign producers, thus limiting Kaamelott to French-speaking audiences. Moreover, other efforts have been made to adapt this Arthurian TV series to other countries, with completely new actors and production On audiovisual translations, see Yves Gambier, “La traduction audiovisuelle: un genre en expansion” [Audiovisual translation: an expanding genre]. Meta 49, (April 2004): 1-11. 32 Special edition DVDs were created for Quebec and released a few years after the French ones: 2005-2009 for the first DVD release in France, 2009-2011 for the Quebec edition. 33 Kaamelott, season 1, episode 93, “Unagi”; season 2, episode 57, “Unagi II”; season 3, episode 16, “Unagi III”; season 4, episode 51, “Unagi IV”; and season 5, episode 39, “Unagi V”. 34 Friends, season 6, episode 17, “The One with the Unagi”. 31

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teams. But, once again, incompatibilities ensued: for instance, an Italian project was rejected when Astier refused the actor chosen to play Arthur in this new version. As he explained, this refusal was narratively justified: during the fifth season of Kaamelott, Arthur abandons his throne to travel across Britain in search of his secret children, supposedly born from his numerous mistresses – before finding none and sinking into depression. Nevertheless, the Italian project had selected a much older actor to play the lead role, thus questioning Arthur’s existential crisis and his middleaged need for descendance. If this reason can be justified, it remains that no other adaptation gained Astier’s approval along the years. This inability of the creator to let Kaamelott exist outside of himself can also be a reminder of Louis de Funès’ famed need for control in his work; similarly, Astier insists on maintaining a stranglehold over his TV series, and he cleverly put himself in a position where he is able to manage both his creation and its aftermath. As a result, Kaamelott has yet to expand beyond the limits of French-speaking countries. This process of favouring a French interpretation is also visible in the choice of sources to write this retelling of the Arthurian legend. As mentioned earlier, Kaamelott uses different source material, including medieval texts and modern rewritings of the legend. But this medievalist TV series seems to condense an important part of Arthuriana in order to present and deliver it to the sole French audience. Indeed, the French origin of the myth is highlighted, whereas most of the British characteristics of King Arthur and his knights are erased. For example, the historical ambition of the story is reduced: as a parody supposedly set in the fifth century, but depicting characters in full body armour typical of the fifteenth century, Kaamelott mixes the time periods and does not pretend to any historical truth, as did, for example, medieval texts like Geoffrey of Montmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. It equally integrates historical elements – the fall of the Roman Empire, for example – and supernatural ones – like the importance of fairies and magical creatures –, following a tradition closer to Chrétien de Troyes. Indeed, even though Astier is clearly influenced by an Anglophone culture, the French medieval sources are essential in his retelling of the legend. The love affair between Lancelot and the Queen, strongly embedded in the Arthurian tradition and born in Chrétien de Troyes’ Knight of the Cart, plays a central role in the story of Kaamelott: It is depicted from the end of the third season and, even though it is short-lived during 162

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the fourth season, it has deep consequences throughout the rest of the show. Astier draws characters and episodes from a well-known and global Arthurian legend, but he also includes elements from specific French texts. The knight Yvain, dubbed “the Knight of the Lion” and inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’ famous work, becomes more important in this retelling, since Yvain is described as Guenièvre’s brother, and thus King Arthur’s brother-in-law. The same goes for the characters of the knight Karadoc and the enchanter Élias, respectively inspired from the characters of Carados Briefbras and Eliavrès, from the French Vie de Caradoc [Life of Caradoc], a text included in the First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval. Unlike Lancelot, Perceval, or other knightly characters who achieved posterity and can now be found in most Arthurian retellings, Yvain is very rarely depicted, and characters like Karadoc/Carados or Élias/Eliavres are completely absent from other Arthurian audiovisual adaptations. Through the inclusion and development of these characters – Karadoc, especially, even becomes King of Britain in this version –, Kaamelott accentuates the importance of French medieval sources in its parodic interpretation of the legend. Furthermore, this TV series takes part in the French tradition of Arthurian disillusionment, which is not limited to the Middle Ages but is made obvious by contemporary adaptations of the myth. Fantasy images are developed within Kaamelott, but they are always included into a more realistic and disenchanted setting. Here, the happily-ever-after does not seem to be an option, as most characters progressively realise the extent of their own limits – their failures, their tendency to self-destruction, their mortality. In Kaamelott, the Lady of the Lake is eventually banned from her celestial universe because of her failure to guide Arthur to the Grail,35 before being utterly rejected by the ungrateful king.36 In the same way, both Merlin and Anton, two father-figures to Arthur, feel abandoned by him.37 When knight after knight leave the castle of Camelot to form their own clan – or their own rival army, as does Lancelot –, Arthur finds himself alone and settles in a downward spiral emphasised by the evil Méléagant. Season 5 culminates in Arthur’s attempted suicide,38 while the Kaamelott, season 4, episode 28, “La Révoquée” [The revoked]. Ibidem, season 5, episode 12, “La Roche et le Fer” [The roc and the sword]. 37 Ibidem, season 5, episode 9, “La Démission” [The resignation], and episode 45, “Anton.” 38 Ibidem, season 5, episode 50, “La Rivière souterraine” [The underground river]. 35 36

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following and final season shows how Lancelot rises to power and implements authoritarian measures.39 Hence, despite the clear influence of British texts, Kaamelott rewrites the Arthurian legend in a disenchanted way that is typical of French cinema. Movies such as Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac [Lancelot of the Lake] (1974) and Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois [Perceval the Welshman] (1978), through very different approaches, both follow this idea of a disillusioned medieval past.40 These works largely insist on the reality of the legend and on its tragic aspects: Rohmer adapts Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, the Story of the Grail, which is unfinished and thus presents the never-ending quest of Perceval for the eluding Holy Grail; while Bresson focuses on Lancelot’s active destruction of the Round Table because of his love for Guenièvre and his inability to find the Grail. The notion of fault – at least in a personal perspective, if not in a biblical one – is at the root of these French rewritings of the Arthurian legend. Heroes are not all-powerful but fail in their mission, mostly because of their own mistakes and character flaws. Kaamelott follows the same principle. Even if the destruction of the kingdom is partly orchestrated by Méléagant, Arthur clearly appears responsible for a large part of his own tragedy. The TV series insists on Arthur’s realisation of his fault and his progressive understanding of his mistakes. The fifth and sixth seasons of the show develop the important reflexivity of the main character, who seems lost in his own legend. Fuelled with geek references and influences from a large Western diachronic culture, Kaamelott is a clear product of our contemporary postmodern era. This approach fits perfectly with the subject of the Arthurian legend, which is in itself a multicultural object developed in different countries and over several centuries. The TV series adapts the story of Arthur and his knights of the Round Table to our twenty-first century in a disillusioned and parodic way, which aims at both laughter and thought on matters like the human condition, the issue of legacy and descendance, and the true nature of power. As such, it corresponds Ibidem, season 6, episode 9, “Dies Irae”. Joan Tasker Grimbert, “Lancelot du Lac: Robert Bresson’s Arthurian Realism”, The Holy Grail on Film: Essays on the Cinematic Quest, ed. Kevin J. Harty (Jefferson: McFarland and co. inc., 2015), 37-49; and Joseph Marty, Perceval le Gallois, film d’Éric Rohmer, ou une solution esthétique donnée au problème de la representation d’une quête spiriturelle [Perceval the Welshman, a movie by Éric Rohmer, or an aesthetical solution given to the issue of representing a spiritual quest], doctoral thesis (University of Montpellier 3, 1984). 39 40

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perfectly to the long tradition of neo-medievalist works, which are always a reflection of their own time of creation more than of the Middle Ages themselves.41 As we saw, it is also typical of a French way of claiming the Arthurian tradition, by strongly highlighting narrative elements born and developed in French medieval sources, which are often erased or neglected in contemporary Anglophone adaptations of the myth. By doing so, Alexandre Astier defends a French but also a very personal version of the legend. While wanting to maintain control over a creation and a subject that inherently tend towards foreign expansion, Astier consequently limits his interpretation of the legend to a select French audience, who thus benefits from a diversity of sources without sharing it with the world.

Bibliography Astier, Alexandre. Kaamelott. TV series. France: M6 and CALT Productions, 2005-2009. Besson, Florian and Breton, Justine, eds. Kaamelott, un livre d’histoire [Kaamelott, a history book]. Paris: Vendémiaire, 2018. Bilem, Vincent. “Pourquoi tout le monde déteste-t-il les fans de Kaamelott?” [Why does everyone hate Kaamelott’s fans?]. Numerama, June 20th, 2020, www.numerama.com/politique/631845-pourquoitout-le-monde-deteste-t-il-les-fans-de-kaamelott.html (accessed Aug. 20, 2020). Blanc, William. Le roi Arthur: un mythe contemporain [King Arthur: a contemporary myth]. Paris: Libertalia editions, 2016. Breton, Justine. Le Roi qui fut et qui sera. Représentations du pouvoir arthurien sur petit et grand écrans [The Once and Future King. Images of Arthurian power in movies and television]. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. Breton, Justine. “[Son du cor] Les marges de Kaamelott” [Horn sound: Kaamelott’s margins]. In L’art des génériques [Télévision], [TV’s art of

Among a long list of publications on the topic, see, for instance, the recent work of KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones, Medievalism, vol. XVI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019); and Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 41

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credits], eds. Réjane Hamus-Vallée and Alexandre Vuillaume-Tylski, 165-182. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019. Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image animée (CNC). “Fréquentation des salles de cinéma en 2019” [Cinema visits in 2019]. www.cnc.fr/professionnels/actualites/frequentation-des-salles-decinema-en-2019--deu xieme-plus-haut-niveau-depuis-53-ans--2133millions-dentrees-en-2019_1104665#:~:text=Source%20%3A%20 CNC.,des%20200%20millions%20d'entr%C3%A9es. (accessed Aug. 20, 2020). Echard, Siân, ed. The Arthur of medieval Latin literature: the development and dissemination of the Arthurian legend in medieval Latin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Fitzpatrick, KellyAnn. Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones, Medievalism, vol. XVI. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019. Gambier, Yves. “La traduction audiovisuelle: un genre en expansion” [Audiovisual translation: an expanding genre]. Meta 49 (April 2004): 1-11. Grimbert, Joan Tasker. “Lancelot du Lac: Robert Bresson’s Arthurian Realism.” In The Holy Grail on Film: Essays on the Cinematic Quest, ed. Kevin J. Harty, 37-49. Jefferson: McFarland and co. inc., 2015. Harty, Kevin J., ed. Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2010. Kaufman, Amy S. and Sturtevant, Paul B. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Marty, Joseph. Perceval le Gallois, film d’Éric Rohmer, ou une solution esthétique donnée au problème de la représentation d’une quête spiriturelle [Perceval the Welshman, a movie by Éric Rohmer, or an aesthetical solution given to the issue of representing a spiritual quest], doctoral thesis. University of Montpellier 3, 1984. Peyron, David. Culture geek [Geek culture]. Paris: FYP Éditions, 2013. Schulmann, Tristan and Sayanoff, Xavier. Suck my Geek!. Documentary. France: Canal+, 2007. Walkey, Sarah. Cultural Diversity in The French Film Industry: Defending the Cultural Exception in a Digital Age. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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The Witcher: Visions of a Shifting Europe Meg Feller*

I. Introduction At times, Slavic folklore, at times, Celtic, Arthurian, or even Quixotian, the Witcher franchise has captured a global audience with its neo-medieval fantasy about a professional monster-slayer. The original concept has undergone a rigorous journey of adaptation, from short story to novel to videogame series, and recently to a series on Netflix. The curious episode in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015),1 titled “Family Matters” takes players through a harrowing ordeal in which Geralt must deal with a botchling, a demonic aborted fetus restored to life as a kind of revenant.2 While the novels and the first two games engage with similar themes explored here, the botchling incident crystallizes how becoming Geralt offers players a coping mechanism for post-Soviet malaise.3 Tomasz Z. Majkowsky illuminates the complex relationships between Poland and its neighbouring countries, further exploring how Wild Hunt reflects the country’s complicated history of fracture and colonization. Louisiana State University (English Department, LSU), United States of America. From this point forward, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) will be referred to simply as Wild Hunt. 2 Andrej Sapkowski published the first materials of The Witcher Saga in 1990. The first two videogames CD Projekt Red distributed were The Witcher (2007) and The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011). 3 Post-Soviet Malaise refers to feelings of unease felt in East Europe following the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a cultural zeitgeist in line with the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, distrust of the government, and austerity politics. Simona Guerra articulates this phenomenon in more depth in relation to Poland’s joining the European Union in “Distrust Unbound: What next after Joining the EU,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 3 (2016): 233–41. *

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In “Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia,” Majkowsky argues that, although Wild Hunt incorporates Polish culture and folklore, the game narrative perpetuates “an elitist aspect of Polish culture: the idea that Slavs should be governed by an elevated, Western-educated elite.”4 Polish representation resides primarily in the game’s superstitious peasants and folkloric monsters. Majkowsky invites further inquiry into player-avatar relations, a gap which Olga Kalashnikova has begun to fill with an inquiry into the political choices of Russian-speaking players. At the 2021 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, Kalashnikova presented supplemental research indicating that Russian-speaking players of Wild Hunt more frequently aligned themselves with the Niilfgaardian Empire – 67% of the survey sample. These tended to be the players with more progressive views.5 In Wild Hunt, the Niilfgaardian Empire allows for a diverse, inclusive State, albeit one in which Temeria – or Poland, by Majkowsky’s reading – becomes a vassal state under Niilfgaardian rule. Wild Hunt captures the pressure of Western hegemony, an alliance of nations whose economies have known significant advantages above those in post-Soviet territories.6 My work continues in the vein of this political allegory, looking primarily at that which haunts the avatar, Geralt of Rivia, and resonates so strongly with a global audience. Geralt’s character opens a window into the Polish national identity, albeit an essentialized one torn between its own cultural story and the Western European authority over East Europe.7 Wild Hunt takes place See Tomasz Z. Majkowski, “Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia,” Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 1 (2018): 22. 5 Analyzing language used on DTF.RU, a popular gaming forum for Russian speakers, Olga Kalishnikova observed that players equated the Niilfgaardian empire with “military violence, cultural coercion, cumbersome bureaucracy, multiculturalism, and tolerance.” “Empires in Witcher 3: Medieval Tropes, Historical Authenticity, and Players’ Reception of Imagined Politics,” Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds: Climates, July 5-9, 2021. Leeds, UK: Institute for Medieval Studies. 6 See Bogdan Mroz’s findings on the economic disadvantage Poland experienced following its independence from the USSR. “Poland’s Economy in Transition to Private Ownership,” Soviet 4

Studies 43, no. 4 (1991): 677–88. 7 There is a

tendency in postcolonial studies to essentialize Poles as the subjugated victims of an imperial homogenous West, a trend that ignores the diversity and unique qualities and political systems of Western powers as well as the diverse political and cultural beliefs within Poland itself. Without reproducing the generalizing tendency of a postcolonial lens, I occasionally rely upon essentialized terms such as “Slavic” or “Western” as they 168

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in a neo-medieval realm plagued by a variety of specters, allegorical and literal, specters that speak to anxieties surrounding the remainders of communism, its broken promise, and its lingering potential. The many realms of neo-medievalism emerging in the cultural imagination have become a landscape upon which to raise cultural concerns about the Western legacy. As Umberto Eco expounds in his essay, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” we continue to revive the Middle Ages because “all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, checks, and prime rate)” (64). Something about looking back toward the beginning of things imbues our modern interpretations of the world with renewed authority. Critics such as Helen Young have articulated how medievalism is used to authenticate colonial attitudes around the ownership of territory and national identity. Young argues that “countries like Australia and the United States were founded on firm belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority,” pointing to anachronistic examples of medieval architecture as a means of rewriting a country as an early Western European settlement (42). The incredible influence of Wild Hunt, which since its debut in 2015, has sold over 28.3 million copies worldwide and amassed a sales revenue of 2.1 billion zloty,8 brings East Europe to the forefront of an anglophone videogame market. The success of Wild Hunt provokes questions around its application to contemporary tensions. If neo-medieval spaces act as a place in which we rewrite the origins of our nation-state, we must examine what specters emerge and how they are exorcised. When players engage a videogame matrix, they insert their own subjectivities into the shell of the avatar, but, regardless of how one plays Geralt of Rivia, the character possesses some core traits that make up his identity and speak to post-Soviet assimilation. Geralt of Rivia is a monster-hunter, but he is first and foremost a monster himself. Witchers undergo a dangerous process of mutation to attain their superhuman powers. The various witcher schools take young children, feed them take on an allegorical life of their own in Wild Hunt to articulate tensions around cultural preservation and political independence. 8 Data collected from CD Projekt Red, “Distribution of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Unit Sales Worldwide from 2015 to 2020, by Distribution Format,” Statista, Statista Inc., April 22, 2021, https://www-statista-com.cmu.idm.oclc.org/statistics/523901/witcher-3-unit -sales-share-worldwide-distribution-format/. 169

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toxic herbs, and the ones who survive go into the wilderness to kill monsters and prove their mettle. They grow up studying the habits, strengths, and weaknesses of various creatures, professionalizing themselves so they can sell their service of removing unwanted beasts. Poachers or animal control might provide a real-world parallel here, but the witchers’ bodies have been irrevocably altered. Their aging process slows. Their sense of smell rivals that of a bloodhound. They are immune to all disease. And they are rendered sterile. The Witcher contains the player experience within the bounds of the straight, white, cisgender, male body – albeit labelled Other within the narrative. What I contend here is that the plight of the witcher resonates strongly with the generation of Poles who feel alienated within their own country. The witcher’s sterility connotes the death of the Polish legacy, which has been assaulted by the media influences of other countries. Geralt fulfills a certain picture of Othering within a white identity that is deeply felt throughout East Europe as a result of the Soviet occupation, austerity measures, and the economic disadvantage countries like Poland continue to face. Geralt lives with persecution and rises above it. Villagers spit on him and call him “mutant” or “butcher” with disdain.9 And the fantasy then is to prove to the people of Velen that Geralt can serve the community and live amongst them. His is the fairytale of Polish Otherness assimilating with the West, a hybrid subject trying to make a modest living without garnering enough attention to be hunted himself. II. Rewriting Poland in the Image of West Europe Many critics have lauded The Witcher series for presenting a realm of fantasy from a non-Western European vantage point, one that incorporates Polish history and folklore. Marcin Iwinski, co-owner of the game’s production company CD Projekt Red, states, “The Witcher is a tribute to the Polish language and to Polishness in general.”10 And yet, in a neomedieval realm that merges West and East Europe into a single space, we have to ask ourselves whether Wild Hunt is a tribute to Polish culture or a tribute to assimilation itself. Young’s reading of Australia’s Shotgunnova, “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game Script,” NeoSeeker, 2017. Kubiński, “Creating The Witcher’s World: Interview with Marcin Blacha of CD Projekt Red,” Culture LP, December 22, 2016, https://culture.pl/en/article/creating-thewitchers-world-an-interview-with-marcin-blacha-of-cd-projekt-red. 99

10 Piotr

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neomedieval pedestrian mall, “Ye London Court,” offers insight into the way “neomedievalism serves commercial neocolonialism.”11 The mall has the appearance of a medieval town with architecture that resembles buildings built centuries before the British ever set foot on Australian soil. Medievalism in this instance works to extend the British occupation, suggesting the colonial presence existed much longer than it actually did. Medieval dreamscapes often serve to rewrite the past in the image of the conqueror. They imagine today’s hierarchical structures as having always existed, giving them a greater sense of permanency. The geography constructed in Wild Hunt imagines an ancient world in which Polish identity and culture were always a subculture within a Western European world. The map of the Northern Realms looks extremely similar to medieval maps of Kievan Rus, the principality of states ruling from 800 a.d. to 1300 a.d. Kievan Rus had a city called Novgorod, almost definitely the inspiration for Sapkowski’s Novigrad, or “New City.” Sapkowski wants to create a place that is new, in which nothing is meant to be authentic or realistic. The Northern Realms is decidedly not Kievan Rus, but, with consideration of Poland’s assimilation with the European Union, one cannot ignore the significance of a fictional Kievan Rus fusing the geographical details of Eastern and Western Europe. Just South of Novigrad in the videogame, one finds Oxenfurt, a university city with numerous parallels to Oxford.12 And while the Northern Realms resemble Kievan Rus in shape and arrangement, the open sea flanks the Western coast, placing it in a similar geographical space as England. To deconstruct the fantasies playing out in Wild Hunt, one must assess the relationship between East and West Europe and the desire for legitimacy through the adoption of a Western aesthetic. A longstanding debate around the all-white cast of Wild Hunt has left critics hesitant to comment, given Poland’s violent, colonial past and centuries-long battle for cultural preservation.13 The pervasive whiteness of Wild Hunt See Helen Young, “Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race,” Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, ed. Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya (Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 40. 12 Oxenfurt is a city that “lived off the Academy, off its students, lecturers, scholars, researchers and their guests, who lived off science and knowledge, off what accompanies the process of learning.” See Official Witcher Wikia. 13 Wild Hunt has received some criticism for its all-white cast. One camp argues that a fantasy genre videogame marketed to a global audience should feature racial diversity, 11

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deserves commentary, however, for as Majkowsky reminds us: “Not only was Central Europe influenced by Byzantium, the gateway to Asia and Africa, but the very word ‘Slav’ comes from an extensive slave trade in the area.”14 Anikó Imre argues that the post-Soviet state has been colonized by Western Europe in its desire for whiteness as legitimacy, leading to the suppression and mistreatment of Romani demographics. “East European nations’ unspoken insistence on their whiteness is one of the most effective and least recognized means of asserting their Europeanness.”15 Poland’s conformity to Western aesthetics goes back to before the end of the Cold War. In his book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Alexei Yerchak describes how Western Rock-and-Roll infiltrated Eastern Europe through ideology even before the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Rock-and-Roll aesthetic became a hybridization of East and West and “allowed even the most devoted young Soviet communists to articulate a more cosmopolitan and creative interpretation of the communist ideals than those offered by the authoritative rhetoric of the party.”16 Before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland’s assimilation had already begun in terms of aesthetics. The Witcher, similarly, incorporates numerous references to Western European and American culture: Game of Thrones, Shakespeare, Apocalypse Now, Addams Family, Monty Python, Doctor Who, and much more that cannot be listed here. And yet, Imre reminds us that, historically, Eastern European nations have been distrustful of “the demonic values conveyed by ‘cultural imperialism,’ associated with consumerism, global media homogenization, and multiculturalism.”17 Escaping into The Witcher’s while the defenders like Patryk Kowalik argue that Polish game developers shouldn’t have to sacrifice their vision of the Polish experience to appease Americans whose cultural demands already dominate gaming culture. For a more thorough description of this online debate, see Majkowski, “Geralt of Poland,” 4-5. 14 Ibidem, 6. 15 Anikó Imre, “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, The End of Race,” Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, ed. Pramod K. Nayar, (New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2015): 435. 16 Alexei Yerchak, “The True Colors of Communism: King Crimson, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd,” Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 223. 17 Anikó Imre, “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe,” 459. 172

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neo-medieval world resists the materialistic vices of Western modernity. People grow and hunt their own food. Their homes are furnished only with useful items. Their concerns revolve around community and family more so than social climbing or the accumulation of material wealth. However, while medievalism holds the promise of a pre-industrial escape from modernity, in reality, it thrusts players into the cultural ruptures taking place across Europe and many other parts of the world as well. III. The Spectre of Marxism in “Family Matters” Much of the cultural tensions playing out in Wild Hunt owe to the fantasy genre itself and the expectations placed on Andrejz Sapkowski, the original author and creator of The Witcher Saga. The genre as we know it, full of elves, goblins, and enchantment-buffed gear, really came into its own through the works of British authors like T.H. White and J.R.R. Tolkien. Though The Witcher Saga utilizes a uniquely East Europe pastiche, English influences continue to shape the work to a great extent. Like the figure of Geralt of Rivia, the text itself is the monstrous configuration of East and West Europe. The monstrosity that emerges from this collision manifests in the game’s antagonistic creatures, forcing players to confront the trauma of assimilation under duress. Geralt lives in a world that has been erasing difference long before he came to the stage. The ancient languages in The Witcher have Slavic roots and alphabets, implicating a lost and possibly longed-for cultural heritage. Geralt must kill monsters – like himself – to survive. Because Slavic roots present most overtly in the monsters that are plaguing human settlements, the work of witchers requires them to destroy Slavic cultural heritage. The folkloric-based botchling, for example, references the Slavic myth of the drekavac, or “the screamer,” a sort of banshee spirit of an unbaptized infant.18 This fleshy, drooling, overgrown fetus possesses ghostly abilities in addition to its physical manifestation. It manifests either in the form of a fetus or a larger and more vicious humanoid. In Wild Hunt, the botchling is both embodied and ethereal, a screeching, mewling babe whose cries summon wraiths. The creature is a mirror of our repressed cultural memories and our inability to reconcile with our own hybridity. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen says Petra Himstedt-Vaid. “Glaubensformen Der Südslawen Und Ihre Struktur.” In Synkretistische Glaubensvorstellungen in Den Volksliedern Der Südslawen, 1st ed., 31–110. 18

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it best in his description of “the monstrous body” as “pure culture.”19 The monsters we imagine in popular media represent an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence.”20 For Geralt of Rivia, the mundane work of exterminating monsters becomes the process of erasing culture itself, but, in the case of the botchling, the violence is transformative. Geralt has the option to redeem monstrosity, rather than erase it. He can turn the botchling into a lubberkin, a spirit at peace. In the “Family Matters” quest, Wild Hunt offers players a chance to process the demons that plague modern Europe, namely the specterer of Marxism. The central figure of this quest, Philip Strenger, the Bloody Baron, is an overlord, an alcoholic, an emotionally volatile abuser, and, as Majkowski notes, “the only ruler with folk roots.”21 The Baron hires Geralt of Rivia to help him locate the wife that abandoned him, and, despite Geralt’s reservations, the witcher needs the Baron’s official seal to pass through his lands. What first resembles the horrors of Soviet bureaucracy is in fact an embodiment of the hard borders and impassible paperwork plaguing Europe and its neighbors today. The Baron is traditional. He believes the pagan rituals connoting Slavic folklore. Yet, despite being a Temerian soldier with his own army, he wittingly belongs to and serves the Niilfgaardian Empire. In the political allegory I am parsing out here, the Slavic ruler (The Baron) has no choice but to serve the Western hegemon (Niilfgaard), and, for the Slavic subject (Geralt) to cross borders, he must gain legitimization through Western channels. The Baron’s seal acts similarly to an EU passport in the modern age.22 The player needs the legitimacy and permissions of the state to progress in the game. In the same way that the post-Soviet state has been culturally colonized by Western Europe in its desire for legitimacy, Geralt becomes enlisted to the Baron for mobility and social acceptance. When we consider hard borders and the economic ramifications of withdrawing from the EU, we begin to see similarities between Geralt and the Polish 19 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Monster Culture,” 4.

Ibidem. Majkowski, “Geralt of Poland,” 20. 22 The EU passport allows citizens to travel visa-free between the twenty-seven member states of the European Union. 20 21

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people as a whole, as well as those caught between neoliberalism and authoritarian tyranny. Wild Hunt treads unstable ground as it navigates the line between accepting or resisting assimilation. In “Family Matters,” Geralt conducts an investigation into the disappearance of the Baron’s wife, Anna, analyzing the details of her room. Through the eyes of a witcher, the player notices the spilt wine, the dent in a post, and the picture frame that has been moved to cover a hole in the wall. Geralt’s strengths are not only his magic or fighting ability, but also his superhuman senses. He can identify blood spatter, follow scents, and notice items out of place. To play the character as he is meant to be played requires one to take a closer look, to really spend time uncovering hidden truths. Videogames do this more effectively than film, forcing the spectator to mentally engage before progressing to the next phase. It is for this reason that Geralt provides us the perfect conduit by which we might access various trauma points within a Polish subjectivity. More than just a shell to inhabit, Geralt is a lens through which gamers read the text of Wild Hunt. He heightens certain details, ignores others, and, in the sense of the game’s allegory, he is the East European subject who sees through the veneer of Western imperialism while still manipulating it to work in his favor. When Geralt confronts the Baron, emboldened by his knowledge that a scuffle took place in Anna’s bedroom, the Baron confesses that he struck his wife and that she later obtained an abortion. The Baron describes finding the fetus thus, “I gave no thought to a funeral. It was a horror, I wanted it to end. That child had been my dream.”23 The Baron buried the fetus in an unmarked grave, not realizing that in doing so he was creating a botchling. The botchling embodies the loss and absence of Polish identity, marred by the memory of state communism. The botchling’s Slavic roots ground it as a distinctly Polish nightmare, a future taking shape against the will of the people. Anna terminated the pregnancy of a child she did not want, but now it has come back to haunt the Baron’s lands. The botchling’s grotesque return to life rejects the will of the mother to terminate. It transgresses female bodily autonomy in the same way that the allies denied Poland its liberation after World War II. After the end of the German occupation, the Soviet project absorbs Poland into the 23

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communist state against the wish of the Polish people. Their land is carved up, borders redrawn, and Polish subjects forced to leave their homes and accept a puppet government that serves the USSR. After the Soviet collapse, Poland awakens to the absence of its national identity. State communism remains a bitter memory, a failed project that conjures negative associations for older Polish generations. In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes how Marxism continues to haunt Europe. The capitalist free market remains the preferred model under the fearful assumption that any other system might quickly devolve into an authoritarian regime. The collapse of state communism left an absence that is in fact a presence. Derrida writes: The specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becomingbody, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter.24 This “becoming-body” articulates the liminal horror of the botchling. Before the botchling became the nightmare, it held all the promise of a dream, the Baron’s dream. When the unborn perish, one cannot help but consider the imagined future that remains unseen. What if the USSR had taken measures to reform? What if the Chernobyl reactor never exploded? That which remains unknown and must remain unknown takes on a monstrous shape. Nothing vanishes. The remainder of the communist state apparatus instills the haunting of post-Soviet Poland. The botchling continues its work in an ominously spectral siege. Put out into the wilderness, nameless, abandoned, unprocessed, it haunts its creators. Its “apparition” constantly moves between the form of the “revenant” and the “spectre,” attacking pregnant women and devouring unborn children so that no other dream may come to fruition. PostSoviet Poland, like a vessel waiting to be filled, resists change while the spectre of state communism remains. And so, the Western European Jacques Derrida, Spectes of Marx: The State of the Debt, the World of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 5. 24

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ideologies spill into the identity of the nation-state and create a body in conflict with itself. Like the monster-hunting monster, Geralt of Rivia, going through the motions of his profession, the Polish subject tries to supplant the absence of cultural identity with Western European legitimacy, only to find that this collision perpetuates the presence of the spectre. Communism remains a scapegoat by which Capitalism can justify itself. The spectre can’t be cut away or erased. The only way to move forward is transformation, transforming how we think about the Soviet Union, not as a monster slain in battle, but as the first phase of an evolution. In Witcher III, this notion of transformation is the only way Geralt can remove the haunting of the botchling with positive results. The father must redeem the botchling’s spirit by embracing it, giving it a name, and burying it under the family threshold. The culture shift taking place in Poland calls for some sort of acknowledgement to take place. Remnants of the Soviet state must be looked at, acknowledged, and processed. In this virtual fever dream of “Family Matters,” that monster is confronted, named, and put to rest. Whether or not the player kills the botchling outright or redeems the spirit by naming it, that choice has no bearing on whether or not the Baron kills himself at the end of the quest. Resolving the episode of the botchling merely provides the player a sense of ordering chaos, finding personal satisfaction with their choices. The reward manifests not in extra coin or loot or happy endings, but in the player’s own sense of morality. If Geralt accepts the more difficult task of transforming the botchling into a lubberkin, the player must undergo a scene that is more disturbing, challenging, and suspenseful. Boss battles are one thing. Oil the sword, drink some pots, mash the attack button, maybe cast quen, if you remember. Converting the botchling involves going to the botchling’s grave, digging it up, handing the squirming, screeching demon fetus to its father, and escorting them back to the manor at night, as monsters rush in. This segment utilizes the discomfiting power of the long shot, a film technique that videogames often employ simply through their mechanics. The camera stays with the main character’s perspective without cutting away, instilling the player with a sense of accountability. Ian Bogost analyzes the long shot utilized in the game Heavy Rain from a scene in which a father loses sight of his child in a shopping mall. The 177

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player must guide the father’s avatar through the crowd following the little boy’s red balloon. Bogost states: As anyone knows who has actually lost a child in a public place, even if only briefly, the central sensations of that experience are not rapidness but slowness. The slow panic of confusion and disorientation, the feeling of extended uncertainty as moments give way to minutes. The sound of each footfall and the neurosis of each head turn.25 This kind of slow panic charges certain scenes with suspense and works especially well for games in the horror genre. In a long shot of the “Family Matters” sequence, Geralt walks alongside the Baron as he carries his writhing botchling spawn up a hill. These moments invest the player. As Geralt investigates bedrooms and travels across Velen pursuing leads, the player becomes increasingly invested in the Baron’s misfortune, culminating in this moment in which Geralt can choose either to be a Witcher and kill a monster for coin or take on a quest that will demonstrate how deeply human he really is. There is nothing more nerve-wracking than an escort mission, and one that involves the unborn demon child of the Bloody Baron certainly leaves its mark on the player’s memory. Part of what makes videogames so immersive and impactful is their effective use of commonplace actions, segments requiring players to walk through towns, care for their equipment, visits shops, collect herbs, or blow off steam playing cards with strangers in taverns. Because a player actively engages in the movement and sight of the avatar, the long shot resists the effect of becoming tedious. It promotes the realism of the game, gives the player time to contemplate the story and the potential effects of his or her actions. Bogost argues that “if ‘edit’ is the verb that makes cinema what it is, then perhaps videogames ought to focus on the opposite: extension, addition, prolonging.”26 The long shot effectively amplifies the player’s sense of participation, and it promotes contemplation during those long rides across the idyllic Temerian countryside.

Ian Bogost, “The Long Shot,” How to Talk about Videogames (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 99. 26 Ibidem, 102. 25

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The player learns to sympathize with the Baron’s loss, despite his mistakes. Horror creates a space in which one can process trauma without real-world ramifications, and videogames allow players to engage directly, being able to say “I saved the botchling’s spirit even though it didn’t matter in the course of the game. I cast axii on it every two minutes to keep it from attacking. I guided it to its parents’ threshold and watched as its father claimed it and gave it a name.” If the player takes this more traumatic path, the horrific botchling becomes a lubberkin, a spirit at peace who no longer haunts the land of Velen. One cannot process his or her own demons without making a conscious choice to do so, and Geralt provides the Polish subject the opportunity to process the unknown monster of that which was never born, that Poland that never emerged as its own nation after World War II, that post-Soviet Poland that became part of the EU before coming into its own. Derrida’s distinction between spectre and spirit states that “what distinguishes the spectre or the revenant from the spirit, including the spirit in the sense of the ghost in general, is doubtless a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X, that nonsensuous sensuous of which Capital speaks.”27 The quest gives the player the opportunity to exorcise the spectre of Polish heritage, putting it to rest as a non-visible spirit, an entity that remains, but does not haunt or disrupt the image of a Poland that imagines itself as a part of the Western hegemon. It is at peace, a spirit that was never born and yet has a name that is known to its parents. Geralt’s unique ability to harness the hybridity within himself makes him capable of transforming such monsters, and, through him, we are made capable as well. The various scenarios and choice trees branching from the main story script present a world that forces players to encounter complexity in our definitions and taxonomies. No longer is one allowed to think of factions or people as wholly righteous or monstrous, nor of choices as good or evil. The narrative’s troubling drive to erase otherness and imitate the hegemon emerges from within our own politics and society. The narrative allegory resonates not only with the Polish subject coping with assimilation with the West, but also with people across the globe who continue to seek legitimacy in whiteness and capital. Videogames offer a 27

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space of potential, a dreamscape in which one can experiment with new identities, possible resolutions, and new codes of ethics. In Wild Hunt, one enacts artificial violence to process the dramatic cultural revolutions taking place in the here and now.

Bibliography “Oxenfurt.” Official Witcher Wikia. https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/ Oxenfurt (accessed December 9, 2019). Bacha, Marcin, writer. The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt Red, 2015. Xbox One. Bogost, Ian. “The Long Shot.” In How to Talk about Videogames, 96-102. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. CD Projekt. “Distribution of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Unit Sales Worldwide from 2015 to 2020, by Distribution Format.” Statista, Statista Inc., April 22, 2021. https://www-statista-com.cmu.idm.ocl c.org/statistics/523901/witcher-3-unit-sales-share-worldwide-distrib ution-format/. Čvorović, Jelena. “Serbian Gypsy Witch Narratives: “Wherever Gypsies Go, There the Witches Are, We Know!’.’” Folklore, 124, no. 2, (2013): 214–225. www.jstor.org/stable/43297690. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the World of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming of the Middle Ages.” In Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver, 61-72. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Guerra, Simona. “Distrust Unbound: What Next After Joining the EU.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 49 (3), 233-41. University of California Press, 2016. Himstedt-Vaid, Petra. “Glaubensformen Der Südslawen Und Ihre Struktur.” Synkretistische Glaubensvorstellungen in Den Volksliedern Der Südslawen, 1st ed., 31–110. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. Imre, Anikó. “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, The End of Race.” In Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, 180

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edited by Pramod K. Nayar, 433-61. New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Kalashnikova, Olga. “Empires in Witcher 3: Medieval Tropes, Historical Authenticity, and Players’ Reception of Imagined Politics.” In Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds: Climates, July 5-9, 2021. Leeds, UK: Institute for Medieval Studies. Kubiński, Piotr. “Creating The Witcher’s World: Interview with Marcin Blacha of CD Projekt Red,” Culture LP, 2016. https://culture.pl/ en/article/creating-the-witchers-world-an-interview-with-marcinblacha-of-cd-projekt-red. Majkowski, Tomasz Z. “Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia.” Open Library of Humanities, 4(1), 2018. Mroz, Bogdan. “Poland’s Economy in Transition to Private Ownership.” Soviet Studies, 43(4), 677–88. Glasgow: Taylor & Francis, Ltd., University of Glasgow, 1991. Shotgunnova. “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game Script.” NeoSeeker. 7 September, 2017. https://www.neoseeker.com/the-witcher-3-wildhunt/faqs/1794833-witcher-3-script.html. Yerchak, Alexei. “The True Colors of Communism: King Crimson, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd.” In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, 207-37. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005. Young, Helen. “Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race.” Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, edited by Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya, 39-50. Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer, 2015.

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Medieval Love Through Centuries from Far East to Far West in Romanesque, by Tonino Benacquista Leticia Ding,* Philippe Frieden,** Stefania Maffei Boillat***

According to Charles Seignobos: “Love is a French invention of the twelfth century.” This statement could be the starting point of Tonino Benacquista’s novel Romanesque (2016).1 Writing about the unconditional love of a man and a woman from the twelfth century, the author offers the reader a double tale: the story of these lovers and its diffusion and reception in the modern days. While the author narrates the story of the lovers, they will tell, all along the twists and turns, their own stories in different manners and to multiple audiences, which in turn contribute to the broadcast. At the end of this process of re-appropriation and actualization, the original love affair becomes a true legend, which expands through the centuries and all around the world. This interlace structure of Romanesque between past and present leads us to focus on the construction of the novel and to explore the complex University of Lausanne, Switzerland. University of Geneva, Switzerland. *** University of Lausanne, Switzerland. 1 Tonino Benacquista, Romanesque (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). Tonino Benacquista is a French novelist and screenwriter of Italian origin, born in 1961. His work, including novels (e. g., Saga, 1997), detective stories (La Commedia des ratés, 1991), short stories (Nos gloires secrètes, 2013), screenplays for the cinema (Sur mes lèvres, co-written with Jacques Audiard, 2001) and comics (Lucky Luke contre Pinkerton, co-written with Daniel Pennac, drawing by Achdé, 2010), is characterized by a great variety and has met with both critical and public success. In addition, some of his novels and short stories have been adapted for the cinema, the most famous of which is Malavita, by Luc Besson (2013), starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. To date, Romanesque is Benacquista’s penultimate novel, followed by Toutes les histoires d’amour ont été racontées, sauf une (Paris: Gallimard, 2020). His latest publication is an autobiographical essay: Porca miseria. (Paris: Gallimard, 2022). *

**

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reuses of creation and transmission mechanisms of medieval writing. In order to analyze these mechanisms, we mobilize specific concepts of medieval studies, such as mouvance, performance, rewriting, actualization, and the notion of authoriality, especially through the figure of the storyteller and the author. The re-employment of these specific notions from medieval literary studies unveils a metanarrative reflection on the act of creation revealing a critical and theoretical dimension. The novel, therefore, acquires an experimental aspect. This metanarrative effect also applies to the thematic of love, to the extent that the text questions the resonance of medieval love in our modern society. However, Benacquista’s idea about love and its permanence from the twelfth to the twenty-first century goes even further. It addresses medievalism itself. In order to demonstrate how Benacquista’s work innovates and renovates at the same time, we propose to examine, after a theoretical setting, first the gesture of creation and transmission, and then the conception of medieval literary love. I. Theoretical Setting: Romanesque and Medievalism Tonino Benacquista narrates a medieval love story between two French lovers. Their passion excludes them from their community and leads them to their death sentence. Nevertheless, their death becomes the trigger of the plot: after banishment from secular life, they suffer the same fate in Heaven. Because of the intensity of their passion, the lovers provoke the wrath of God who drives them out of Paradise and sends them back to Earth, at the antipodes of each other, as punishment. The man, a poacher, lands in Latin America, while the woman, a gleaner, awakens in Asia. Along with this geographical leap comes a temporal leap, as they are projected in the eighteenth century. Then begins a quest for their reunion, during which the lovers will tell their story. This story, transmitted by word of mouth, will move in space and time until it ends up in a preserved manuscript in Thailand, engraved in a bas-relief in Colombia, and adapted into an English play. This one – entitled Les mariés malgré eux [The unwilling bride and groom]– becomes the medium for transmitting this love story in the twenty-first century. Projected into the twenty-first century, the lovers will experience other adventures. They will be sought by the authorities because of their anonymity.

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The main subject of Benacquista’s novel is the passion of this couple who travels through time and space. However, the title of the book does not emphasize these medieval lovers: the author chose the elusive title “Romanesque.” This title, which at first glance seems simple, actually raises several questions: does it evoke a romantic story or does it refer to the novelistic genre? This indetermination echoes the difficulty to define the concept of “Romanesque,” as Jean-Marie Schaeffer points out in his article simply entitled “Le Romanesque.”2 Schaeffer highlights the semantic plurality of the term. First, the word “romanesque” derives from “roman” (novel), which originally does not refer to a literary genre, but to writings in Romance language. The term “roman” has evolved over time, from a linguistic concept, to include fictions in verse and prose from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Then, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “roman” was interpreted as a literary genre – novel – and became more closely related with the meaning of “romance” referring to fictions whose importance is given to the realm of affects, passions, and feelings.3 Therefore, the notion of “romanesque” can encompass literary, linguistic, generic, and thematic phenomena. Thus, in order to fully grasp the meaning of Benacquista’s work, the title Romanesque must be understood in all its acceptances. In terms of literary genre, it is a fictional novel telling the romance of a couple from medieval France in the twelfth century – a geographical and temporal space that sees the blossoming of Romance language literature. In addition, the text also witnesses the four traits of “romanesque” defined by Schaeffer. First, the action is essentially motivated by the characters’ emotional life; as we said, the love story is the main theme of the text. Second, the “romanesque” fictional world offers a representation of actantial typologies extremely polarized, it becomes the theatre of all excesses, where superhuman actions, models of virtues, or even absolute vices come into play.4 In short, the “romanesque” tradition shows the gap between the purity of the represented axiologies and reallife behaviour. In Benacquista’s novel, this feature is highlighted by the transgressive position of the couple, marginalized from the community due to the unconditionality of their love – a passion that conflicts with Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Le romanesque,” Vox Poetica (2002): 1-14, www.voxpoetica.org/t/ articles/indexarticles.html (accessed September 27, 2020). 3 Schaeffer, “Romanesque,” 6. 4 Ibid., 8. 2

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the daily life of the community, as the villagers’ astonishment shows: “The villagers, all of whom had experienced famine, wondered about the incredible temperance of these two, as if they were gaining strength through hardship.” [Les villageois, qui tous avaient connu la famine, s’interrogèrent sur l’incroyable tempérance de ces deux-là, comme s’ils gagnaient en force au fil des privations (p. 23)]. This opposition, between the couple and the villagers, refers to a third characteristic noted by Schaeffer: the “romanesque” mimetic particularity, which presents itself as a counter-model to reality.5 In Benacquista’s novel, this feature has a meta-diegetic value, because this reverse mirror of reality does not appear only between the characters of the novel and the reader, it is present within the diegesis itself. The author overlays in the fictional world the realistic universe of the community and the lovers’ universe, disconnected from reality due to their absolute love. And it is essentially through the villagers’ imagination that the gap between these two universes is created: Imaginations left fallow by too much misery finally revealed themselves to be teeming with bitterly delicious fruits, so that in the hamlet men and women led a secret life full of phantasmagorias, unfulfilled desires and grandiose projects. And perhaps, through their ramblings, they were laying the foundations of a legend to come. Like a gap to be filled, a need to explore an obscure part of themselves, a collective concern to answer questions with allegories and to give anxieties picturesque springs. [Les imaginations laissées en jachère par trop de misère se révélaient enfin foisonnantes de fruits délicieux comme amers, si bien que dans le hameau hommes et femmes menaient une vie secrète pleine de fantasmagories, de désirs inassouvis et de projets grandioses. Et peut-être posaient-ils là, à travers leurs divagations, les prémices d’une légende à venir. Comme un manque à combler, un besoin d’explorer une part obscure d’eux-mêmes, un souci collectif de répondre aux questionnements par des allégories et de donner aux inquiétudes des ressorts pittoresques. p. 24] 5

Ibid., 11. 186

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Therefore, the villagers’ imagination excludes the couple from a historical Middle Ages to send them into a marvellous fictional universe, and they start to give birth to the legend. Finally, the event-driven saturation of the diegesis and the extensibility of its outcome constitute the last feature of the “romanesque” concept. The twists and turns are the driving force behind the narrative rhythm and any ending can become a new starting point for a new adventure. Moreover, Jacques Roubaud agrees that the delayed ending is one of the characteristics of the novel, adding that all sorts of avoidance strategies are put in place to delay the end, making any ending a provisional one.6 The diegetic extension and an open end are indeed present in Benacquista’s work, which transgresses the finiteness of death in order to evolve the action over the centuries and even over the galaxies, as the couple is catapulted on another planet (p. 272). By managing to embody the different meanings of the “romanesque” terminology and applying the features defined by Schaeffer, Benacquista’s work appears like a construction putting a concept of literary theory into practice. Hence, the novel demonstrates a scholarly character and the mastery of narratological and critical tools, giving the text a special position that oscillates between fiction and theory. The author, therefore, acquires the double role of novelist and literary theorist or critic, offering a double level of reading of the text: narrative and metanarrative. In addition to questioning the definition of “novel,” the story also unveils a commentary on literary history and a reflection on the processes of creation and transmission of a legend. Consequently, fiction reveals a critical value, referring to the modern and postmodern conception of critical activity as suggested by Baudelaire, Wilde, or Barthes. They compare the artist’s relationship to the world and the critic’s relationship to the work of art. They only differ from each other in that they don’t start from the same point of view: the artist’s activity is concerned with impressions produced by nature, experiences of life and of the world; the critic’s activity is concerned with those generated by plays, novels or paintings.7 With this permeability of the boundaries between criticism and fiction, Romanesque appears as an original postmodern and experimental Jacques Roubaud, Poésie, etcetera : ménage (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1995), 245. Yves Landerouin, La Critique créative, une autre façon de commenter les œuvres (Paris: Champion, 2016), 32. 6 7

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fiction. Nevertheless, in this apparent originality, the presence of the Middle Ages acquires its relevance. First, because weaving links with the medieval past demonstrate the upstream study of the author who interprets the model texts, explores their cultural environment and studies their poetic and stylistic specificity, which is comparable to the exercise of criticism. This work allows the author to question the relevance of medieval texts to their own aesthetic universe, with the aim of renewing contemporary poetic forms. Second, this invitation to reflect on the links between past and present in the process of creation, reading, and interpretation, leads to questioning our contemporaneity, a peculiarity that is found in the majority of texts that borrow from the Middle Ages.8 According to Umberto Eco, the reason why, in order to understand our present, we interrogate the Middle Ages lies in the fact that this period represents “the root of all our contemporary ‘hot’ problems, and it is not surprising that we go back to that period every time we ask ourselves about our origin.”9 And then, if Benacquista’s work initially seems innovative in presenting two levels of reading – narrative and meta-narrative –, in reality it reveals merely a reflection of medieval texts. These already offer a double reading, as Todorov testifies by analysing the Quête du Saint Graal. Moreover, the extensibility of the diegesis by a provisional end, which we have mentioned as a trait of the novel, is a strategy particularly present in the medieval novel, as Roubaud indicates about the interlace structure of the Lancelot in prose, appearing then as “the most post-postmodern of all.”10 It becomes clear that Benacquista borrows from the Middle Ages for the purpose of a novelistic renewal. He renews forgotten processes whose aim is to create an illusion of originality. Through this act, a double objective is affirmed: innovation and renovation. Koble and Séguy Passé présent, ed. Nathalie Koble and Mireille Séguy (Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2009), 9. Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyper Reality, trans. by William Weaver (San Diego: Hartcourt, 1986), 61-73. 10 Jacques Roubaud, Poésie, etcetera : ménage, 245. [Mais la plus grande « manière » de l’évitisme, la plus post-post-post-moderne de toutes, c’est le roman médiéval: les entrelacements du Lancelot en prose. Ce n’est pas seulement qu’il lutte contre la célèbre et bien injustement décriée linéarité par les embranchement forestiers (au sens propre comme au figuré) de sa narration, mais parce qu’il résout le problème de l’achèvement en n’offrant jamais que des fins provisoires.] About the interlace structure: F. Lot, Étude sur le Lancelot en prose (Paris: Champion, 1918), 17. 8 9

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explain that borrowing from the Middle Ages to create a contemporary work is therefore as much about remembering the works as about renewing the gesture that ensured their survival and the medieval reference emphasizes the persistence of a questioning of origin.11 Benacquista goes even further, because, in addition to only renewing past creative processes, he also tells us how they have evolved. II. From Telling to Tweeting The novel is organized in two parts. The first one focuses on the medieval love story through the prism of the modern play. The text, therefore, alternates between the contemporary period – presenting the lovers as spectators of the play – and the medieval time, where the action of the play occurs. The second part relates to the quest for the reunion following each point of view and continuing to interlace the past with the present. By building these alternations in the plot, Benacquista renews with the interlacing method from Lancelot in prose. However, these back and forth from past to present enlarge the distance between the medieval time, which appears as bookish, and modernity, which presents real historical features. In Romanesque, the Middle Ages represent what Le Goff calls the “medieval imagination,” mixing legend and history.12 The novel describes a feudal society governed by Louis the Virtuous (p. 16). This name is absent from history books, but it evokes the Middle Ages through the qualifier that accompanies the king’s first name. It sounds medieval enough to transport the reader to this epoch. The author creates a reality effect, giving the story a character of vraisemblance. However, it quickly disappears when the reader follows the couple’s adventures in Heaven. Paradoxically, this event reinforces the realism in the rest of the tale, since the eighteenth century in which the lovers are projected is the one of Philippe d’Orléans (p. 82). The reason from the Enlightenment comes to justify this presence of historical reality which accentuates the rupture with this legendary tale of the lovers from the Dark Ages. This rupture reflects two phenomena. On the one hand, contemporary medievalism and the modern construction of the Middle 11 12

Koble and Séguy, Passé présent, 24. Jacques Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1991 [1985]), 4-53. 189

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Ages. On the other hand, this legendary construction of the Middle Ages exposes a diegetic plurality in the novel: the legendary space and the reality. The Middle Ages, as well as Paradise, belong to the imagination, there constitute this “other time, the one of the tale, where anything can happen” (p. 14). So, when the lovers are projected in modernity, they enter reality, but, at the same time, they are detached from it, because, unlike the other characters, they keep their anonymity and their impression of intangibility. However, this gives the lovers a special character: they come from a legendary and original era. This relationship to the origin is accentuated by their banishment from Paradise, which reminds Adam and Eve. They would thus embody a tale of origins taking its roots in the European Middle Ages, and propagating the absolute value of love. The propagation of this tale preserves the mechanisms of creation and transmission of medieval texts. By telling their story, the lovers bring back the vocality of medieval poetic as defined by Zumthor. The voice becomes the only possible mode of realization.13 But, at the same time, a concordance and a mixture between oral and written traditions remain which provoke the mouvance, that Zumthor refers to this incessant vibration and fundamental instability of the text. The story of the lovers knows this mixing, because it enjoys both oral and written tradition.14 Its first transmission takes place in the Kingdom of Siam, through the gleaner. Because of a language that she lacks, she puts her story in writing on mulberry paper, while her husband, in the New World, tells their story to the Huacanis. These two traditions are justified by the geographical situation: the written word in China, the land where the oldest paper was found, and the oral word within a Latin American tribe considered primitive. And the instability of the narrative emerges from this first oral transmission, because the story is simultaneously translated, the passage from French to the language of the tribe marks a translation. The mouvance continues each time the story is told again. When the Frenchwoman works on a tea plantation, she enhances her story with more skilful turns and she is even helped to finish her sentences (p. 93). This story was then repeated by the workers. The Frenchman, also, tells “his version, unpublished and rich in extravagant details” (p. 97). Moreover, Benacquista’s novel makes explicit the malleable 13 14

Paul Zumthor, La Lettre et la voix (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 22. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 610. 190

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characteristic, proposing a meta-narrative insertion on the formation of a legend: The Frenchwoman did not take offence in any way: if a legend was always inspired by real facts, the voice of men perpetuated it to make it a common good. If it was polished by the word, if its rough edges were erased, if it was embellished, it was to make it accessible to all cultures and to transmit it across borders and generations. Hers had a long road ahead of it before finding its final form. [La Française ne s’en offusqua en aucune manière : si une légende était toujours inspirée de faits réels, la voix des hommes la perpétuait pour en faire un bien commun. Si on la polissait par la parole, si on en gommait les aspérités, si on l’agrémentait de fioritures, c’était pour la rendre accessible à toutes les cultures et la transmettre par-delà les frontières et les générations. La sienne avait encore une longue route à parcourir avant de trouver sa forme définitive. p. 110-111] This mouvance of the story is accompanied by the movement of the characters in space. During their peregrinations, the lovers’ story serves as a bargaining chip. Thanks to their tale, the gleaner receives dogs from a couple to guide her, and the poacher gets the last place on a ship for successfully entertaining the captain. Also, the Frenchman and Alvaro, prisoners of the Huacanis, regain their freedom, and the Frenchwoman, like a Scheherazade, manages to escape from the seraglio from which she is held, as well as all the other women. The story thus covers the double poetic goal of being useful (utilitas) and pleasant (delectatio). Consequently, this saving feature also has an effect on the part of the audience. This is particularly noticeable when the rich merchant couple regains the passion of the first days after listening to the story of the Frenchwoman (p. 101). The tale serves as a romantic example, becoming a desire mediator in the Girardian sense of the word,15 and recalling in Dante’s Inferno the passion of Paolo and Francesca which comes alive when they read the Lancelot.16 In the same way that Galehaut was the book, the Frenchwoman is the tale. 15 16

René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Hachette, 2011), 12. Dante, La Divine comédie, trad. Pier-Angelo Fiorentina (Paris: Lidis, 1992), v. 119-138. 191

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By restoring the vocality and the mouvance of the tale, Benacquista rehabilitates the art of storytelling, which, according to Benjamin, has dissipated with modernity.17 The German philosopher states that the experience transmitted from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.18 The storyteller is a wise man who passes on experience and offers counsel, because he has been given the opportunity “to reach back to a whole lifetime.”19 His talent is to tell the story of his entire life; he is the man who “could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.” This figure of the storyteller can be represented through two archaic prototypes: the one who travels and sees the country – the merchant navigator – and the one who knows the stories and traditions of the land – the sedentary ploughman. And the Middle Ages, with their trade structure, allowed the interpenetration of these two prototypes setting “the actual extension of the realm of storytelling.”20 These two archaic types are precisely present in Romanesque: the Frenchwoman and her journey through Asia between rice fields and tea plantations represents the ploughman, while the Frenchman coming from the New World embodies the navigator. This connection with the art of storytelling allows us to understand the importance of the couple’s anonymity, but paradoxically, it gives them the identity of the storyteller. Moreover, their journey passes through highly symbolic places in the tradition of storytelling. We have stressed the link between the Frenchwoman and Scheherazade, the oriental figure of the storyteller. We have also said that the Frenchman begins his journey in an Amerindian tribe where oral tradition is central, specifying that before returning to Europe he passes through an African village, in which two characters are introduced: the sorcerer and the griot (p. 126). Also, the Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 361-378. 18 Ibid., 362. 19 Ibid., 378. 20 Ibid., 363. 17

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transit through these lands, which refer back to pre-modern societies, is necessary to rediscover the very essence of the storytelling. Especially because for Benjamin this art has become rare with modernity: first by the rise of the novel with the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and secondly by the progress of information. Benjamin argues that information is in touch with the most immediate reality and finds a greater audience than intelligence coming from afar.21 In Romanesque, despite the title, the novel is absent as a relay for the legend, except at a meta-narrative level by the book through which the reader discovers the story of the lovers. However, information is omnipresent when the action is set in the twenty-first century, where media and technology are over present. The couple, who is now on hunt, appears as robotic or even lobotomized, connected with earphones (p. 197), constantly glued to their screens, following the latest news about themselves on television. However, in this ultra-modern world where everybody knows about them, they no longer tell their story, they are mute: No sooner have they hugged each other than they faint from sleep in front of a lit screen where sometimes it is about them. On the coffee table, their computers and telephones vibrate, tinkle, lead an independent life. The #runninglovers, messages, articles and links fall in rain. The legend of the lovers is now written without them and in spite of them. [À peine enlacés ils se sont évanouis de sommeil devant un écran allumé où parfois il est question d’eux. Sur la table basse, leurs ordinateurs et leurs téléphones vibrent, tintent, mènent une vie autonome. Les #runninglovers, messages, articles et liens tombent en pluie. La légende des amants s’écrit désormais sans eux et malgré eux. p. 252] They are mute from experience, which tends to illustrate Benjamin’s thought that immediate information causes the loss of the storytelling. It would even seem that in Romanesque Benjamin’s thought is prolonged, when an editorialist in the Washington Post denounces the threat of social networks on public opinion, states that information is supplanted by the buzz focusing on the news item: 21

Ibid., 365. 193

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Today, all you have to do is connect to YouTube! And politicians, with their eyes glued to social networks, no longer need to communicate through the press; a raging tweet tapped from the ends of the earth reaches its target much faster. The information has just been murdered by the buzz, an invisible and invincible competitor who chooses here to focus on a small couple of illegal immigrants – French people! [Aujourd’hui il suffit de se connecter sur YouTube ! Et les politiques, l’œil rivé sur les réseaux sociaux, n’ont plus besoin de communiquer par voie de presse, un tweet rageur tapoté du bout du monde atteint bien plus vite sa cible. L’information vient d’être assassinée par le buzz, concurrent invisible et invincible qui choisit ici de s’arrêter sur un petit couple de clandestins – des Français ! p. 231] Nevertheless, this criticism is made by a representative of the press, a field that caused the decline of storytelling according to Benjamin. Therefore, this criticism is to be considered from a distance. Actually, the presentation of social networks in Romanesque, which may appear as negative in a first time, opens up a reflection. The buzz around the lovers will in fact gives rise to a community, admittedly mostly virtual, but which brings together all strata of society, from the most erudite to the most popular, such as a specialist in conspiracy theory, the French consulate in Thailand, a doctoral student, a Parisian, and, above, all ordinary people: The media rumour, which is impossible to contain, is reaching record levels of popularity. And those who are passionate about it are anonymous, everyday people, tired of ordinary scoundrels, tired of anxiety-provoking current events, tired of the pernicious observation of their neighbour’s morals, tired of the apology of stupidity spread out on the screens. [La rumeur médiatique, impossible à endiguer, atteint des records de popularité. Et ceux qui se passionnent sont des anonymes, des gens de tous les jours, lassés de la crapulerie ordinaire, lassés d’une actualité anxiogène, lassés de 194

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l’observation pernicieuse des mœurs du voisin, lassé de l’apologie de la stupidité étalée sur les écrans. p. 253] The term rumour has its importance, it refers to orality and, as Gingras highlights, it precedes the novel.22 And the adjective “media” invokes various types of distribution channels that could arise oral, written, and visual practices at the same time. This transmediality contributes to the mouvance of the story and its diffusion is handled by anonymous people. Consequently, modern technologies that translate collective and anonymous writing have a greater tendency to bring the twenty-first century closer to the Middle Ages than to create a distance from them. Moreover, in Romanesque, the appearance of characters in the 21st century is accompanied by a return to the Middle Ages. If the Frenchwoman went through several functions during her Asian journey, in the twenty-first century she becomes a gleaner in her modern version while waiting for the end of the markets to pick up damaged goods (p. 239). The couple also dress up as troubadours or minstrels and perform at medieval festivals to earn a living. In a way, they become themselves again. This revival of the Middle Ages is successful because: The Middle Ages inspired confidence, to the point of forgetting its cruelties and miseries in order to retain only its age-old truths, before men fell in love with their own words. In the end, they had experienced the Renaissance, as those of today hoped for their own. [Le Moyen Âge inspirait confiance, au point d’en oublier ses cruautés et ses misères pour n’en retenir que ses vérités séculaires, avant que les hommes ne s’éprennent de leur propre parole. Au bout du compte, ils avaient connu la Renaissance, comme ceux d’aujourd’hui espéraient la leur. p. 240] One of these age-old truths is precisely love, that the couple embodies. This is also the reason why the criticism of the Washington Post editorialist can be questioned. The lovers are much more than a “fait Francis Gingras, “La mauvaise langue et les lettres, statuts de la rumeur et de l’écrit à la naissance du roman (1150-1230),” Protée 32 (2004): 87-99. 22

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divers,” they remind us what love would have been like long ago: altruism and self-sacrifice, i.e., charitable love (p. 227, 254). Hence, again, the importance of a return to a pre-modern era is justified. Although, before this perfect love invaded the social networks, it passed through the theatre in the eighteenth century. III. A Legend on Stage Among the various achievements of the legend of the rebellious couple within the diegesis, we will focus on the one that weaves the main link between the contemporary framework story and the retrospective narrative that intertwine throughout the novel, namely the play entitled Les mariés malgré eux. Attributed to the British playwright Charles Knight, who is said to have composed it in London in 1721, this “classic” (p. 13) is actually the result of an infinitely more complex process of elaboration. In the novel, Charles Knight is a “talented but uninspired” (p. 176) playwright who desperately yearns for glory. He thinks he has the material for a masterpiece when his brother Lewis, a merchant navigator, reports from a trip to China the story he heard from a Frenchwoman – our heroine – working on a tea plantation. The unknown woman had in fact “revealed the intimate episodes of her existence,” including her alleged “rebirth” (id.) following a capital execution. Charles Knight thus staged “the legend of the woman with her head cut off” (p. 165), but the playwright was not entirely satisfied with his work, and anticipated only short-term success for his play. He was therefore astonished when a complete stranger, present at a performance of Les mariés malgré eux in Gibraltar (from where he was planning to return to France), arrived in London and introduced himself as the protagonist of his play. The intriguing character seeks information about the source of this work, in which he recognizes his own story. At his insistence, Knight finally acknowledges that the argument of Les mariés malgré eux did not emerge of his own imagination as he claimed, and accepts the curious bargain he is offered: in exchange for a crossing to China on his brother’s ship, the Frenchman will help him rewrite the play by infusing it with “the power of reality and the resonance of experience” (p. 166). Knight accepts and the play, in this reworked form, enjoys a glorious posterity. From the first oral utterance of the story to its literary implementation in the form of a dramatic work, the story of the accursed lovers is therefore subject, in the case of the theatrical creation by Charles Knight, 196

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to a particularly subtle process of transformation, which involves very different methods of elaboration. After the oral spread of the legend by the gleaner and then by the English navigator, the written fixation that follows is quite relative, insofar as the play will be the object of a rewriting and the mouvance of the text is perpetuated. It should also be noted that the rewriting is motivated by a situation of reception which – after the oral tale and the dramatic writing – calls for a third type of updating of the story: the living representation, in deed and in word. Indeed, once the poacher, witnessing a staging of the story of his own life, has overcome his initial reaction of dismay, this fortuitous spectator will become critical and will judge the play rather mediocre, not only in terms of style, tone, and interpretation, but also in terms of the very plot of the work, particularly as regards the “false” (p. 143) happy ending. It is therefore a double motivation that drives the Frenchman to go and find the person given as the author of the play: to find his wife (the only other individual likely to be at the source of the story) and to re-establish the conformity of certain represented facts with the reality of his life. A. An Authors’ Reworking Another peculiarity of Les mariés malgré eux is that this piece is the only formatting of the legend resulting from the contribution – although not simultaneous – of the two protagonists, the wife and then the husband. Of the two, it is the male character who assumes the most active – or at least the most conscious – participation in the literary elaboration process, since he becomes the “accomplice in writing” (p. 181) of the playwright who has “appropriated his story” (p. 150). The two men join forces to give Knight’s play the scope he had hoped for, and if the collaboration between “the guarantor of reality and the representative of form” (p. 176) is not always serene, it is certainly fruitful, judging by the success of the second version of Les mariés malgré eux. Throughout the singular creative process that leads to the rewriting of the play, the husband assumes multiple roles: he is at the same time or successively character, spectator23 (of the first version of the play), Or even a director when, at the end of the performance of the play he is attending, the young man “cannot refrain from [...] giving a few acting instructions” [« ne p[e]ut se retenir de […] donner quelques indications de jeu », p. 144] to the comedians, inviting them to adopt a sober style of acting. 23

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narrator (of his own story to Charles Knight) and co-author (of the second version of Les mariés malgré eux). However, this latter status will never earn him the slightest public recognition, Knight having scrupulously ensured that his encounter and his connivance with the Frenchman remain a secret “for the sole purpose of reserving the absolute authorship of the work to himself” (p. 212). In this respect, it is significant that, in the novel as a whole, among the various works taken from the legend of the rebellious lovers, the only one that is attributed to an author is from the eighteenth century, a period that saw the introduction of legislation protecting intellectual property.24 In fact, while Charles Knight is presented “draped in his position as a writer” (id.), the Frenchman, as a man of the Middle Ages – a period that ignores copyright – attaches little importance to the signature of the work to which he intends to contribute, as the very terms of the pact he submits to the playwright show: In exchange for his service, for which he would receive no remuneration or demand any credit, he asked to be introduced to his brother captain so that he could go with him to the very place where he had met this inspired picker [...]. [En échange de sa prestation, pour laquelle il ne percevrait aucune rétribution ni n’exigerait aucun crédit, il demandait à être présenté à son frère capitaine afin de partir avec lui sur le lieu même où il avait rencontré cette cueilleuse si inspirée […]. p. 167] Nevertheless, although he does not recognize himself as an author, our protagonist functions as an authority: he attests to the truthfulness of the story told in the play, helps to shape the legend about his couple, and validates one version of it. And this, it seems, is what is essential in the eyes of the person who, from “co-author” (p. 176) becomes character once the new play is completed, while Knight is consistently referred to as the author: The author’ ’s farewells to his character were more moving than expected; their secret pact had created the same 24 For

example, in France from 1793. See Bernard Edelman, La propriété littéraire et artistique (Paris: PUF, 2008 [1989]), 34. 198

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uneasiness in each of them, as if they had transgressed some sacred law of artistic genesis [...]. But this pact knew no precedent and would not be emulated, and no matter where the text originated, only the laughter and tears that it would arouse for centuries to come counted. [Les adieux de l’auteur à son personnage furent plus poignants que prévu ; leur pacte secret avait créé en chacun d’eux un même malaise, comme s’ils avaient transgressé quelque loi sacrée de la genèse artistique […]. Mais ce pactelà ne connaissait aucun précédent et ne ferait aucun émule, et peu importait l’origine de ce texte, seuls comptaient les rires et les larmes qu’il allait susciter pour les siècles à venir. p. 182] Higher than vain personal glory, the purpose of the anonymous lover is to entertain and edify future generations. His approach thus joins that of his beloved when, stranded in a small village in Thailand, she begins to write her memoirs. Not knowing the local language, but nevertheless feeling the need to tell her story, the wife leaves a small autobiographical volume in French to the village women who took her in, in the hope that one day someone would be able to decipher its contents and make her experience known: ““Such was the vocation of this document: to record the truth of their story so that others might be inspired by it”” [« [T]elle était la vocation de ce document : consigner la vérité de leur histoire pour que d’autres s’en inspirent », p. 80]. It is therefore a conscious and deliberate desire to pass on an experience that drives the French lovers: beyond their individual quest, they seek to make a mark, to touch the human community by recounting the story of their lives, which will be disseminated through multiple transmission channels. It means that, even if their story is put on paper, they conserve their anonymous identity as storytellers. B. Theatrical Performance or Role Reversal When, following a new leap in time, the French find themselves in the contemporary era, they are given the opportunity to see the result of the husband’s collaboration with Charles Knight. Indeed, while the lovers are on the run across the United States, a performance of Les mariés malgré 199

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eux is announced in the city where they are stopping off. Despite the risk involved, the couple goes to the Chicago Theatre to attend. If, from the point of view of the diegetic chronology, this episode takes place towards the end of the journey of the rebellious lovers, it corresponds, in Benacquista’s narrative setting, to the novel’s opening scene. From the outset, the theatrical performance, which the heroes attend as spectators, is shown as a pivotal moment when the boundaries – between fiction and reality, between past and present – become permeable: “Reality slowly vacillates towards another time, that of the tale, where anything can happen [...]” [« Le réel vacille lentement vers un autre temps, celui du conte, où tout peut advenir […] », p. 14]. It is significant that this fusion of worlds and this blending of temporalities takes place through stage representation: combining orality and textuality, the dramatic genre constitutes the privileged place of hybridity. Its dual written and oral component also places theatre at the crossroads of the practices through which the artistic elaboration of the legend of our heroes was forged. It is therefore easy to understand why those concerned are curious to see and listen to a synthesis of these practices,25 and why they are tempted, during this suspended, timeless moment, to allow themselves a rare moment of passivity by delegating their roles to their performers. However, the respite will be of short duration. By concretizing one of its infinite potential modalities of realization, the theatrical performance leads to a re-actualization of the work, thus perpetuating the mouvance and the creative process. In this case, this renewal takes place both through the interpretation of the actors and through the public’s participation, on which the creative potential will move. Indeed, during the performance, the outlaws are recognized among the spectators and soon have to flee from the forces of law and order, whose irruption disrupts the course of the performance: “Suddenly the stage becomes the hall and the hall becomes the stage All the more so as our medieval protagonists have been theatre-lovers ever since they had the opportunity, in their own time, to attend a performance by actors: “On their way home, they gave thanks to that handful of illuminated people who, in immemorial times, had invented theatre. [...] They promised themselves that they would not miss any of the next shows, and even if they had to walk all day long, it was a small price to pay for their delight” (« Sur le chemin du retour, ils rendirent grâce à cette poignée d’illuminés qui, en des temps immémoriaux, avaient inventé le théâtre. […] Ils se promirent de ne rien rater des prochains spectacles, quitte à marcher tout le jour durant, c’était bien peu cher payé pour le ravissement qu’ils en tiraient », p. 39-40). 25

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when armed men emerge from the floor [...]” [« Soudain la scène devient la salle et la salle devient la scène quand du parterre surgissent des hommes armés […] » p. 71]. It is then that the audience, moved by “the power of the tale” (p. 72), with the same enthusiasm, takes up the cause of the runaways, whom they symbolically identify with the heroes of the play, without being able to suspect that the two couples are actually one and the same: We then hear the whistles of the audience, silhouettes rise up here and there, as if this classic of the English repertoire was taking a turn that nobody wants; we have witnessed the sad destiny of the condemned, the hateful king, the gallows, the executioner, the people who exalt themselves with their death. Tonight they will be given a chance. And rare are the opportunities for spectators who have come to see a play to rewrite its ending. [On entend alors les sifflets du public, des silhouettes se dressent çà et là, comme si ce classique du répertoire anglais prenait un tour dont personne ne veut ; on a assisté à la triste destinée des condamnés, le roi haineux, le gibet, le bourreau, le peuple qui s’exalte de leur mise à mort. Ce soir on leur laissera une chance. Et rares sont les occasions pour des spectateurs venus assister à une pièce d’en réécrire la fin. p. 71-72] Although it also concerns the actors in the play,26 this reversal of roles and situations cannot fail to evoke in the medievalist reader of Romanesque a kind of illustration taken to the extreme of the notion of the “accomplice listener” [« auditeur complice »]27 that Paul Zumthor poses in relation to the medieval work, of which the “listener-spectator” [« l’auditeur-spectateur »] would be “in some way a co-author” [« en quelque manière coauteur »].28 Indeed, according to the scholar, “the performed work is […] a dialogue, even if, more often than not, only one of the participants has the floor” [« [l]’œuvre performée est […] dialogue, “The two main actors, spectators in turn, applaud the runaways” [« Les deux acteurs principaux, spectateurs à leur tour, applaudissent les fuyards », p. 72]. 27 See Zumthor, La Lettre, 245-268. 28 Ibid., 249. 26

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même si, le plus souvent, un seul des participants a la parole »].29 This is indeed a collective and participatory creation, in which each contributor takes on different roles in turn. The episode of the performance at the Chicago Theatre allows relaunching the adventure of our heroes, who, with the help of the audience, manage to escape from the police force and then go on the run again. But if this chosen audience functions as an adjuvant for the runaway couple, the same will not be true outside the privileged space of the theatre. The news of the escape of the outlaws spreads with the lightning speed of the modern media; certainly, the story of the mysterious couple most often arouses sympathy, but very quickly the popular enthusiasm is so overwhelming that it becomes detrimental to the heroes, who have all the trouble in the world to pass incognito: A long time ago, the lovers were careful to pass on their history. Today they would give everything so that their traces fade away as if by magic, in memories and in writing. [Bien loin est le temps où les amants veillaient à transmettre leur histoire. Aujourd’hui ils donneraient tout pour que leurs traces s’effacent comme par enchantement, dans les mémoires et dans les écrits. p. 91] While the separated lovers have told and spread their story extensively in order to progress in their quest for each other, once reunited, they are overwhelmed by the extent of the media rumour about them, just as they were victims of the village rumour in their “first life.” The community had, in fact, granted itself the right to take hold of their romance, making public what should have remained private, while the poacher and the gatherer aspired to nothing more than to live out their nascent love discreetly; thus they were led to their downfall. In contemporary times, the facts repeat themselves to some extent, as the passionate lovers find themselves dispossessed of their history by a vast network of strangers, as we have seen. The amplification and popular appropriation of their personal history will eventually take them away from life once again. But the two rebels have already braved the afterlife. And no doubt the legend will survive them.

29

Ibid., 248. 202

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IV. L’amour A. Love and Romanesque Does love define the novel as a genre? The answer to this question is not simple. It depends on when one is asking it. According to René Girard,30 the modern novel begins with the Don Quichotte of Cervantes. In this case, the answer would be no, since Cervantes’s novel is far from being a love story. Rabelais’s novels, more drastically, seem to exclude love from their narratives: neither Pantagruel, nor Gargantua or the Tiers Livre contain a real love story. One could even suppose that Rabelais wrote these texts against this topic. In fact, it is possible that both authors are reacting against the trend that dominated writings for at least four centuries: since the twelfth century, love and the novel seem inseparable. The history of literature considers this union as the essence of what makes the novel and sees in one the origin of the other. We observe, for example, that love as a theme is gaining in importance between the three “romans antiques”: the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d’Eneas, and the Roman de Troie. If the first one does not include any real love affair in its tale, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, who wrote his Roman de Troie around 1165, includes many couples in it. Even the Roman d’Eneas describes how love bounds Eneas, the hero, to Lavinia. Their feelings are described with many details that remembered the lyrics of the troubadours and what they called fin’amor. Love, as a criterion, seems to be valid even when we look at ancient Greek production. In his Introduction to the translations he provided for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection, Pierre Grimal uses it when he is describing the love affairs of his novels.31 At one point, he even compares the relationship between two young Greek lovers to that of Tristan and Isolde: Callirhoé, proud and concealed, does she not know, more feminine than Isolde, how to write to her second husband, when she has found her Tristan, and in a few lines of an apparent naivety, to make him hear the right note of a tenderness that is not ennobled by her ardour for Chéréas? 30 31

René Girard, Mensonge romantique, op. cit. See Romans grecs et latins, trans. Pierre Grimal (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), XX. 203

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[Callirhoé, fière et dissimulée, ne sait-elle pas, plus féminine qu’Yseult, écrire à son second époux, alors qu’elle a retrouvé son Tristan, et, en quelques lignes d’une apparente naïveté, lui faire entendre la note juste d’une tendresse que n’anoblit pas l’ardeur de sa passion pour Chéréas ?] For the purpose of his demonstration, Pierre Grimal commits a chronological error: on the one hand, he implicitly suggests that the Greek novel is the origin of its medieval version, but, on the other hand, he describes the antique love with the aid of a medieval and famous example, as if it could have influenced the antique author. In doing so, Pierre Grimal illustrates how easily some medieval model of love, culturally well known, could serve anachronically as examples to explain to a modern reader what was love at a different time. In any case, it seems that love and the novel evolved together in the Middle Ages and that it would be difficult to find many examples where love did not play an important role. Affects and Romanesque We have already seen that Jean-Marie Schaeffer tried to define the romanesque using four criteria. The first gives great importance to affects, passions, et feelings. He adds that the feelings often appear in a very intense way. In saying that, he suggests that love, and more precisely, passion, defines what constitutes a romantic theme. Giving to his text the title Romanesque, Tonino Benacquista ascribes it to novel as genre, but to a specific kind of novel which would be itself “romanesque,” that is to say, a novel of a novel, given that “romanesque” and novel (in French), are very close. In both cases, love is central to the novel and the “romanesque.” The story of Romanesque will not contradict this statement: love irrigates it and appears from the very beginning until the end as a passion. The structure of the text underlines the importance of this theme since the story opens with the meeting of the two protagonists: One day, a man on his way to the city to negotiate the fruit of his poaching ran into a woman venturing into the forest to fill her basket with berries (…). But suddenly, seeing the other’s silhouette in the distance, their blood freezes, their footsteps waver. A vertigo that lasts less than a minute, the 204

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time for them to break with the world before, because never again will such an opportunity to get rid of the burdens of the mind arise. [Un jour, un homme qui se rendait à la ville pour négocier le fruit de son braconnage croisa une femme qui s’aventurait dans la forêt pour y remplir son panier de baies (…). Masi soudain, en apercevant au loin la silhouette de l’autre, leur sang se glace, leur pas vacille. Un vertige qui dure moins d’une minute, le temps pour eux de rompre avec le monde d’avant, car plus jamais pareille occasion de se débarrasser des fardeaux de l’esprit ne se représentera. p. 19-20] Likewise, the story ends – or begins over again – in the Nothingness into which they have been thrown: the image of a heart that starts beating again indicates it. The heart is here not only the principle of life but the seat of feelings (p. 272). Between these points, love gives form to the tale. In Benacquista’s story, love is even twice “romanesque:” first, because it is involved in a novel which takes place, presumably, in the wake of those medieval novels which consider love as their main theme: Tristan and Iseut, the Knight of the Cart of Chrétien de Troyes, but also more recent texts such as the Voir Dit of Guillaume de Machaut or the allegorical Book of the Heart, written by René d’Anjou in the fifteenth century. Yet love is also “romanesque” because of the nature of the feeling described. On the one hand, the lovers never have doubts about each other even when they suffer, and most of all because it is the only feeling in the text. Tonino Benacquista’s novel is not devoid of feelings such as anger, envy, jealousy, or hate, but all these affects do not play a crucial role in Romanesque, as does love. And, above all, they do not interfere with its progress. B. Love as Medievalism Tonino Benacquista’s novel is based on two principles: on the one hand, it tells a story of love which begins in the Middle Ages when a woman meets a man in the forest; on the other hand, this story does not end in the Middle Ages, but continues until the twenty-first century. This has two consequences: it strongly connects love and the Middle Ages, and it 205

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creates a link between love and Medievalism. We will consider these two aspects one after the other. Love and the Middle Ages The already mentioned quotation of Charles Seignobos makes a link between an epoch and a feeling. In fact, the twelfth century has usually been seen as a time of change on different levels. A cultural renewal is often said to take place at this time; economic transformations are observed, as well as a new kind of relationship between men and women. It is during this century, too, that literature in vernacular begins to be written, first in France, then in other European countries. However, something troubling appears in Seignobos’s statement. It is said that love was invented in the twelfth century as if the feeling itself did not exist before. This strange idea has persisted until very recently, as Simon Gaunt pointed out: It has been a common place in medieval studies since the last century that courtly literature simultaneously “discovers” the individual, woman, and love.32 In other words, Charles Seignobos’s assertion would lead us to think that human beings discovered a new feeling, that is, love, only in the twelfth century. It is presumed that it is less a question of feeling than a matter of how people describe and speak about love. If there is any invention at all, it should most likely be that of a new discourse of love than of love itself. What is important for us is based on the fact that at a certain point in the twelfth century one talked about love in a very different way. Even if Tonino Benacquista does not try to recreate the twelfth century with all its details and peculiarities, several clues lead us to this period. The Middle Ages he describes is mainly global and elusive: we have already seen that it is a time where Kings wore nicknames (Louis the Vertuous, p. 16); we discover that at this time people write on parchment with a quill pen; hunger, poverty, and misery are the rule (p. 17-19). The author even specifies, soon after the representation of Les mariés malgré eux, that the meeting of the lovers takes place “ten centuries earlier” (p. 14), i.e., Cf. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71. 32

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during the eleventh century. Another allusion to this century is made later, at the end of the story (p. 233). All these clues suggest that the Middle Ages is very much connected with the first love story. The theme of love then is rooted in a time that critics refer to as the moment where new social relationships between people emerge, and where the fin’amor, this new discourse on love, is created, first in the poems of troubadours, then in novels.33 Love and Medievalism The fact that love between the French lovers took place in the Middle Age is of the utmost importance to us. With the help of fiction, or “merveilleux,” as it is called in medieval stories, love travels through time and reappears twice in the narrative: firstly, driven out of Paradise by God himself, the lovers resurface in 1721; then, guided by the Devil, they land in France in the twenty-first century, at the very place where they had met. More than a simple theme, love is therefore the same feeling from the beginning to the end of the novel. Moreover, it is experienced by the same protagonists throughout the story. If time and space change in the meantime, the passion remains the same. The consequences of such a scenario are that love is not only born in the eleventh century, but that it is the same feeling that we experiment today. Time is not the only dimension to prove that. Space confirms its permanence. Separated by thousands of miles on the globe, the lovers tell their story to different people and each time it is well received, even with empathy. The example of the Frenchman is a good illustration of this aspect. Prisoner of a South American tribe, he tells his story which is translated by a Spanish man who is also a prisoner. The distance between the history of the Frenchman and the people who listen to him is threefold: it involves time, firstly, because the love affair is already a six hundred years old story; then, space separates the audience from what they are listening to, as it all began in France; eventually, because it has to be Among many references, one could read: Maurice Accarie, “Courtoisie, fine amor et amour courtois. La course à la marginalité dans la civilisation féodale,” in Marginalité et littérature. Hommage à Christine Martineau-Génieys, eds. Maurice Accarie, Jean-Guy Gouttebroze et Eliane Kotler, (Nice: Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, 2001), 1-28. 33

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translated from one language to another, the distance is a question of culture too. Nevertheless, despite the changes that may result from the translation, the audience is moved by it. Identically, the same reception occurs when lovers are in the twentyfirst century. Internet, social networks are fascinated by their history and relay all incidents as soon as they occur. Eventually, love in Romanesque acquires a sort of universal dimension. And even if love is taken in the “mouvance” of its transmission, it remains unchanged from the beginning to the end of the novel. Linked to its medieval origin, it becomes somehow the essence of medievalism in this text: it is at the same time the subject of the novel, a feeling born in the Middle Ages and which dominates the story, and an affect that travels through space and times without difficulty and is perceived unanimously by all those who are aware of it. C. Love Models We have not yet attempted to define what kind of love or discourse on love was born in the twelfth century. The “medieval” love shared by the protagonists described above not only originated in the Middle Ages, but resembles different models or examples borrowed from literature. Then, in order to better understand what it is made of, we will try, on the one hand, to compare the feeling with that of literary models, and, on the other, with what is called “courtly love” since the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, it should be necessary to find out what is the specificity of the love described by Tonino Benacquista. Intertextualities Our goal here is not to find all the models hidden behind Tonino Benacquista’s lovers. But it seems obvious that some famous examples may have influenced him in the writing of Romanesque. First of all, the story seems to be constructed according to a scheme borrowed from certain medieval texts. Like Romanesque, these texts tell us a love story in a less usual way. In any of these examples, the love affair is not the conclusion of the story, but its beginning. Then, after a time of happiness, the lovers are separated from each other by chance or by a character who acts against them, and most of the story tells us how the

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lovers manage to find each other, which is the end of the novel. We find this pattern in what are the so-called “romans idylliques.”34 Then, on both occasions, at the beginning and the end of the novel, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, written by Ovid, inspired a scene to Tonino Benacquista. Indeed, prisoners of the king of France, we find the lovers separated by a wall, like the young lovers: Huddled against the wall, the lovers talked to each other without hearing each other. Resigned to the idea of being locked up with the insane, their fellow inmates ended up falling asleep. [Blottis contre le mur qui les séparait, les amants se parlaient sans s’entendre. Résignés à l’idée d’être enfermés avec des aliénés, leurs codétenus finirent par s’endormir. p. 49] If their destiny differs from that of the ancient lovers who commit suicide, the modern lovers are forced to flee their home to find a place, even a temporary one, where to live their love. But, in this case, the scene in prison is the only point where the two stories come together. Yet, the most obvious example that might come to the mind of readers is that of Tristan and Isolde. Not only is their love one of the best-known examples among medieval stories, but their story shares more than one detail with that of the lovers in Romanesque. As for Tristan and Isolde, their love also forces them to flee the society in which they live, be it their small village, the France of the Middle Ages, or the modern society of the twenty-first century. The forest is another detail that brings the two stories together. It is known that Tristan and Isolde found refuge in the Morois forest after fleeing the court of King Mark. There, they live a life very different from their own. They have to hunt for food, they only have water to drink and, more importantly for the time, they never eat bread.35 In fact, they live more like animals than human beings. That is not the case for the modern lovers. At the beginning, the story tells us that she picks berries in the forest and that he is a poacher. Their See, in particular, Mirrha Lot-Borodine, Le roman idyllique au Moyen Âge (Paris: Picard, 1913). 35 See Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Aliments symboliques et symbolique de la table dans les romans arthuriens (XIIe-XIIIe siècles),” Annales ESC 47 (1992): 561-594. 34

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activities bring them closer to the forest and it is in the forest that they think they will find a refuge when the devil sends them back on earth, ironically, at the very place where they first met. But the forest has changed a lot since the eleventh century and it can no longer provide them food and security, as it used to do in those days. What all these models from the medieval literature teach us is not only that all of them play a role in this story, but that they are contemporaneous with the feeling that the lovers share and that was born at some point in the twelfth century. In fact, it is the literature of this century that sets up codes for love and a new discourse about love, creating a new way of talking about love that is still ours – at least in part – in the twenty-first century. But what they also point out is that, like the Middle Ages itself, none of them is the perfect example of what we read in Romanesque. Many details are absent in the modern story: for example, the lovers are older than the heroes of the romans idylliques who, by the way, are usually of a nobler rank, sons or daughters of emperors or kings; the love potion of Tristan and Isolde has no place in Romanesque and, above all, the French lovers stubbornly refuse to die. Critical Models Amor est passio quaedam innata ex visione procedens.36 This definition of love written by André le Chapelain in the last quarter of the twelfth century could apply to our story, since it starts in the forest, when the lovers see each other for the first time. More generally, it is the way in which a large part of medieval lovers falls in love. Chrétien de Troyes, among other writers, will refine this episode by imagining that an arrow made in the image of a young woman’s body enters the eye of her lover and hits his heart without causing injury.37 Guillaume de Lorris, on the other hand, in his allegorical Roman de la Rose, will not imagine another scenario, both taking their inspiration from Ovid’s Art of Love.38 Quoted by Jean-Yves Tilliette in “‘Amor est passio quaedam innata ex visione procedens’. Amour et vision dans le Tractatus amoris d’André le Chapelain,” Micrologus 6 (“La visione e lo sguardo nel Medio Evo/View and vision in the Middle Ages (II”) (1998) 187-200. 37 It is in Cliges, his second novel, that Chrétien de Troyes describes his heroine in this way. 38 See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. F. Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1973). 36

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In his own way, André le Chapelain theorizes what the troubadours had recently invented in their poems, this new discourse of love and its rituals. However, we will be more interested here in another theory, the one conceived of by Gaston Paris in 1883. For the first time, Gaston Paris was introducing a new terminology that he called “courtly love.” It would be difficult to do without it today when talking about sentimental relationships in medieval literature. We would now like to compare love in Romanesque with courtly love as defined by Paris. Commenting on Chrétien de Troyes’ Knight of the cart, the French scholar draws three criteria from it: love is adulterous, it involves a woman who dominates her lover even socially, and, finally, the knight lover tries to attract the attention of his lady by accomplishing feats that will help to increase her feelings and the courage of the beloved. During the twentieth century, others return to Paris’s concept of courtly love. They tried to shed light on aspects neglected by Paris, such as the discursive dimension of the phenomenon, or the fact that medieval expressions already existed at the time, like corteisie or fin’amor, to designate these social and sentimental relationships; some of them have even tried to direct this new love towards a more spiritual, even religious horizon.39 But everything they’ve developed comes from Paris’s theory. Neither adultery, nor social inequality can link Romanesque and courtly love. The triangular relationship that usually ties together the wife, her husband, and her lover (for example, Guenever, Arthur, and Lancelot), plays no role in the novel. The social level of the French protagonists is not unbalanced as it should be if their relationship would resemble that of courtly lovers. The woman never becomes the lady of her poach lover. What is left is perhaps the dialectical dimension of courtly love, that is, the dynamism between “armes et amour.”40 Here again, equality is at stake, since the woman and the man must face dangers and challenges upon their return to France, which contradicts the courtly model.

In the chronological order, we refer to : Rudiger Schnell, « L’amour courtois en tant que discours courtois sur l’amour », Romania 110 (1989) 72-126 and 331-363 ; Maurice Accarie, art. cit. and Jean Frappier, « Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les littératures d’oc et d’oïl au XIIe siècle », Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 2 (1959), 135-156. 40 The translation does not render the original: love and weapons. This pair of terms is used to express the dialectic between love and the exploits accomplished by the knightlover. 39

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It is therefore difficult to assert that love in Romanesque resembles courtly love as defined by Gaston Paris. On the other hand, no example from medieval literature seems to fit with the relationship shared by French lovers. One detail, however, could explain why Tonino Benacquista decided to situate the beginning of his novel in the Middle ages. Love and Transgression We have seen that adultery is one of the three criteria for identifying courtly love. Adultery has a double function in this case: it means that love cannot take place in matrimony, and, most importantly, that the lover must overcome an obstacle in order to obtain his lady’s favors. The result is that courtly love involves some kind of transgression. The story of Tristan and Isolde provides a very clear example of this aspect, as Claude Machabey-Besanceney41 points out: This passionate, irrational, asocial love calls for wandering: it is wandering, and condemns the two lovers to be cut off from the social body, and more particularly Tristan to decay. What the French lovers experience is very close to that. From the very beginning, they become the center of attention and their passion raises questions from the people of their village who wonder what kind of bond binds them together: The villagers, all of whom had already experienced famine, wondered about the incredible temperance of these two, as if they were gaining in strength through privation. On the other hand, was it humanly possible to live like prisoners, without having to serve time or jailers to coerce them? And why were they not subjected to the natural law that any activity practiced to excess, including the most amiable such as gallant company, conversation, loitering, necessarily engenders boredom? [Les villageois, qui tous avaient connu la famine, s’interrogèrent sur l’incroyable tempérance de ces deux-là, See Claude Machabey-Besanceney, Le « martyr d’amour » dans les romans en vers de la seconde moitié du douzième à la fin du treizième siècle (Paris: Champion, 2012), p. 132 for the quotation. 41

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comme s’ils gagnaient en force au fil des privations. Par ailleurs, était-il humainement possible de vivre comme des prisonniers, sans peine à purger ni geôliers pour contraindre ? Et pourquoi n’étaient-ils pas soumis à cette loi naturelle qui veut que toute activité pratiquée à l’excès, y compris les plus aimables, comme la compagnie galante, la conversation, la flânerie, engendrât nécessairement l’ennui ? p. 23] The word prison transforms the lovers into some voluntary prisoners. It also makes them criminals. This becomes true when Louis le Vertueux throws them in jail, as he realized that they do not possess the powers he expected from them. He sentenced them to death. In the meantime, their behavior or their activities had already made them marginal. Consequently, Tonino Benacquista proclaims that a kind of continuity links medieval and modern loves in terms of their transgressive aspect. We have also seen that love in Romanesque was more a passion than an everyday feeling. This in turn informs the “romanesque” theme present in the novel, which, as has already been said, needs a kind of excess in order to exist. Eventually, Romanesque is a novel of love, an unconditional and absolute love which begins in the Middle Ages and lasts until the twenty-first century, making this feeling the very essence of medievalism. This leads us to a conclusion that may constitute at first sight some sort of paradox. We have observed that Romanesque is built on a powerful agent of transformation: the tale of the lovers is altered, rewritten, even translated from the moment they meet in the forest to the last tweet exchanged in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the love that the readers of Romanesque discover is also the result of a series of transformations with respect either to the literature of the time (that composed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) or to the model that critics have drawn from the same literature in order to “create” what they have called “courtly love.” In either case, a gap separates the affect of the lovers and their models. One detail, however, remains unchanged: the transgressive dimension. We can conclude that medievalism must rely on a stable base, a fixed element, in order to be able to go through all the other transformations and adaptations involved in its process.

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Bibliography Benacquista, Tonino. Romanesque. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. Dante. La Divine comédie, trad. Pier-Angelo Fiorentina. Paris: Lidis, 1992. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. F. Lecoy. Paris: Champion, 1973. Critical bibliography Accarie, Maurice. “Courtoisie, fine amor et amour courtois. La course à la marginalité dans la civilisation féodale.” In ed. Maurice Accarie, ed. Jean-Guy Gouttebroze et Eliane Kotler, Marginalité et littérature. Hommage à Christine Martineau-Génieys, 1-28. Nice: Université de NiceSophia Antipolis, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale, 361-378. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming of the Middle Ages.” In Travels in Hyper Reality, trans. William Weaver, 61-73. San Diego: Hartcourt, 1986. Edelman, Bernard. La propriété littéraire et artistique. Paris: PUF, 2008 [1989]. Frappier, Jean. “Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les littératures d’oc et d’oïl au XIIe siècle.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 2 (1959), 135-156. Gaunt, Simon. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Gingras, Francis. “La mauvaise langue et les lettres, statuts de la rumeur et de l’écrit à la naissance du roman (1150-1230).” Protée 32 (2004): 87-99. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Hachette, 2011. Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita. “Aliments symboliques et symbolique de la table dans les romans arthuriens (XIIe-XIIIe siècles).” Annales ESC 47 (1992): 561-594. Koble, Nathalie, Séguy, Mireille, ed. Passé présent. Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2009. Landerouin, Yves. La Critique créative, une autre façon de commenter les œuvres. Paris: Champion, 2016. Le Goff, Jacques. L’Imaginaire médiéval. Paris: Gallimard, 1991 [1985]. 214

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Lot Ferdinand. Étude sur le Lancelot en prose. Paris: Champion, 1918. Lot-Borodine, Mirrha. Le roman idyllique au Moyen Âge. Paris: Picard, 1913. Machabey-Besanceney, Claude. Le « martyr d’amour » dans les romans en vers de la seconde moitié du douzième à la fin du treizième siècle. Paris: Champion, 2012. Romans grecs et latins, trans. Pierre Grimal. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Roubaud, Jacques. Poésie, etcetera : ménage. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1995. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Le romanesque.” Vox Poetica (2002): 1-14, www.vox-poetica.org/t/articles/indexarticles.html (accessed Sept. 27, 2020). Schnell, Rudiger. “L’amour courtois en tant que discours courtois sur l’amour.” Romania 110 (1989): 72-126 and 331-363. Tilliette, Jean-Yves. “‘Amor est passio quaedam innata ex visione procedens’. Amour et vision dans le Tractatus amoris d’André le Chapelain.” Micrologus 6 (“La visione e lo sguardo nel Medio Evo/View and vision in the Middle Ages (II)” (1998): 187-200. Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Zumthor, Paul. La Lettre et la voix. Paris: Seuil, 1987.

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Medievalism, Philosophers, and Medievalists in the Twenty-First Century in Peru: From the Forgotten Image to New Perspectives Jean Christian Egoavil*

I. Introduction The main objective of this essay is to analyse the process of revaluation during this twenty-first century of medieval studies, especially philosophical studies, in Peru, since it is one of the least studied subjects in its intellectual history. This process has been long and has had to overcome the pejorative perspective created two centuries ago of a philosophy as obsolete as the European scholasticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In Peruvian intellectual circles there was also an unfavourable view of the Middle Ages. I refer to this view as an antimedieval perspective or a denial of a way of doing philosophy because it was inherited from the Middle Ages, although, paradoxically, many of the architectural constructions of that time – the scenes of the debates – were buildings of clear neo-Gothic inspiration. In other words, the beginnings of Peruvian neo-medievalism are to be found in the walls of the splendid neo-gothic houses that are very popular throughout the country. However, in this essay, I will focus on the space of medieval (or neo-medieval) ideas studied with a special interest in twenty-first century Peru. This essay consists of three parts. The first part analyses the main aspects that contributed to the revaluation of the philosophy of the Middle Ages in the twenty-first century in Peru. It highlights the value of philosophers during the Peruvian viceroyalty and their medieval and *

University of the Pacific, Indian Studies Project, Peru.

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scholastic connections. In the second part, the roots of the ignorance (or interruptus) of the philosophical Middle Ages in Peru are analysed, especially the Bourbon reforms and the intellectuals of the Generation of the Nineteenth Century (Generación del Novecientos). Finally, the third part systematises the main contributions of scholars to the understanding of the Middle Ages in terms of a more objective understanding of our intellectual history, without neglecting the very interesting fact of the popular presence of neo-gothic architecture in Peru as the most remote beginning of Peruvian neo-medievalism. II. The Medieval Heritage in the Peruvian Philosophical Thought Interest in medieval studies in Peru, especially from a philosophical perspective, is becoming increasingly relevant. Unlike historical, cultural, literary,1 artistic,2 legal,3 etc., studies on the philosophical relationship between Peru and the Middle Ages have a very recent history. Despite the prejudices that still persist against medieval philosophy (difficult, obscure, monothematic, not important, etc.), in recent years, interest in the recognition of the heritage of the Middle Ages in our historical roots, especially philosophical ones, has increased considerably, so that publications and events such as seminars, conferences, and congresses are more recurrent today. The main reason for this sustained interest in the knowledge of medieval philosophy lies in the need to know and acknowledge an important part of our philosophical roots together with the (indigenous) Andean cultural foundations. The medieval heritage was brought to Peru by Hispanic intellectuals in the 16th century, those men of Spanish culture of the Golden Age. The philosophical Middle Ages in Peru were consolidated in the 17th century through the pedagogical action of missionaries and members of the most important religious orders. The Dominicans brought the immense theological and philosophical work of La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinal, ed. Teodoro Hampe, (Lima: UNMSM. Fondo Editorial, 1999). 2 F, Stastny, Síntomas medievales en el barroco americano (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994). 3 G. Flórez, “El comercio en el Derecho Indiano: Entre el Medioevo y el mundo moderno,” Illapa. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales año 1 (2008): 115-128. 1

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St. Thomas Aquinas,4 the Augustinians, the vast work of St. Augustine of Hippo,5 doctor of the Church. For their part, the Mercedarians adhered to Thomistic thought,6 while the Franciscans7 transferred to American lands the debate between the thought of St. Bonaventure (1217-1274) and the novel philosophical perspective of John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and William of Ockham (1285-1347); finally, the Jesuits8 arrived in Peru with the recent works of Francisco Suarez (15481617). All this philosophical novelty brought from Spain was mediated and renewed by a reform drive at the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. This movement was known as the “Second Scholastic”9 [Segunda Escolástica],10 originated in the Spanish Renaissance environment,11 and was the vehicle by which the doctrines of the great scholastic masters arrived in Peru. However, it is important to note that what was produced in the Peruvian viceroyalty is something different, something proper, in spite of its medieval foundations, so, without going too deep into the nomenclature with which the Peruvian philosophy of this period is recognized, I prefer to use the term viceroyalty philosophy instead of scholastica colonialis or American scholastics. The research carried out by outstanding specialists such as Walter Redmond12 and María Luisa Rivara13 in the last decades has shown that the philosophy developed in the Peruvian viceroyalty was not only heir G. Lohmann Villena, “Los dominicos en la vida cultural y académica del Perú en el siglo XVI,” Dominicos Y El Nuevo Mundo: Actas Del II Congreso Internacional, (1990): 403-32. 5 A. Villarejo, Los agustinos en el Perú, 1548-1965 (Lima: Ed. Ausonia, 1965). 6 S. Aparicio, La orden de la Merced en el Perú: estudos históricos (Cuzco: Provincia Mercedaria del Perú, 2001). 7 A. Tibesar, Comienzos de los Franciscanos en el Perú (Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1991). 8 J. Klaiber, Los jesuítas en América Ltina, 1549-2000: 450 años de inculturación, defensa de los derechos humanos y testimonio profético (Lima: Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 2007). 9 C. Giacon, La seconda scolastica (Milano: Bocca, 1944). 10 L. De Boni and T. Soares, “A segunda escolástica,” Veritas: revista de filosofia 54, 3 (2009): 13-192. 11 M. Bataillon, Erasmo y España: estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950). 12 W. Redmond, La lógica en el Virreinato del Perú: A través de las obras de Juan Espinoza Medrano (1668) e Isidoro de Celis (1787) (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1998). 13 M. Rivara de Tuesta, Pensamiento prehispánico y filosofía colonial en el Perú (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000a). 4

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to the immense doctrinal corpus of the Middle Ages, but it has also managed to organise an authentic philosophy based on it, driven, as is natural, by the social, political, and historical circumstances in which the viceroyalty’s thinkers lived and developed their theories. Thus, the medieval foundations are inserted in that long and extensive cultural movement known as the translatio studiorum or the process of translation and transmission14 of the Greek philosophical doctrines to the Western world during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.15 The triumph of the professors of Arts at the University of Paris and the consequent condemnation by Bishop Etienne Tempier in 127716 of a set of theses considered heretical did not mean the end of philosophy. Instead, it continued to develop at the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares during the Spanish Golden Age, and then projected into America, especially at the universities of Mexico and Lima (Universidad Real y Pontificia de San Marcos, founded in 1551 by royal decree and recognised in 1571 by the papal bull).17 Therefore, the great philosophical debates in the two American viceroyalties took place on the philosophical heritage of the Middle Ages, the doctrinal innovations of the Hispanic Golden Age, and the special situation of the Indian novelty. The sixteenth century, for example, was characterised by the dispute over the anthropological, intellectual, and moral status of the Indians. The positions in question were those of Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda.18 On the other hand, in the seventeenth century, driven by the Indian turn or the need for a new evangelisation and indoctrination of the Peruvian territory, the question of understanding T. Gregogry, “Translatio Studiorum.” In Translatio Studiorum, Ancient, Medieval and Modern Bearers of Intellectual History, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 1-24. 15 F. León Florido, “Translatio Studiorum, traslado de los libros y diálogo de las civilizaciones en la Edad Media,” Revista General de Informacion y documentación, 15, 2 (2005), 51-77. 16 J. Wippel, “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977): 169–201. A. De Libera, “Philosophie et censure. Remarques sur la crise universitaire parisienne de 1270–1277,” in: Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter ?, eds. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998) 71–89. 17 L. Eguiguren, Alma Mater, orígenes de la Universidad de San Marcos (1551-1579) (Lima, UNMSM, 1939). L. Eguiguren, Diccionario histórico cronología de la Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Marcos y sus colegios, crónica e investigación (Lima, imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1949). 18L. Hanke, La humanidad es una: estudio acerca de la querella que sobre la capacidad intelectual y religiosa de los indígenas americanos sostuvieron en 1550 Bartolomé de las Casas y Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985). 14

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between Hispanic and indigenous minds arose, so that the philosophical debate turned towards a rethinking of the great medieval logical-linguistic doctrines. The acknowledgement of the philosophical heritage of the Middle Ages in America was a slow and gradual movement. Silvio Zavala19 and José Gaos,20 for example, initiated in Mexico a novel way of studying the relations between the philosophy of the Middle Ages and the foundations of Mexican thought. This effort was continued by Mauricio Beuchot,21 whose main publications glimpse a new perspective on medieval and viceregal relations. In the case of South America, the works of David García Baca22 and his interest in the knowledge of the roots of the philosophical heritage of the territories of Venezuela and Colombia (regions that had been part of the viceroyalty of Peru during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and part of the eighteeth centuries) stand out. Likewise, it is important to highlight the studies of Guillermo Furlong23 for the case of the viceroyalty of La Plata (current Argentina) and the birth of Argentinean philosophical thought. Finally, the researches and extensive monographs of José Toribio Medina24 are a very important source when recognizing the medieval component in our philosophical and cultural formation. All these scholars systematised their perspectives in the middle of the twentieth century, so that they constitute an important antecedent prior to the moment of the rise in favour of medieval studies in the twenty-first century. The case of the medieval heritage in the philosophical history of Peru, as I said, has been forged in parallel with the need for an understanding of the history of viceregal philosophy. The efforts of specialists such as Walter Redmond25 and María Luisa Rivara are fundamental.26 Their S. Zavala, Ensayos iberoamericanos (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1993). S. Zavala, Estudios indianos (México: Colegio Nacional, 1948). 20 J. Gaos, En torno a la filosofía mexicana (Mexico: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1980). 21 M. Beuchot, Historia de la filosofía en el México colonial (Barcelona: Herder, 1997). 22 J. García Bacca, Antología del pensamiento filosófico venezolano (siglos XVII-XVIII) (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, 1954). J, García Bacca, Antología del pensamiento en Colombia (siglos XVII-XVIII) (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1955). 23 G. Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía en el Río de la Plata (entre 1536 y 1810) (Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1952). 24 J. Medina, La imprenta en Lima (1568-1824) (Santiago de Chile: José Toribio Medina, 1965). 25 Redmond, La lógica en el Virreinato del Perú, 25. 26 Rivara de Tuesta, Pensamiento prehispánico y filosofía colonial en el Perú, 150. 19

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publications give an account of the enormous wealth of medieval culture, especially of the great masters of scholasticism, present in the proposals of the viceregal philosophers. Based on the results and inspired by their works, an increasing number of philosophers and historians interested in the Middle Ages are being trained in the university and academic environment in Peru. There is no doubt about the historiographic recognition of the medieval matrix in our cultural fabric.27 Likewise, thanks to the renewal of medieval studies in recent decades,28 it is even possible to read much of our intellectual history embedded in medieval history. To deny this is to deny a good part of our foundations. A genuine search for our philosophical history requires knowledge of the Middle Ages and their main contributions to the constitution of our philosophy. However, this recognition, as I said, is a recent process (last two decades) that has been slowly forged in a constant struggle against the antiphilosophical perspective that discredits the Middle Ages by means of a distorted vision. At what point, then, was the image of the Middle Ages distorted in our philosophical culture? The answer, apparently easy, requires a calm study and historical account. How the Middle Ages were banished from our discourse by denying it any heritage. This problem undoubtedly leads us to investigate its roots in two key moments: the end of the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon reforms were implemented, and the end of the nineteenth century, when a cultural movement called the “Generation of the Nineteenth Century” emerged in Peru, inspired to a large extent by the philosophical ideas of Comte’s positivism, which were totally opposed to the medieval and viceroyalty, so that throughout the twentieth century the history of viceroyalty in Peru would be identified as “our Middle Ages.”29

C. Verlinden, Précédents médiévaux de la Colonie en Amérique (México: I.P.G.H., 1954). L. Weckmann, La herencia medieval de México (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984). 28 J. Le Goff, La Civilización del Occidente medieval (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999). G. Duby, Hombres y estructuras de la Edad Media (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2000). J. Huizinga, El otoño de la Edad Media: estudios sobre la forma de la vida y del espíritu durante los siglos XIV y XV en Francia y en los Países Bajos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001). 29 F. Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú (Lima: UNMSM, 1909) 27

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III. A Gap in the Medieval Heritage of Peru’s Intellectual History A. The “Carolinos” and an Abrupt Break From the foundation of the University of San Marcos, in 1551, and its papal recognition in 1571, especially since the Toledo reforms, until the end of the eighteenth century, there was a constant philosophical work inspired by the main scholastic topics discussed and brought to Peru by the Spaniards during Golden Age.30 The Peruvian philosophers of that time first thought and wrote under medieval models during the sixteenth century. This changed during the seventeenth century, turning towards their own way of doing philosophy, reflected in the novelty of their logical-linguistic approach, given the interest in the Indian languages, and in the novelty of shaping it through the elaboration of courses (Cursus), either Cursus Philosophicus or Cursus Theologicus. This genuine movement of making philosophy in the Peruvian viceroyalty on the foundations of the medieval heritage was abruptly interrupted by political causes in the dynastic succession of the Spanish Crown. The Habsburg dynasty, of Austrian and German origin, ceded power to the Bourbon dynasty, of French origin, after a long and intense political, military, and ideological dispute. The Bourbons, in comparison with their Austrian counterparts, more clearly represented European enlightened absolutism, so that the Bourbon reforms implemented for the entire Hispanic American monarchy meant for philosophy the beginning of the great interruptus of its medieval scholastic roots, so that, with the passing of time, the rejection of the viceroyalty was identified with a rejection of the medieval. In essence, the Bourbon reforms were a set of measures promoted by King Carlos III’s ministers,31 both for Spain and for his SpanishAmerican possessions, with the aim of boosting the geopolitical presence of the Hispanic crown. In this sense, as part of these measures, the university reform was implemented with an enlightened character in all J. Fuertes, M. Lázaro and I. Zorroza, Mística y filosofía en el Siglo de Oro (Pamplona, EUNSA: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2017). 31 The main theoretical background to these reforms was written by the French Enlightenment. They include works such as De la manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les BellesLettres of Charles Rollin in 1755 or the work of Luis Antonio de Verney, Verdadero método de estudiar para ser útil a la República y a la Iglesia (1746). 30

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the centres of higher studies dependent on the Spanish crown destined to the training of ecclesiastical and state officials.32 The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish American territories in 1767 accelerated this process, so that the drafting of new curricula was the mainstay of all this. Gregorio Mayans and Siscar, together with Manuel de Roda, wrote the Plan de Estudios universitarios de 1767, without it being implemented. The enlightened thinker Pablo de Olavide then proposed a very interesting plan of university reform without discarding the doctrines inherited from the classical and scholastic tradition such as the works of Aristotle, the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas in theology, or the Corpus of Galen.33 These reforms arrived in Peru with the mission of José de Areche, with the aim of reforming the Peruvian university system34 using the material and bibliographical heritage left by the Jesuits after their expulsion. The University of San Marcos and its annexed colleges, such as San Pablo and San Martín, had been the main centres of study in the viceroyalty, and enjoyed a high level of prestige during the most glorious centuries of the viceroyalty’ ’s culture: San Pablo taught Latin, philosophy, theology, and lessons in Greek, Quechua and Aymara (native languages of the Andes). St. Martin housed students of Latin, theology and jurisprudence. In philosophical studies he followed the doctrine of Aristotle and Scholasticism, while in theology the preferred authors were St. Thomas and Francisco Suarez.35 Among the main reform measures was the foundation of the Convictorio de San Carlos (St. Charles College),36 with the aim of: A. Domínguez Ortiz, Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988), 161. 33 Domínguez Ortiz, Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración, 165-166. 34 R. Kagan, Universidad y sociedad en la España Moderna (Madrid: Tecnos, 1981), 51-64. C. D. Valcárcel, Historia de la educación colonial (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1968) 21-33. 35 L. Martin, The intelectual conquest of Peru. The jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568-1767 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1968), 9-25, 34-40. A. Nieto Vélez, “Colegios de San Pablo y San Martín,” Revista peruana e historia eclesiástica, 1 (1989), Cuzco. 36 C. D. Valcárcel, Historia de la educación colonial, 33. R. Vargas Ugarte, Historia General del Perú. El Virreinato (Lima, Editorial Milla Batrres, 1966), 326. G. Espinoza Ruiz, “La reforma de la educación suprior en Lima: el caso del Real Convictorio de San Carlos,” El Perú en el siglo XVIII. La era borbónica, ed. Scarlett O´Phelan (Lima, Pontificia Universidad Católica el Perú/Instituto Riva Agüero, 19999), 216. 32

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crear una cultura dirigida por el gobierno, con el fin de conducir a la nación al progreso y fortalecer al Estado mediante una eficiente y centralizada administración pública. Para lograr estos objetivos los pensadores ilustrados españoles creían en la necesidad de desarrollar un nuevo tipo de cultura y un nuevo modelo de hombre [creating a culture directed by the government, in order to lead the nation to progress and strengthen the state through an efficient and centralised public administration. In order to achieve these objectives the Spanish enlightened thinkers believed in the need to develop a new type of culture and a new model of man]37 That is to say, to change that which represented the previously identified with the medieval.38 In this sense, they were measured with an absolutely illustrative character.39 Indeed, new curricula were drawn up for the intellectual training of state and church officials. The “Study Plan of 1787,” written by the Peruvian enlightened Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza, clearly shows a position that is contrary to the “decadent scholastic” of previous centuries. It is required to abandon the scholastic methodology of “dotting” or the teacher’s comments, especially in the manner of Aristotle. Instead, he proposes the use of textbooks or compendiums, since, with these, students se ven necesitados a inculcar en su lectura a meditar, reflexionar y combinar los principios y a consultar otros libros para aclarar el sentido en los cuales adquieren nuevas luces, especies y conocimientos [are required to inculcate in their reading to meditate, reflect and combine the principles and to consult other books to

R. Cubas, “Educación, élites e independencia: el papel del Convictorio de San Carlos en la emancipación peruana,” La independencia del Perú. De los Borbones a Bolívar, ed. Scarlett O´Phelan (Lima, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Instituto Riva Agüero, 2001), 291. 38 C. Stoetzer, El pensamiento político en la América española durante el período de la emancipación (1789-1825) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966). 39 J. Sarrailh, La España ilustrada (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957). 37

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clarify the meaning in which they acquire new lights, species and knowledge]40. As far as philosophy is concerned, after proposing its ultimate objective as forming the ethical character of man,41 it leaves aside medieval doctrines to introduce the thought of Newton and Descartes, overcoming “cuestiones metafísicas, confusas, enredadas y ridículas” [“metaphysical, confused, entangled and ridiculous questions”].42 In this sense, the programme of philosophical studies of the 1787 Plan ignores any medieval philosophical tradition and introduces new authors. As for the study of the history of philosophy and logic, he proposes the work of Heinecio, since nada omite de lo que tratan los mejores dialécticos y tiene cien preciosidades que le son propias. El estilo es puro, claro y elegante. Usa del método geométrico con tanto acierto que siendo tan uniforme no es fastidioso como Wolf [nothing omits what the best dialectics deal with and it has a hundred precious things that are peculiar to it. The style is pure, clear and elegant. He uses the geometrical method with such success that being so uniform it is not annoying like Wolf].43 Besides being a complete and clear work, it is short and the themes treated are explained as if they were seeds (veluti in núcleo). Then, for the study of ontology, he suggests the work of Luis Antonio Vernet, since it has the advantage of being easily summarized and applied with comfort. Next, for the study of mathematics, which includes arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, conic sections, and infinitesimal calculus, and of physics, he proposes the work of Benito Ballis and the Newotnian compendium by Pedro Dumekio, Philosophia newtoniana illustrate, and Pedro van Musschenbroeck. For pneumatology, “que trata de los espíritus, Dios y el alma” [“which deals with spirits, God and the soul”],44 the Genuense is recommended. Finally, and as the final Ibidem. Ibidem. 42 Vargas Ugarte, El Real Convictorio Carolino y sus dos luminares, 72. 43 Vargas Ugarte, El Real Convictorio Carolino y sus dos luminares, 74. 44 Vargas Ugarte, El Real Convictorio Carolino y sus dos luminares, 78. 40 41

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objective of philosophy, for ethics, “dirigida a rectificar el corazón para formar hombres de bien” [“aimed at rectifying the heart in order to form good men”],45 Heinetius was chosen, because, besides being a good book, it was necessary to link it to his legal work. All these subjects were organized in a maximum of three and a half years plus half a year of general review of what had been learned. B. The Generation of the Nineteenth Century (Generación del Novescientos) and the Absolute Rejection of the Middle Ages The Nineteenth Century generation finally banished medieval thought from Peruvian intellectual history. This generation is contextualised in a totally different social and political environment, as it emerged in the midst of the Republican era and after the disastrous experience of the War with Chile from 1879 to 1881.46 Two aspects characterise it. Firstly, its critical stance towards the political and social crisis after Peru lost the war. The generation of the nineteenth century set out to rethink the project of the Peruvian nation, but, at many times, ignoring our medieval cultural roots. Secondly, and from a philosophical perspective, the members of this generation adopted the positivism47 of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), by interpreting our cultural and philosophical history under this ideology, and it is not by chance, then, that many of their representatives have held ideas discrediting the Middle Ages. Felipe Barreda y Laos, author of Vida intelectual del Virreinato del Perú, offers us a reading, in accordance with his positivist vision of the generation, contrary to the medieval heritage in Peru. His work constructed the undervalued image of the Middle Ages throughout the 20th century in Peru. Barreda identifies our viceregal period as our “Middle Ages,” and, similar to European critics with respect to the Middle Ages, he considers that viceregal philosophy was a philosophy supported by theological clericalism: “la vigilancia estricta de la Iglesia y del virrey, había comunicado al pensamiento una orientación teológica definida, que inspira a los intelectuales peruano del siglo XVII” [“the strict vigilance of the Church and the viceroy had communicated to Ibidem. C. Pacheco Vélez, Ensayos de simpatía: sobre ideas y generaciones en el Perú del siglo XX (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico, 1993). 47 M. Mejía Valera, Fuentes para la historia de la filosofía en el Peru (Lima: UNMSM, 1963). 45 46

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thought a definite theological orientation, which inspires the Peruvian intellectuals of the seventeenth century”].48 For him, our philosophical history is no more than a simple extension of the Latin Middle Ages, as opposed to a perspective, curiously, more favourable to a Greek-Eastern interpretation of the Middle Ages: La erudición bizantina provocó el Renacimiento verdadero del siglo XV; y decimos verdadero, porque doscientos años antes, en plena Edad Media, el vigoroso desarrollo intelectual de los judíos y los árabes determinó ese renacimiento poco conocido, del siglo XIII, en que correspondió a España desempeñar misión de preponderante importancia que creemos indispensable rememorar. [Byzantine erudition brought about the true Renaissance of the 15th century; and we say true, because two hundred years earlier, in the middle of the Middle Ages, the vigorous intellectual development of the Jews and Arabs determined that little-known 13th century Renaissance, in which it fell to Spain to carry out a mission of preponderant importance that we believe it is essential to remember].49 So, the triumph, the best version of scholasticism, is under the spectre of oriental triumph: “los célebres campeones del escolasticismo cristiano son verdaderos discípulos de los filósofos árabes” [“the famous champions of Christian scholasticism are true disciples of the Arab philosophers”].50 From his perspective, the decline of scholasticism occurred in the fifteenth century, following the crisis of Arab-Jewish culture in Europe and coinciding with the reappearance of Platonism. However, it is curious that our historian should attempt a definition of scholasticism by listing its main features51 and under which he will interpret our philosophical history. Barreda holds the main characters of scholastic philosophy:

F. Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú (Lima: UNMSM, 1909), 108. Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 13. 50 Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 15. 51 Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 15-17. 48 49

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1.- El supremo criterio de verdad es la revelación divina, en la que se tiene plena fe. 2.-la curiosidad humana debe satisfacerse con la revelación divina, manifestada directa o indirectamente, en libros sagrados, escritos por Dios mismo, o por hombres inspirados por la Divinidad. 3.-Los supremos argumentos para contentar a la razón rebelde está contenidos en esta revelación divina.52 [1.-The supreme criterion of truth is divine revelation, in which full faith is held. 2.-Human curiosity must be satisfied with divine revelation, whether directly or indirectly manifested in sacred books written by God Himself or by men inspired by the Divine. 3.-The supreme arguments for the satisfaction of rebellious reason are contained in this divine revelation]. Hence, from the perspective of the positivists and of Barreda himself, the image of philosophy as “slave” to theology remained unchanged from the twelfth century in Europe to the nineteenth century in Peru. For this reason, he interprets, there was not really a scientific interest in the Peruvian Indians from the moment the first missionaries arrived in Peru. He even maintains that the dying scholastic tradition of the Spanish, “esa escolástica vencida en Europa” [“that scholastic tradition that was defeated in Europe”],53 found in Peruvian lands a space of relief and then a place of refuge.54 The convents and colleges of the main religious orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits) were then the place where this unfinished European scholasticism was refounded; thus, Peruvian medieval thought emerged withered, ruined, without the slightest solid support.55 Therefore, Barreda concludes, during the viceroyalty period, we lived in our Middle Ages with centuries of backwardness with respect to European modernity. Furthermore, Peruvian youth was distracted by boring theological debates and an unsuccessful study of Aristotle’ ’s work, feeling a disdain for the sciences of modernity. Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 16. Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 24. 54 Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 23-26. 55 Barreda y Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 42. 52 53

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The Bourbon reforms at the end of the eighteenth century interrupted an original process of philosophical formation and production whose roots lay in the medieval scholastic heritage. This ideological turnaround became more acute at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Generation of the Nineteenth Century and its total rejection of the scholastic heritage of our philosophy. Almost all the intellectuals of the twentieth century interpreted our medieval heritage in the light of these two great landmarks of our cultural history. Not even the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, in 1879, and the renewed European scholasticism influenced the renewal of medieval studies in Peru. Rather, it was a slow process, focused and individualized on a very small group of thinkers interested in our medieval and viceregal past. Thanks to the efforts of these and the encouragement of foreign scholars, medieval studies in Peru have been greatly renewed during these first two decades of the 21st century, with the aim of recognizing part of our scholastic philosophical roots in a new product during our viceroyalty. IV. Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Middle Ages in Twenty-First Century Peru Almost all twenty-century Peruvian thinkers and intellectuals maintained a rather pejorative and limited perspective on the medieval heritage in our philosophical history. Figures of the stature of Augusto Salazar Bondy (1925-1974) and Francisco Miró Quesada (1918-2019), for example, upheld this anti-medieval vision inherited from the work of Felipe Barreda y Laos, and, to some extent, from more distant antecedents, such as the Bourbon reforms. In his reading of the history of Peruvian philosophy, Salazar Bondy questions its originality by criticising its medieval character. Thus, in his book La filosofía en el Perú. Panorama histórico, he maintains that Peruvian thought: estaba calcado sobre los moldes académicos dominantes en España. Todo el sistema se enderezaba a forjar en los vasallos de ultramar una conciencia absolutista y teocrática, condicionada por la aceptación de la idea de una jerarquía social y política rígida. Fundamento del sistema era la doctrina oficial y teológica de la Escolástica que, como se sabe, sobrepone las instancias de la revelación y la autoridad 230

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a la capacidad racional del hombre y al libre empleo de sus medios cognoscitivos y que concibe al orden natural fundado en una regularidad trascendente, origen de toda verdad óntica.56 [was modeled on the dominant academic moulds in Spain. The whole system was straightening out to forge in the overseas vassals an absolutist and theocratic consciousness, conditioned by the acceptance of the idea of a rigid social and political hierarchy. The foundation of the system was the official and theological doctrine of Scholasticism which, as we know, superimposes the instances of revelation and authority on the rational capacity of man and the free use of his cognitive means and which conceives of the natural order based on a transcendent regularity, the origin of all ontic truth]. On the other hand, Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias, in his most important work on philosophical history, Apuntes para una teoría de la razón,57 devotes a complete section to the medieval contribution to universal philosophical culture (pp. 61-64), highlighting the studies of Ernest Moody, Josef Bochensky and Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, but never mentions this contribution to the studies on medieval heritage in Peru. Miró Quesada’s intellectual intentions are more universal and he is completely unaware of the three centuries of Peruvian philosophical history rooted in the Middle Ages. It is an undeniable fact that the neo-medievalism developed in Europe several decades ago, with the slogan of “medievalism after the Middle Ages,” studies the diverse expressions of the “medieval imaginary”58 in the twenty-first century, given the approaches to the medieval world through books or films (The Lord of the Rings, for example). In Peru, this “medieval imaginary” is still quite atomised, so that one of the most palpable and popular expressions is the neo-gothic architecture present in a good number of buildings throughout several

A. Salazar Bondy, La filosofía en el Perú. Panorama histórico (Lima, Universo, 1967) 17-18. F. Miró Quesada Cantuarias, Apuntes para una teoría de la razón (Lima: UNMSM, 1963). 58 E. Emery, R. Utz, Medievalism Key Critical Terms (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Editions 2014). 56 57

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Peruvian regions.59 Thus, there are architectural materials in Peru for a “Middle Ages Revived”60 with the presence of neo-Gothic.61 An incipient neo-medievalism in Peru would begin (conditionally) from the architecture of the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, in the space of concepts where philosophy plays the leading role, the need to recognise medieval sources in the Peruvian cultural fabric is increasingly recurrent. In her latest book, Nadia Altschul62 studies the presence of medievalism and orientalism in South America in the nineteenth century. Although Atschul deals with the realities of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, it does not differ much from the Peruvian reality of the same century, except for the eagerness of Peruvians to reject all “medievalism” in the field of ideas, but to reaffirm it in others, such as architecture. Despite this, Peruvian neo-medievalism is undergoing favourable changes, it could be said, not only in popular spaces such as architecture, but also in the field of ideas. This perspective began to change in Peru in the nineties; it is important to recognize the teaching of many university professors. Among those most remembered for their contribution and training of future researchers are professors Antonio Peña Cabrera, author of the text La Edad Media y la filosofía63 from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and the Augustinian priest Gerardo Alarco Larrabure, author of the book Agustín de Hipona: ensayos sobre su itinerario espiritual64 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Without forgetting the work of many other important professors, most of whom were members of religious orders and communities during many years of the last century and the beginning of the present one in the Faculty of Pontifical and Civil Theology in Lima, where academic disciplines related to medieval philosophy such as history, Latin language, theology, etc. were cultivated. The intellectual formation, especially in medieval philosophy, has made

S. Negro, “El acertijo de la arquitectura neogótica en el Perú y la antigua hacienda Unanue de Cañete,” Arquitextos, 28, 20 (2013): 28-75. 60 D. Matthews, Medievalism. A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Editions, 2015). 61 D. Matthews, Medievalism. A Critical History, 51-53. 62 N. Altschul, Politics of Temporalization. Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America (Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). 63 A. Peña Cabrera, “La Edad Media y la filosofía,” in Letras 40 (1968): 29-40. 64 G. Alarco Larrabure, Agustín de Hipona; ensayos sobre su itinerario espiritual (Lima: Pontuifucia Universidad Católica el Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1996). 59

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it possible to have a significant number of professors and researchers interested in the main medieval scholastic themes. In this sense, the renewal of medieval philosophical studies has experienced an important increase in Peru. The productions of Luis Bacigalupo,65 Sandro D’Onofrio,66 Rosa Elvira Vargas,67 Giancarlo Bellina Schols,68 among the most outstanding, contribute in a remarkable way to the production of medieval studies based on the recognition of our philosophical roots in the viceroyalty. Indeed, on the one hand, the scholars José Carlos Ballón69 and his extraordinary group of researchers trained in the cloisters of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, on the other hand, Milko Pretell,70 Oscar Yangali,71 members of Peruvian team called Scholastica Colonialis. It is also worth mentioning the participation of Jean Christian Egoávil72 in the Indian Studies Project of the University of the Pacific73 and the series of contributions to the study of the philosophical relations between the Middle Ages and the Peruvian viceroyalty. It is also important to note the contribution of foreign scholars whose research confirms the indissoluble philosophical relations between the Middle Ages and Peru, notably Roberto Hofmeister and Alfredo Culleton,74 and Cléber Dos Santos. 65 L. Bacigalupo, Los rostros de Jano: ensayo sobre San

Agustín y la sofística cristiana (Lima, Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2011). 66 S. D'Onofrio, “Aquinas as representationalist: the ontology of the species intelligibilis” (Doctoral Thesis, State University of New York, 2008. 67 R. Vargas et al., “Albert the Great on Metaphysics,” in A Companion to Albert the Great: theology, philosophy, and the sciences, ed. Ireven Resnick (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 68 G. Bellina, Una sola fe… diversas costumbres. Las cartas de San Gregorio Magno y la evangelización de los anglos (Lima: Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae, 2019). 69 La complicada historia del pensamiento filosófico peruano siglos XVII y XVIII. Selección de textos, notas y estudios, ed. José Carlos Ballón Vargas (Lima, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos / Universidad Científica del Sur, 2011). 70 M. Pretell “Los primeros filósofos de la academia limensis,” Phainomenon 17:2 (2018): 141-9. 71 O. Yangali, “La noción de unidad formal en relación con los entes de razón según José de Aguilar S. J,” Solar, 16, 1 (2020): 105-125. 72 J. Egoavil Ríos, “Las condiciones para el desarrollo de la filosofía virreinal en el Perú como fundamento del pensamiento peruano: el caso de la Logica via Scoti (Lima, 1610) de Jerónimo de Valera (1568-1625),” La escritura del territorio americano, eds. Carlos Mata, Antonio Sanchez Jimenez and Martina Vinatea (New York: IDEA, IGAS, 2019): 65-92. 73 Lima, Perú. http://estudiosindianos.org/en/ 74 R. Hofmeister Pich, and A. Culleton, “Scholastica colonialis: Recepc̦ão e Desenvolvimento da Escolástica Barroca na América Latina, Séculos 16-18” (Conference), 2016. 233

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This change was undoubtedly inspired and enhanced by the pioneering works of Maria Luisa Rivara de Tuesta, a distinguished Peruvian philosopher and historian, whose main efforts were concentrated on the study of the novelties of our philosophy during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing our attention to our medieval heritage from the main thinkers of scholasticism. She has published a series of studies in which she systematizes her main theses on the relationship between the Middle Ages and Peru, namely Historia del pensamiento prehispánico, filosofía e ideología colonial y republicana del Perú y Latinoamérica, and Filosofía e historia de las ideas en el Perú. Here, our scholar invokes us to understand the Middle Ages without the prejudices of yesteryear, but rather with the aim of understanding its complexity within our cultural fabric: la filosofía americana durante los siglos XVI y XVII, se sostiene, fue la filosofía escolástica, pero como podemos apreciar por el estudio del desenvolvimiento de su vertiente humanista, no llegó a América con pureza teorética [American philosophy during the 16th and 17th centuries, it is argued, was scholastic philosophy, but as we can see from the study of the development of its humanist aspect, it did not arrive in America with theoretical purity]75 (2000a, p. 15). We must also acknowledge the remarkable efforts of the American Walter Redmond in studying the medieval heritage of Peruvian thought and its viceroyalty novelty. In 1972, Redmond began a series of important publications on philosophical production in the Peruvian viceroyalty. The book Bibliography of the Philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America76 lists the main works published from the 16th to the 19th century. From this catalogue, an initial corpus philosophicum peruvianum was compiled, consisting of thirty works registered by Redmond in 1972, but this first corpus has now increased in number. By way of example, I will only note the most famous works: Jerónimo de Valera (1525-1625) Logica Via Scoti. Juan Pérez de Menacho (1565-1626), Comentarii ad Divinae Thomae. Rivara de Tuesta, Historia del pensamiento prehispánico y filosofía colonial en el Perú, 15. W. Redmond, Bibliography of the Philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). 75 76

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Juan Espinoza Medrano (1632-1688), Philosophia Thomistica seu Cursus Philosophicus Duce D. Thoma Doctores Angelico. José de Aguilar (1652-1708), Cursus Philosophicus Dictatus Limae. Pedro de Peralta y Barnuevo (1663-1743), Observationes Astronomicae. Isidoro de Celis (1753-1827), Elementa Philosophiae, quibus accdent Principia Mathematica verae Physicae Prorsus Neccesaria. On the other hand, in the book La lógica en el virreinato del Perú published in 1998,77 Redmond studies the main topics of Scholastic logic rethought in the Peruvian reality of the 17th century. Unfortunately, due to ignorance of such an important philosophical period, value judgments have been made without any sense: este repudio de la escolástica latinoamericana como oscurantista, decadente, retrograda, etc. era una actitud común en el siglo pasado y en la primera parte de este siglo, y no ha desparecido del todo en nuestros días. La postura estriba en la crítica de la edad Media en general, y fue propuesta por hombres que, con demasiada frecuencia, no conocían a fondo la filosofía que criticaban y además no podían apreciar la índole analítica del pensar escolástico [this repudiation of Latin American scholasticism as obscurantist, decadent, retrograde, etc. was a common attitude in the last century and in the first part of this century, and it has not completely disappeared in our days. The position is based on the criticism of the Middle Ages in general, and was proposed by men who, all too often, did not know in depth the philosophy they were criticizing and, moreover, could not appreciate the analytical nature of scholastic thought].78 The 21st century meant for medieval studies in Peru a renewal preceded by scholars from the end of the last century. The number of interested people and specialists on medieval thought and its close relationship with Peruvian history is increasing. The image of an obsolete Middle Ages has yet to be dealt with, philosophically speaking, but, 77 78

W. Redmond, La lógica en el Virreinato del Perú. W. Redmond, La lógica en el Virreinato del Perú, 40. 235

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thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned scholars, this slope is becoming less and less difficult to navigate. Few people are interested in learning about our philosophical past, and publications in specialised journals and on websites are increasing, as are events and conferences where medieval and viceroyalty studies are becoming more and more relevant. These facts indicate, in fact, a renewal of medieval studies and the image of the Middle Ages in a country where it is necessary to recognize its cultural roots, both native and foreign. V. Conclusions The formation of an original way of philosophizing in Peru was developed during the 16th century and assumed its own form in the seventeenth century. The themes and works published in this century show a logical and linguistic predominance in the concerns of the viceroyalty philosophers. All of this was due to what I call the “Indian turn” or the need to overcome the great problem of understanding between totally different mentalities and, therefore, the obligation to write grammars, dictionaries, and manuals for Christian indoctrination in Quechua and Aymara under the mould of the Latin language. Thus, an authentic philosophical exercise emerged in the renewal of the main topics inherited from the philosophical tradition. Without this, an original proposal would have been impossible. This tradition has its own name: the heritage of the philosophical Middle Ages. The twenty-first century brought the necessary recognition of the Middle Ages as the foundation of an important part in the formation of our cultural fabric alongside the indigenous foundations. Its transfer from Europe in the sixteenth century took place together with missionaries and soldiers who came from Spain in that great movement that led to the Hispanic settlement of the two great American viceroyalties: that of Mexico and that of Peru. From the first decades, the social and cultural environment for the intellectual formation of its inhabitants was forged with the foundation of universities and schools. The philosophical stream that came from Europe was the immense wealth of medieval philosophy reoriented, and in many places totally renewed, by the Spanish thinkers of the Golden Age, so that to deny the presence of the Middle Ages in our philosophical roots is to deny an essential part of our cultural history. There is no meaner and more obsolete vision in this twenty-first century than to observe the Middle 236

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Ages with ignorance and to make unfounded value judgements, which is why, in twenty-first century Peru, medieval studies are happily moving from a forgotten image to a new perspective.

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Martin, Luis. The intellectual conquest of Peru. The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568-1767. New York: Fordham University Press, 1968. Matthews, David. Medievalism. A Critical History. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Editions, 2015. Mejía Valera, Manuel. Fuentes para la historia de la filosofía en el Peru. Lima: UNMSM, 1963. Media, José Toribio. La imprenta en Lima (1568-1824). Santiago de Chile: José Toribio Medina, 1965. Miró Quesada Cantuarias, Francisco. Apuntes para una teoría de la razón. Lima: UNMSM, 1963. Negro, Sandra, “El acertijo de la arquitectura neogótica en el Perú y la antigua hacienda Unanue de Cañete.” Arquitextos, 28, 20 (2013): 2875. Nieto Vélez, Armando. “Colegios de San Pablo y San Martín.” Revista peruana e historia eclesiástica, 1 (1989), Cuzco. Pacheco Vélez, César. Ensayos de simpatía: sobre ideas y generaciones en el Perú del siglo XX. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico, 1993. Peña Cabrera, A. “La Edad Media y la filosofía.” Letras 40 (1968): 29-40. Pretell, Milko. “Los primeros filósofos de la academia limensis.” Phainomenon, 17, 2 (2018): 141-149. Redmond, Walter. Bibliography of the Philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. –––. La lógica en el Virreinato del Perú: A través de las obras de Juan Espinoza Medrano (1668) e Isidoro de Celis (1787). Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1998. Rivara de Tuesta, María Luisa. Pensamiento prehispánico y filosofía colonial en el Perú. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000a. Salazar Bondy, Augusto. La filosofía en el Perú. Panorama histórico. Lima: Universo, 1967. Stastny, Francisco. Síntomas medievales en el barroco americano. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994. Stoetzer, Carlos. El pensamiento político en la América española durante el período de la emancipación (1789-1825). Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966. Sarrailh, Jean. La España ilustrada. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957.

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Tibesar, Antonino. Comienzos de los Franciscanos en el Perú. Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1991. Vargas, Rosa Elvira et al. “Albert the Great on Metaphysics.” In A Companion to Albert the Great: theology, philosophy, and the sciences, ed. Ireven Resnick. Leiden, Brill, 2013. Vargas Ugarte, Raúl. Historia del Perú. Virreinato. Lima, Editorial Milla Batrres, 1966. –––. El Real Convictorio Carolino y sus dos luminares. Lima: Milla Batres, 1970. Valcárcel, Carlos Daniel. Historia de la educación colonial. Lima: Editorial Universo, 1968. Verlinden, Charles. Précédents médiévaux de la Colonie en Amérique. México: I.P.G.H., 1954. Villarejo, Avencio. Los agustinos en el Perú, 1548-1965. Lima: Ed. Ausonia, 1965. Weckmann, Luis. La herencia medieval de México. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984. Wippel, John. “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris.” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977): 169–201. Yangali, Oscar. “La noción de unidad formal en relación con los entes de razón según José de Aguilar S. J.” Solar, 16, 1 (2020): 105-125. Zavala, Silvio. Estudios indianos. México: Colegio Nacional, 1948. –––. Ensayos iberoamericanos. Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1993.

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The Use of Political Neomedievalism in Spain Álvaro Garrote Pascual*

According to Bruce Holsinger, political medievalism during the twentyfirst century has been understood as an axis that divides the modern West and the antimodernist Islamic East.1 This trope has become recurrent since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, and it is repeated every time an attack is carried out by an Islamic radical against a Western country. Interestingly enough, this medieval perception changes when a terrorist attack is committed by a non-Arab organization or individual. Mass shootings in the US, terrorist actions carried out by separatist groups in Spain, or the bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland are not usually seen through the prism of the popular conception of what the Middle Ages were. This clearly shows that this rhetorical use of the Middle Ages as the paradigm of backwardness operates as a tool of exclusion rather than a theoretical frame through which to analyze and understand the causes of radicalism. In this way, political medievalism enters the conservative space of national and cultural identity. Nowhere but in Spain has the Middle Ages played a key role in discussions about identity. In the year 711, the disembarkation of Berber troops commanded by Tariq Ibn Ziyad in the Iberian Peninsula led to the presence of different forms of Islamic polities in Spain for more than 700 years. After the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492 – a year that, coincidentally, marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern times in Spanish historiography – Spain started a Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University, United States of America. B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007), 6-7. *

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process of homogenization under the control of Isabel and Fernando, the Catholic Monarchs. This process reached the religious sector and the Muslim inhabitants that remained in Castile and Aragon after the successive Christian conquests of Muslim-controlled territories. The Moriscos – as the Muslim people of Spain came to be known after the forced conversions of 16th century – posed a problem for a nation that aimed to present itself as an exclusive homogenous Christian country and that wanted to appear as a fully European nation before other countries.2 This struggle for identity has taken different forms in Spain since the 16th century. Nowadays, it has been a recurring motive for Spanish far-right militants to call to memory the Middle Ages and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain over 500 years ago as a warning against the medievalization of Spain. For instance, Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, said that “history matters and we should not be afraid of that” in an allusion to the presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages.3 Later, during the campaign for the regional elections of Andalucía, Vox launched a video of their leader, Santiago Abascal, riding a horse with the motto “a la Reconquista de España desde Andalucía” [to the re-conquest of Spain from Andalusia]. As we will see later, this was a manipulated reference to the struggles between the Muslim and Christian kingdoms of Iberia during the Middle Ages, emulating an iconography that triggered the image of “El Cid,” a literary milestone in Spanish literature and a national hero for many Spaniards. This essay analyzes how these manipulated references to the Middle Ages are produced to establish a relation between the Muslim conquest of Spain and today’s North African migrants to create an effect by which, paradoxically, neomedievalism is imprinted on them. According to the United Nations, there were 6,104,203 documented immigrants in Spain in 2019, which roughly represents 12% of the B. Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009),8; A. Milhou, “Desemitización y europeización en la cultura española desde la época de los reyes católicos hasta la expulsión de los moriscos,” Cultura del Renaixement: Homenatge al pare Miquel Batllori. Manuscrits 11 (1993): 22. 3 D. Loucaides and S Jannessari, “Spain’s Vox Party Hates Muslims-Except the Ones Who Fund It,” Foreign Policy, January 1, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/27/spainsvox-party-hates-muslims-except-the-ones-who-fund-it-mek-ncri-maryam-rajavi-pmoividal-quadras-abascal/ (accessed December 4th 2021). 2

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population of the country. Most of these immigrants – 813,587 – are from Morocco4. Like many other countries around the world, immigration is a large part of the political debate in the country. This debate, which is framed within the successive economic crises of the twenty-first century, encompasses anxieties about the issues of globalization, multiculturalism, and identity. Unfounded fears and racist statements about the loss of communal and supposedly ancestral identities fill the ideology of some conservative groups and the far right such as Vox. As Daniel Wollenberg says, far-right movements across the US and Western Europe have stressed the idea of loss of what they consider communal values such as nation, place, or race.5 This return to the Middle Ages in political discourse has two impulses that the far-right has made somehow compatible. On the one hand, these movements look back to the Middle Ages as the source of identity, as, for them, the Middle Ages stand for everything they long for. As Wollenberg affirms, for white nationalists “medieval Christendom was essentially racialists at its core.”6 In this sense, they perceive the Middle Ages to be the receptacle of a set of values based on its supposed acceptance of “the reality of racial difference.”7 This use of the Middle Ages as a token for racial purity – a period in which they think racial difference was preserved by authorities and communities alike – is closely related to the clash of civilization theory that far-right movements have exploited over the last decades and that has crystalized in islamophobia.8 These groups hail their perception of the Middle Ages as a site of racial and religious homogeneity as a way to oppose multiculturalism.9 On the other hand, the Middle Ages has come to signify backwardness, a period understood for lacking rationality and development. And many conservatives and far-right parties have taken on this notion to associate the words medieval and Islam to promote the same racialist agenda. In some cases, some politicians, as if they were expert contortionists, are capable of “España - Inmigración 2019,” Expansion (Unidad Editorial, February 6, 2020), https://datosmacro.expansion.com/demografia/migracion/inmigracion/espana (Accessed December 4th 2020). 5 D. Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today's Politics (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2018), 2. 6 D. Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, 27. 7 D.Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, 32. 8 For the clash of civilization theory, see S.Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order ( New York: Simon&Schuster, 1996). 9 D.Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, 27. 4

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using both medieval drives for the same end. That is the case of one of the most famous extremists in Europe, the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who is able to resort to the myth of the battle of Tours in 732 and to dismiss Islam as medieval.10 The same could be said about other movements, such as the English Defense League, Golden Dawn, or the French National Front, just to name a few.11 Hence, although all groups of immigrants are targeted by this xenophobic trend – as we can see in the US with Mexicans and other Hispanic groups –, it especially targets Muslims, and it uses Islam as an equivalent of backwardness. To do so, the far-right associate Islam and Muslims with the Middle Ages, which denotes a deformed idea of both Islam and what the Middle Ages were. Medievalism, in this case, functions as a derogatory term associated with the religious or political views of life from the Middle Ages that are regarded as outdated.12 The Middle Ages, represented as the antitheses of the modern, “functions as a reservoir of unconsidered and reductive propaganda.”13 According to this idea, Muslims are living as if they were in the Middle Ages. In this view, the Middle Ages represent something antimodern that goes against the current view of nationhood, favoring other views of supranational governmental entities that undermine and erode sovereignties based on our current concept of nation-state. Islam, as a transnational religion, is transformed into a supranational entity with values that are portrayed as incompatible with Western democracies. In this transformation, Muslims are seen as a homogenous group in which individuals are devoid of personal agency. In this way, the individual Muslim becomes an archetype of ideological backwardness that threatens democracy. This threat is actualized through terrorist attacks around the world that are not attributed to deranged individuals or specific Islamic extremists but rather to all Muslim communities. These barbaric acts are shown as an irrefutable example of what Holsinger calls a “failure to be modern,” represented by the medieval (Muslim) man.14 This historical displacement that centers a barbaric D.Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery, 59. A. Elliot, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 158-159. 12 B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 12. 13 B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 15. 14 B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, IV. 10 11

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conception of the medieval on the Muslim individual grew out of the political language that described the 9/11 terrorist attacks as medieval acts.15 As Holsinger points out, this characterization “divides the world along an axis simultaneously of history and geography, placing the West on the side of modernity and Islamism on the side of the primitive, the archaic, the premodern.”16 Along the same lines, Andrew Elliot says that in “this fraught territorisation of medievalism, the medieval past is frequently, and powerfully, used as a rhetorical site representing primitivism and barbarity in order to vaunts the triumph of West progress.”17 What was initially a “war against temporality”18 represented through the US interventions in the Middle East was rapidly transformed into what Lean calls the “Islamophobia industry,” which portrays any Muslim immigrant as representative of the savage past that the West must fight. This industry of hate developed by the political spectrum of the far-right and ultra-conservative media situates this war on the supposed incapability of the Muslim immigrant to adapt to the society and times in which s/he lives.19 It inspires fear of immigrants and minorities by inventing and/or exaggerating differences that are not seen as suitable in modern democracies.20 Insecurity, here, is a crucial word, a feeling inserted in the collective imagination of society.21 This insecurity relates to a civilization that can collapse due to the pressure of barbarians at its borders. These imagined barbarians would bring with them new views of the world, “that want to seize a wealth that has been denied to them, [that may] steal into the cultural and reigning Pax, spreading new faiths and new perspectives of life.”22 These are the characteristics of the fabrication of the good Middle Ages.23 In the discourse of the far-right, the civilization under attack is what they call Judeo-Christian civilization, B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 6. B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 6-7. 17 A. Elliot, Medievalism, 60. 18 B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 6. 19 N. Lean, Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 6. 20 N. Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 5-6. 21 U. Eco and W. Weaver, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays/Umberto Eco; Transl. from the Italian by William Weaver (London: Pan Books, in association with Secker & Warburg, 1987), 79. 22 U. Eco and W. Weaver, Travels in Hyperreality, 74. 23 U. Eco and W. Weaver, Travels in Hyperreality, 74. 15 16

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and those foreigners lurking to spoil its wealth and destroy it are the Muslim immigrants that are “invading” Western countries. The term “invasion” is very powerful since, as García Sanjuán says, it indicates, on one hand, a forced and violent incursion that leads to the illegitimate presence of the so-called invaders. On the other hand, in biological terms, it symbolizes a pathogenic agent that threatens the wellbeing of the body it has entered.24 In Spain, the rhetoric of invasion has been used with frequency in the last 30 years to refer to the different waves of what is called illegal immigration. However, the recent wave of right-wing populism that has swept across Europe in the last decade, provoked by the big economic crash of 2008, has given an unusual voice to a Spanish political party, Vox, that has intensified the xenophobic trope of the invasion. In a video published by this political party during the summer of 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, we can see the images of different groups of immigrants arriving by boat to the Spanish coasts from Africa.25 The video is accompanied by headlines from mostly far-right pamphlets that discuss crimes and offenses committed by foreigners, associating the people arriving by boat, the supposed invaders, with those crimes. The message of the video is that the “invasion” is not just a menace against the sovereignty of the state, but it is also a threat to individuals and their property. Although the images show a mix of sub-Saharan and Moroccan immigrants, the latter are the ones that have historically been at the center of disputes over integration and assimilation.26 As Flesles says, Moroccan immigrants have a direct connection with the question of national identity due to the Islamic political presence in Spain from 711 to 1492. Already, the use of the term “invasion” functions as a reminder of Tarik Ibn Zyad’s troops crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, comparing economic migrants to an army, as if they formed part of a hidden plan to Islamize Spain and Europe.27 This characterization is reinforced by using the term moro (moor) to refer to current Moroccan nationals living A. García Sanjuán, La Conquista Islámica De La Península Ibérica y La Tergiversación Del Pasado: Del Catastrofismo Al Negacionismo (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2019), 46. 25 Vox España, “Invasión silenciosa,” YouTube Video, 2:00, August 4, 2020, https://youtu.be/WzM7I4tT2C4. 26 D. Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 2. 27 Vox España, https://www.voxespana.es/noticias/santiago-abascal-no-queremos-unaue-crecientemente-islamizada-20160608 (Accessed December 4th, 2020). 24

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in Spain. This term originally comes from the Latin maurus, and it refers to the inhabitants of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana, which roughly corresponds to modern-day Morocco and part of Algeria. During the Middle Ages, this term came to be associated with the people coming from North Africa and, later, with all Muslims, regardless of whether they were originally from North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula. As Flesler points out, naming Moroccan immigrants moros warps their identity with distorted medieval imagery.28 A Moor, de la Serna says, is someone that Spaniards do not understand and whose identity is hidden after centuries of stereotypical images – not always negative – that on many occasions overlap with our current political stances.29 In this way, the use of a violent word like “invasion,” the echoes of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula that this word provokes, and the connection of those conquerors with today’s immigrants by using the word moros instead of marroquíes (Moroccans) imprints antimodern and antisocial behavior on them. These concepts and their reference to the Middle Ages create the perception of the Moroccan as a violent invading moor, which produces and justifies rejection.30 This violence, as Vox’s videos seem to transmit, is not practiced by Berber knights with swords but by robberies, violent brawls in the streets, or attacking women. Different but the same, for Vox, these immigrants will try to erode Spanish democracy and sovereignty like their moorish “ancestors” did with Spain in the year 711. In this context, Vox portrays itself as the restorer of law and order, as the last line of defense against the new medievalization of Spain. To do that, for the regional elections of Andalucía in 2018, Vox presented itself in society under the slogan of the “Desde Andalucía a la Reconquista de Espana” [from Andalusia to the Reconquest of Spain], another sound reference to the Middle Ages. As Ríos Saloma says, the Reconquista designates five different ideas from an epistemological point of view. The first is the historical process of struggle between Muslims and Christians in what today is Spain and Portugal. The second is a period of time that roughly corresponds to what is associated with the Middle Ages in Spain that starts in the year D. Flesler, The Return of the Moor), 3. A. Serna, Al Sur De Tarifa: Marruecos-España: Un Malentendido histórico (Madrid:Marcial Pons, 2006), 34. 30 D. Flesler, The Return of the Moor, 10. 28 29

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718, with the battle of Covadonga, where Christians from Asturias led by Pelayo beat Muslim troops, and lasts until the conquest of Granada in 1492. The third is a precise moment in the history of Spain determined by the conquest of a certain town or fortress (i.e., the conquest of Toledo in 1085). The fourth is an ideological project started by the Asturian Kingdom in the 8th century that was later carried out by the successive medieval monarchs of Castile. With this project, they considered themselves to be the legitimate successors of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain that fell with the Muslim conquest and that they believe should be restored. Last is a historiographic category used to analyze the process of conquest and repopulation carried out by Christians advancing toward the south and the ideological implications of this process.31 The term Reconquista first appeared in Spain in the 19th century, in the heat of the nationalist movements of the period. In this way, the word Reconquista acquired patriotic features that did not function as a historiographic tool, but rather as an identarian term that signaled the essence of what it means to be Spanish and marked the beginning of the nation in the period of the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain – specifically in the conversion of King Recaredo to Catholicism in the year 584.32 This idea of reconquest as the restoration of a previous order destroyed by Muslim usurpers was born out of the nationalist essentialism of the 19th century, which understands the nation as an eternal entity that allows modern societies to find its origins in a remote time.33 Thus, the idea of reconquest has its roots in the interpretation of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula as an invasion that interrupted the normal development of a nation that was almost destroyed in 711 and whose freedom and vitality were restored in 1492. This establishes a process of continuity that links the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain with modern Spain. Such an interpretation exploited during the 19th century was based on early Christian chronicles of the Muslim conquest and what it meant for them.34 As Ríos Saloma says, this vision was mainly sustained

F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista: Una construcción historiográfica: Siglos XVI-XIX (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2011), 30. 32 F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista, 31. 33 A. García Sanjuán, La Conquista Islámica, 52. 34 A. García Sanjuán, La Conquista Islámica, 40-42 31

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by the monarchies of Asturias, and later León and Castile.35 However, this view of history established by the nascent nationalism of the 19th century does not consider the numerous pacts between Christian and Muslim kingdoms or even between warlords and rulers of a different faith – for instance, the case of the Cid, a national hero that fought under the banner of the Muslim king of Zaragoza. The Reconquista, seen as an uninterrupted struggle between Muslims and Christians, even as a sort of crusade, is not supported by historical facts and/or literary accounts. However, this visualization of the Middle Ages as a catastrophe did not end in the nineteenth century. In fact, it had a boost during the rule of the dictator Francisco Franco, who used foundational myths to accumulate all the power under the concepts of nation and religion. Under this premise, the Reconquista symbolized a continuous war for almost eight centuries to re-establish the political and religious unity of Spain.36 Although democracy opened every field of study and nationalistic myths of dictatorships such as this were questioned and challenged, the interpretation of the Reconquista as a crusade to restore the cultural and religious identity of the nation has lasted in the minds of the general population till today. For this reason, some conservatives and the Spanish far-right still project this view, which has collapsed since the beginning of the twenty-first century with the global Islamophobic movements that associate Islam and Muslims with terrorism. Hence, the Spanish far-right has added Islamic terrorism to the idea of loss and restoration embedded in the concept of the Reconquista, linking today’s barbaric acts against civilians with the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711. Such is the case for two influential characters of the most conservative groups of Spain: José María Aznar, the president of Spain from 1996 to 2004 and one of the intellectual promoters of Vox, and César Vidal, a historian and ex-radio host in Cope and esRadio, two influential conservative stations. In a conference given at Georgetown University in 2004, some months after March 11th, the major terrorist attack committed in Spain, Aznar referred to this tragic event. He said that the problem Spain had with Islamic terrorist groups started in the 8th century, when Spain – portrayed by him to be the very same nation then as it is now, with the same civil rights, freedoms, and concepts of 35 36

F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista, 30,32 F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista, 26 251

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nationhood – was invaded by the Moors and it patriotically refused to become part of the Islamic world by declaring a war, the Reconquista, that steadily lasted for almost eight centuries.37 A similar idea was repeated in 2009 at the same forum, when he said, I do think that the question of our time, one of the most important questions of our time, is the relationship between Christianity, the Western world, and Islam. Coming from a country that fought Islam for eight centuries, this is not big news.38 As in the first case, Aznar collapses many notions into one, which perfectly exemplifies the binding of Islamophobia with the concept of the Reconquista that has given the term a renovated impact and appeal to far-right movements. As if they were absolute uniform categories, he links the so-called Western world with Christianity and Islam with terrorism – ignoring the fact that most attacks carried out by jihadist movements are committed within the Islamic world and against Muslims – and declares the latter a threat for the West, like they were for the Iberian Peninsula in 711. In this way, he roots a contemporary global threat in the Middle Ages, associating Muslims with terrorism and terrorism with the medieval Arab conquerors of Hispania. By doing this, he frames today’s world as another Reconquista in which Muslims around the world (especially those living in Europe or America or those “invading” the Western world) are the heirs of those earlier “terrorists” that almost destroyed Spain and that threaten to do it again. This ideological bond is replicated by the aforementioned César Vidal, who, in his book “España frente al Islam. De Mahoma a Ben Laden,” demonizes Islam and portrays it as a continuous menace to what he calls the Judeo-Christian world. The title immediately indicates hostility, a supposedly historic clash between Spain and Islam that lasts even today, and an identification between the most sacred prophet in Islam, Muhammad, and Osama Bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist in the world at the time, establishing a continuity of terror and carnage from J. Pino, “Aznar asegura que ‘el problema de españa con al qaeda’ empezó con ‘la invasión de los moros’ y La Reconquista” (Cadena SER, September 22, 2004), https://cadenaser.com/ ser/2004/09/22/espana/1095810611_850215.html (Accessed December 4th, 2020). 38 Berkley Center, “Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar on religion & democracy in foreign policy,” YouTube video, 48:54, July 17, 2013, https://youtu.be/bdmeGeMjHdI. 37

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the foundation of Islam to today. This is confirmed in the interior of the book, where Vidal states that Islam is especially prone to looting and violence and that the military practices followed by Muhammad and his followers were precedents of today’s terrorist attacks.39 He then goes on to establish the Spanishness of the Visigothic Kingdom, which he identifies with a sort of bliss, as something that was destroyed by uncivilized violent hordes of Muslims: “Los musulmanes no solo no tenían la menor intención de retirarse, sino que además aniquilaron la riquísima herencia clásica Española para sustituirla por un dominio despótico.”40 As we have seen, these interpretations of the history of Spain and the Reconquista joined the nationalistic Catholic view of the nineteenth century with the post-9/11 Islamophobic discourse of the inevitable clash of civilizations, in which, as García Sanjuán points out, Islam represents barbarity.41 Furthermore, the Reconquista functions as a marker of modernity and a fight in the Middle Ages, but also, from a modern point of view, against the Middle Ages. The splendor of Spain, as seen by those who hold the view of Aznar and Vidal, was interrupted by the Arabs for eight centuries, until 1492, when the capture of Granada ended the Reconquista. This year also marks the beginning of modernity in Spanish historiography. Against this modernity that the Reconquista stands for, Muslims represent the backwardness associated with the Middle Ages. In that process of continuity that Vidal and Aznar established between the people living 1300 years ago and today, the Muslim men and women, as individuals and communities, are seen as the heirs of the medieval conquerors, who at the same time are seen as the ancestors of modern jihadists. Therefore, for Aznar and Vidal, Muslim immigrants represent the danger of regression. They and their customs are seen as medieval. Thus, the concept of reconquest has become an axiom of identity and modernity that sees the origin of modern Spain in a long struggle against Islam. In this version of history and identity, only one form of being C. Vidal, España Frente Al Islam: De Mahoma a Ben Laden (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2006), 5. 40 C. Vidal, España Frente Al Islam, 12. The Muslims did not have any intention to retreat. Instead, they annihilated the rich Spanish classical legacy to substitute it with a despotic dominance. My trans. 41 A. García Sanjuán, La Conquista Islámica, 52. 39

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Spanish and European is accepted, while all others are excluded. In this sense, Rodriguez Mediano says that the myth around the origin of a country or a community is not meant to explain or mention its beginning, but rather it expresses the principles that guide or should guide that society, provoking the idea that whoever does not conform to those absolute principles is excluded from the community.42 The far-right identarian understanding of the Reconquista, seen as a resistance from civilization against continuous barbaric attacks, where Spain and the West represent the advanced modern world, while Islam is a synonym of medieval brutality, is designed to consciously exclude Muslims from Spain in a way that makes them feel like outsiders, whether they were born in Spain or are immigrants. At the same time, they are perceived as invaders by the rest of the conservative population. Vox has picked up this ideology and brought it to the front of the political arena to use as a weapon against those who do not share their vision of the world. This use of an imagined Middle Ages that they force into our contemporary lives could be defined as a political neomedievalism. As Fitzpatrick points out, “Neomedievalist stories are contemporary medieval narratives that purport to merge (or even replace) reality as much as possible.”43 To understand how the use of political neomedievalism works in Vox’s ideology, we must discern a few concepts, so their approach is not confused with an honest manner of describing the Middle Ages as an epistemological category. The Middle Ages, as such, is what Emery calls an artificial construct, with an interpretation and understanding that may change depending on the society or person that views it.44 As Workman says, medievalism as a field is the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages.45 This process of “creation” is not a manipulative process with the objective of distorting reality. Medievalists try to study the Middle Ages by using new F. Rodríguez Mediano, “Al Andalus y la batalla del presente,” in Hispania, al-Ándalus y España. Identidad y nacionalismo en la historia peninsular, eds. Maribel Fierro and Alejandro García Sanjuán (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 30. On the historical exclusion generated by the notion of Reconquista, see also A.García-Sanjuán, “Rejecting al-Andalus, exalting the Reconquista: historical memory in contemporary Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 10:1, 127-145, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2016.1268263. 43 K. Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: from Tolkien to Game of Thrones (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019), 22. 44 E. Emery, “Medievalism and the Middle Ages,” Studies in Medievalism 17 (2009), 79. 45 K. Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, 13. 42

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methodologies and approaches that change over time. This may include the creation of temporal divisions or cultural categories of which people of the period were not aware to facilitate the tasks of historians or literary critics. In this way, the Middle Ages are continuously being changed and created but with the objective of decoding meanings and interpreting facts of a remote past. However, neomedievalism, as Robinson and Clements say, does not look to the Middle Ages to use, to copy or even to learn; the perception of the Middle Ages is more filtered, perceptions of perceptions and of distortions, done without a concern for facts of reality. Something is neomedievalist because the inaccuracies are the result of careful carelessness: an act of taking care to consciously impose contemporary ideology.46 Thus, neomedievalism can pose a threat and function as a destructive political faction, as Holsinger believes, but it can also be “simply aesthetic silliness.”47 Indeed, neomedievalism can function as both a threat to the study of the Middle Ages – and democracy itself – and as a metaphoric catalyst that provokes a reaction of interest toward the Middle Ages in all its manifestations. The latter is the case for works like The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, which are set in what is imagined or perceived to be the Middle Ages but, make no attempt to be realistic, and they define themselves from a purely aesthetic point of view. The case of neomedievalism as a political weapon is different, as it tries to use inaccurate depictions of the Middle Ages to exclude certain groups from society and to justify their rejection. This is the case for Vox and other far-right and conservative personalities, and their use of the Reconquista rhetoric. Of course, this rhetoric is not born out of nothing. If they use it, it is because they know that certain historical topics are present in the minds of society. As Flesler says, “Moroccan immigration is pervasively imagined through the anachronistic and deforming lens of a confrontation with medieval Moors,”48 which in many cases includes the manipulated perception that C. Robinson and P. Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” Studies in Medievalism 17 (2009), 62. 47 C. Robinson and P. Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” 64. 48 D. Flesler, The Return of the Moor, 83. 46

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these immigrants are not arriving to Spain for economic reasons, but to recover a land that they consider theirs.49 These irrational fears installed in the Spanish imagination over many years are being exploited by Vox for political reasons. This is shown in the 2019 speech by Abascal at a convention of far-right parties in Italy, when he said, regarding “illegal” immigration, that “España tiene una ventaja: que fue vacunada contra la inmigración islámica durante ocho siglos de ocupación y ocho de Reconquista.”50 More recently, in January 2020, the second in command of Vox and a member of the Spanish parliament, Ortega Smith, reminded his followers during the commemorations of the Christian conquest of Granada that the Reconquista is not finished yet due to the invasion of radical Islamism that, in his view, Spain is suffering from.51 It is in this ideological frame that the video mentioned at the beginning of this essay takes place. At the beginning of the electoral campaign for the Andalusian parliament, Vox released a video that visually exemplifies their use of political neomedievalism and summarizes the ideology present in all the examples shown so far. The video shows Abascal mounting a horse, riding through a paramo in which no sign of civilization can be seen. Then, two more riders join him, and they are followed by many others on their way to – we assume – Andalusia. The music that accompanies the video is the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings, and the video closes with a slogan that says “¡Andalucía por España!” (Andalusia for Spain!). The video was presented by Vox through their social media accounts under another slogan that directly links the video and those filmed with the Reconquista: “La Reconquista empieza por Andalucía”52 [The Reconquest begins in Andalusia]. The video is a product of the political D. Flesler, The Return of the Moor, 55. Efe, “Abascal Afirma Que España ‘Fue Vacunada Contra La Inmigración Islámica’ Durante La Reconquista,” abc (Vocento, September 22, 2019), https://www.abc.es/espana/abciabascal-afirma-espana-vacunada-contra-inmigracion-islamica-durante-reconquista201909221352_noticia.html.Spain has an advantage: it is immunized against Islamic immigration after eight centuries of occupation and eight centuries of Reconquest. 51 El Plural, “Vox Llama a La ‘Reconquista’ Ante La ‘Invasión Del Islamismo Radical,’” El Plural (Elplural.com, January 2, 2020), https://www.elplural.com/politica/espana/voxllama-reconquista-invasion-islamismo-radical_230447102. 52 Vox noticias (@ voxnoticias_es) La Reconquista comenzará en tierras andaluzas [Twitter post]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/voxnoticias_es/status/1061917901031129088. The video can be seen at the following link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8whR_vRfuls. 49 50

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neomedievalism explained before. As in other farright and conservative statements, speeches, and books, the video does not attempt to recreate the true Middle Ages. The participants wear modern clothes, and there is no sort of visual reference to the Middle Ages. However, the setting and the display of the video, with Abascal being joined by other horsemen in every scene, riding through an empty plain toward Andalucía, shows the viewer echoes of this period. Through this image, Vox tries to combine the image of its leader with that of the Cid, who, at the beginning of the epic poem El Poema Mío Cid, sees how other knights join him as he rides toward the border between Castile and Moorish lands. Hence, in the minds of many people, this video triggered the image of this prominent Castilian medieval celebrity, El Cid Campeador, a historical figure transformed into a national hero through the aforementioned epic poem and through the different nationalistic historiographical and political reworkings of him. Through such reworkings, a misreading of the poem, and the ignorance of the historic character, many Spaniards have come to see El Cid Campeador as a champion of that imagined reconquest that is thought of as an uninterrupted struggle against the Muslim “invader.” For this reason, this figure is claimed and acclaimed by far-right militants. However, this image is far from accurate. His nickname tells us a different story about him and the times in which he lived. The name Cid comes from the Arabic word Sidi (lord). He was named this way, most likely, by the Muslim knights under his banner when he was working for the Taifa of Zaragoza or by his Muslim subjects after conquering Valencia, places where he lived after being expelled from Castille by king Alfonso VI.53 This misinterpretation of the Cid is due to the exaltation that some sectors have made of passages of the poem where the Cid fights and slaughters many moors, excluding other passages of the epic that display a different type of behavior. For instance, Vox overlook verses 2630-2680. In these verses, we can see how the Cid entrusts the safety of his daughters to the moor Avengalvón.54 In verses 1778-1779, the Cid fights alongside the Muslims of Valencia against the Almoravid troops, making a distinction between the moors of the land (Valencia), On an alternative on the origin of the epithet Cid, see D. Peterson, “The Castilian Origins of the Epithet Mio Cid,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (2021), 98, (3): 213–229. 54 A. Montaner Frutos and F. Rico, Cantar De Mio Cid (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), 162-164. 53

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who are seen as legitimate Valencians, and foreign moors, the Almoravids coming from North Africa.55 These examples and many others throughout the poem tell about a pragmatic warrior who does not just fight for religion. Hence, through the Vox video, we see how political neomedievalism is once again at work. This party does not care about recreating the Middle Ages, yet the Middle Ages are brought to the present. By fusing all the elements that defined Iberian medieval knights and warriors with their modern attire, Vox is bringing the Middle Ages into today’s world. Their interest is not to recreate the Middle Ages, but to create a new version devoid of any historical truth. This creation is to be displayed in the present, and it is carefully constructed based on crafted inaccuracies to pursue political yields. It also attempts to inspire irrational fears of a manipulated past. By portraying himself as a modern Cid, Abascal proposes himself to be the new savior of Spain, the executor of the war on temporality that marks this new Reconquista. It is through this Reconquista that today’s Cids and Pelayos are going to save the country from the “invasion” of Muslim immigrants that, according to Vox, once again threaten the country with destruction, violence, and backwardness. As noted in the introduction section of this article, the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Vox is in line with similar European far right factions. As Aristotle Kallis says, Islamophobia has become an obsession for far-right movements in the so-called West. Through such obsession, the Muslim citizen “is presented as omnipotent, omnipresent, invested with extraordinary power mixed with malice, and thus, existentially threatening in the most extreme sense.”56 This sense of threat increased after the 9/11 attacks in New York and the subsequent terror attacks in Madrid and London, paving the way for far-right hate speech that relies on concepts like cultural incompatibility, the incapacity of migratory absorption, and fears of invasion and colonization that supposedly would destroy Western civilization.57 As a sensationalist feeling of insecurity has spread across Western societies, Islamophobia has overtly appeared in

A. Montaner Frutos and F. Rico, Cantar, 113. A.Kallis, “The radical right and Islamophobia,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydgren (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 45. 57 A.Kallis, “The radical right,” 46-47. 55 56

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the public sphere, “feeding off an explosive mix of new fears and old stereotypes.”58 In the case of Spain, Vox added the original nationalist and Catholic features of the 19th century Reconquista to the discourse of clashing civilizations that sprung in post-9/11 times in many parts of the Western World, attacking Islam and Muslim men and women as the possessors of a set of values that threaten the essence of Western countries. These values are represented as medieval and employed as synonyms for barbaric. The medieval men and women, as Holsinger said, are to be feared and, therefore, excluded.59 The discourse of the War on Terror has been transformed and introduced into mainstream society by the far right as a war on temporality of which Muslim men and women are representatives. They are portrayed to recall, with solely their presence, medieval times that are constructed and perceived as barbaric. The Middle Ages, then, become a period that is always there, ready to disrupt modernity from the margins of history.60 In order to fight the “monstrosity” of the Middle Ages, the Spanish far right offers the concept of Reconquista. This, according to their dishonest interpretation of history, was a successful war of Spaniards against invading Muslims that lasted steadily for more than 700 years and entailed the rebirth of Spain and modernity. This vision of the Reconquista implies that hundreds of years ago, modernity was not possible until the Muslims were expelled. It brings forth a carefully constructed new medievalism that tries to shape today’s world based on intentional past inaccuracies. By inserting the Middle Ages by means of their concept of the Reconquista as a present threat to our civilization, the far right, paradoxically, imprints the medieval on the North African immigrant. This imprint converts these immigrants to the heirs of the Muslim conquerors in the 8th century, by associating terms to them like “invasion” or “invaders” and by calling them moors in a way that causes their identity to blend with that of the medieval Iberian Muslims. These individuals and their communities become atemporal marks of regression. Because of this, as Holsinger pointed out, the medieval man A.Kallis, “The radical right,” 52. B. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, IV. 60 B. Bildhauer and R. Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 59. 58 59

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must be feared and, according to the far-right, repressed and ultimately excluded from society. For the far-right, the medieval imprint of these men and women is everywhere they go, and their sole presence must be looked upon suspiciously. As previously mentioned, neomedievalism can be used to construct fantasy worlds based on what society perceives to be the aesthetic of the Middle Ages. Such is the case of many series and videogames that populate the entertainment market. However, neomedievalism can also be used for political purposes. As shown in this article, the case of Vox is noteworthy. This party takes and collapses an already charged term, the Reconquista, based on a decontextualized and distorted vision of history where Spain as a nation already existed in the 8th century. In this vision, Spain is idealized by the exaltation and exaggeration of certain aspects, such as mentioning St. Isidore, but omitting or downsizing the violent instability of the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, as well as its religious persecutions against minorities like Jews. This vision focuses on bloody events of the Arab conquest of the Iberian peninsula, but forgets about literary and scientific advances and the importance of Al Andalus in the recovery of Greek culture for the West through the translations of Arabic books into Castilian and Latin carried out in the School of Translators of Toledo. The Reconquista, as an event that relates to the Middle Ages, but the completion of which in 1492 marks the birth of modern-day Spain, functions in Vox’s discourse as a way of bringing the fabricated Middle Ages into the present. At the same time, it functions as a marker of modernity and a key tool in fighting against the medievalization of society that supposedly threatens Western civilization and is perpetrated by the immigrants arriving from North Africa. Therefore, it is very important to be aware of the ideological construction of political neomedievalism that aims to dehumanize people from certain communities by marking them as medieval. This is the real danger for our societies.

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The Black Veil of Freedom: Widows Beyond Westeros Dawn A. Seymour Klos*

I. Introduction Game of Thrones has offered medievalists an amazing opportunity to broaden our discussions and reach new audiences. The adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels into an accessible television programme allowed audiences to immerse themselves in an imperfect world filled with complex characters firmly rooted in the medieval past. The following chapter will consider HBO’s television adaptation of Martin’s literary work by comparing the characters of Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister with a thirteenth-century noblewoman, Isolde Pantulf (c.1170c.1222/3), to uncover the nuanced ways in which fictional women and their real-life counterparts exercised legal autonomy as widows. In Westeros, women wage war, participate in politics, speak their minds, are abused, and quietly exist until they find their voices. Martin’s women adapt and learn from the social structures around them. They are not idealists. They understand the odds are not in their favour, yet they fight for their social and legal interests. The subject of twelfth- and thirteenth-century law is rarely a trendy subject amongst academic audiences and typically has very few popular media examples. Shiloh Carroll suggested popular culture remains to ignore powerful and influential medieval women despite plentiful examples.1 This could be due to a lack of accessible secondary sources on the subject. Depictions of medieval women are often limited to the domestic sphere, with few Trinity College Dublin (Department of History), Ireland. Shiloh Carroll, Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018), 84. *

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considerations of their legal prowess. Analysis of litigating medieval women often indicates their court appearances must be linked to their life cycle, such as marital status. In this paradigm, women litigate more frequently following the death of a husband. Medieval English widows have provided the basis for some of our most beloved and our most hated characters within Westeros, such as Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Martin admitted each main character in the series was inspired by attributes of many historical figures, but should not be considered an adaptation of any singular personality. While the series succeeds at humanising these women, they are still broadly viewed as exceptional; a classification which deserves to be challenged. This chapter fuses two widows of Westeros with a real thirteenth-century English counterpart to reconsider current popular views on noblewomen’s rights in the Middle Ages. II. Raising the Bar: Knowledge Beyond the Nineteenth Century Women have long been perceived as silent or largely inactive participants in legal matters throughout the Middle Ages. Work examining any aspect of the female experience, particularly in regard to legal decisions, must still market the subject as “exceptional” to gain traction outside of a niche audience. Language used to describe the agency, power, or participation of women in legal disputes in the Middle Ages remains coloured by the presuppositions and values of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. The continued use of nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of medieval law have created a paradigm within the field.2 Some legal historians have continued to utilise these sources to influence their interpretations, practices, and concerns. Although scholars are presenting new lines of inquiry into the experience of law, rather than simply the study of written law, they are in turn exposing the limitations and biases of these modern legal commentaries.3 Heather J. Tanner has argued the past thirty years have produced dozens of examples of the so-called “exceptional” woman, begging the

Heather J Tanner, “Women’s Legal Capacity: Was the Thirteenth Century a Turning Point?,” in Paradigm Shifts During the Global Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrect Classen, vol. 44 (Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2019), 82. 3 Ibidem. 2

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question, when does she become the norm?4 Louise Wilkinson has published several works outlining women such as Nichola de la Haye, the heiress of Brattleby, who, in addition to being styled as a baron, served as a sheriff in Lincolnshire in 1215, without any negative legal repercussions.5 As more scholars begin to embrace new approaches and interpretations of medieval sources, the faint voices of erased women are growing louder. The language of a problematic metanarrative is not limited to the academic sphere. Kavita Mudan Finn concluded “readers are caught in a feedback loop in which Martin’s work helps to create a neomedieval idea of the Middle Ages.”6 In essence, popular juggernauts like Game of Thrones are imprinting and, in some cases, overwriting an individual’s construction of a time, place, or people. Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisel argued “the past is the present, for the past never dies but is continually reborn in the present moment of consideration and consumption.”7 The medievalism employed by both the literary and television programme need not be an enemy of the historian, but rather a useful tool for reaching audiences outside academia. Historians must also grapple with the complication of modern projection on medieval people. Victoria Ortenberg argued accuracy cannot exist in historical fiction because the projections of the current readership and author will always outweigh the truth.8 Helen Young further asserted, “There is a very strong desire amongst fantasy fans […] for imagined worlds to reflect historical realities of the Middle Ages.”9 It would appear the illusion of authenticity due to an agreeable projection Heather J. Tanner, Laura L. Gathagan, and Lois L. Honeycutt, “Introduction,” in Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100-1400: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalist Debate, ed. Heather J. Tanner (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1-2. 5 Louise J. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, vol. 54 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2007), 18-24. 6 Kavita Mudan Finn, “Queen of Sad Mischance: Medievalism, ‘Realism,’ and the Case of Cersei Lannister, in Queenship and the Women of Westeros: Female Agency and Advice in Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, eds. Zita Eva Rohr and Lisa Benz (Chaum, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020), 30. 7 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisel, Medievalism: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), 10. 8 Victoria Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 192. 9 Helen Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!’: Race, Neo/medievalism, and the World of Dragon Age,” Year’s Work in Medievalisms 27, (2012): 6. 4

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of modern ideas onto medieval people is the desired outcome, not a discussion of corroborated facts. Creators and consumers of popular media generate their own frames of reference, which are then distorted and reimagined by each person who brings their own views to the material. Just as writers and showrunners must consider the power of palatability, historians too must grapple with the influence of unsubstantiated received wisdom regarding the representation of medieval women and their response to the modality of power allowing that information to persist. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski defined power as “the ability to act effectively, to influence people or decisions, and to achieve goals.”10 This definition does not require a dichotomy of public and private law, nor does it assume a binary bias. While it is certainly true that the work of men remains more plentiful in the surviving records, what has survived written by and for women exemplifies their exercise of power and agency in accordance with Erler and Kowaleski’s guidelines. The evidence for the medieval female voice is present, yet often ignored. Tanner estimated “charters, writs, letters, and other administrative instruments documented women’s roles approximately thirty percent of the time.”11 While the sample size is undoubtedly smaller, the role of women as active participants who demonstrate power over their legal affairs was the norm, not the exception. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the modern system which propagates the silence of medieval women and reduces them to arguments of exceptionalism. Westeros is filled to the brim with women capturing the hearts of audiences for their wit, intelligence, and resilience. While women certainly did not hold power to the same extent as men in thirteenthcentury England, they could, and did, exercise a substantial amount of legal agency. High-born women are often perceived as silent, obedient, and, in extreme cases, political prisoners in marriage. Sansa Stark, Cersei Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, and Catelyn Tully were all participants of an arranged marriage for political reasons. Their marriages were Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 2. 11 Heather J. Tanner, “Women’s Legal Capacity-Was the Thirteenth-Century a Turning Point?,” in Paradigm Shifts in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Transformations, Reformation, and Revolutions in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Albrect Classen, ASMAR (Leiden: Brepols, 2019), 81-96. 10

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contracted by and for the benefit of the men of their houses. Each of these women would also experience widowhood and the wider influence that came with it. Regardless of the contractual expectations of marriage, each Westerosi woman cultivated power and exercised varying degrees of agency as a wife and widow. Perhaps the two most striking cases from Game of Thrones are the personal and political arcs of Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark. Cersei and Sansa in many ways represent the prevailing depiction of medieval women. Sansa began her journey as the petulant high-born girl who dreams of marrying a prince. She obeyed her father’s orders and was rarely seen writing or participating in statecraft until her marriage to Tyrion Lannister. She was the embodiment of the “weaker sex” ideal. 12 In a visual representation of coverture, at their wedding, Sansa was literally covered with a cloak symbolising Tyrion’s protection. This act formally stripped Sansa of her agency as an individual legally and socially. Conversely, Cersei’s introduction on screen painted her as incestuous, power-hungry, and actively planning her husband’s murder. Even in twenty-first-century multi-media depictions of women in the medieval world, they are still subject to lion vs. lamb dichotomies. This conscious choice by writers has led to a false narrative of female participation, representation, and ability. In later seasons, Game of Thrones presented a fundamentally changed world, one with a wider gaze which left Sansa Stark as one of the most powerful and respected people in Westeros. Sansa became the unlikely feminist icon. Writing about the lives of medieval women is in itself a political act of feminism. Denise Riley claimed, “the volatility of ‘women’ is so marked that it makes feminist alliances with other tendencies as difficult as they are inescapable.”13 Modern ideas of feminism call into context ideas of enfranchisement or equality which do not directly correlate to the medieval world. It is therefore understood, although not excusable, how certain audiences might find the idea of a feminist reading of the Middle Ages to be not only reductive, but perhaps even threatening. Many modern theorists and historians tend to reject “woman” as a Emily Stoper and Roberta Ann Johnson, “The Weaker Sex & the Better Half: The Idea of Women’s Moral Superiority in the American Feminist Movement,” Polity 10, no. 2 (1977): 192-217. 13 Denise Riley, “Does Sex Have a History?,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 20. 12

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category for analysis, citing its instability.14 Ultimately, gender, like any other chosen analytical category, is part of a larger superstructure which can be examined, but only if care is taken to interpret evidence within the context of the individual’s lived experience. Feminism does not seek to change what occurred; it asks why situations do or do not display inconsistency between sexes in a specific context. Feminism is not a static concept. A feminist reading of a subject is simply another way of stating a process is being observed. The following case study is a feminist reading of Isolde Pantulf and the historians who have attempted to bring more stories like hers into the academic mainstream. III. The Black Widow of Breedon and the Queen in the North England in the thirteenth century was composed of many waning customs. King John’s legal reforms and growing need for capital culminated in the blending and recording of early English and Norman customs into what would become English Common Law. One aspect of Norman cultural identity was the insistence on a structured hierarchical society. The Anglo-Normans reconstructed this culture in England as they reaffirmed the necessity to marry within one’s own class.15 At first glance, a system bolstering classism does not appear unique to Europe or to the Middle Ages. In a wider context, however, this fixation on classism ushered in a host of problems relating to marriage. Not only did Anglo-Norman elites marry within their own class, they often married within the same communities. Keats-Rohan has suggested AngloNormans maintained a strong bond with Normandy by marrying other nobles who hailed from the same region, as they were likely to share political and cultural beliefs.16 The need for men to marry young noblewomen of a certain region which correlated to their own personal or political agenda determined the genetic variation between mates was not as diverse as desired. These practices are also displayed in matches such as Sansa and Tyrion Lannister, Joffrey Baratheon and Margery Tyrell, and Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon. While the audience Ibidem. Also, see Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19-50. 15 Michael Dolley, Anglo-Norman Ireland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 124. 16 K.S.B. Rohan, Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1997), 147. 14

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is privy to each of these characters’ motivations, the inner workings of real people are far more elusive. Isolde Pantulf (~1170-~1223) was born to William Pantulf (d. 1194) and Joan de Goldington, daughter of Piers de Goldington (d. ~1175) of Breedon-on-the-Hill.17 At the time of her birth, Isolde’s paternal family, the Pantulfs of Shropshire, held extensive lands in Shropshire on the Welsh frontier and occupied appointed positions in the royal government, such as sheriff.18 Her family originated in Calvados.19 Her paternal relatives served Earl Roger Montgomery and their entrance into England is due to Montgomery’s gift of land to William Pantulf.20 Following the death of his wife, Roger’s friendship with William Pantulf ended as he was accused of orchestrating the murder of Mabel de Bellême.21 This ordeal would stain the Pantulf name and create a friction between the Pantulf and Montgomery which would last for generations. When Isolde married, her family would have sought a suitor with connections to Calvados to uphold their “imagined community”22 of displaced Normans in England. Adherence to this custom suggests Anglo-Normans, at least on the occasion of their first marriage, often married a person of their same class and with ties to the same region. Familial structure in Norman and Anglo-Norman societies are the heart of any social discussion. It is therefore of the utmost importance that this be considered in any discussion of marriage age. Familial alliances such as this mirror the ascension of Sansa as the Starks gained notoriety for their part in Robert Baratheon’s rebellion. Sansa’s father, Ned, would strike a bargain with Robert to marry his son, Joffrey, the future king, to Sansa in an effort to safeguard their alliance. Doris Mary Stenton, ed., Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Staffordshire, 1221-1222, vol. 59 (London, UK: Spottiswood, Ballentine & Co., 1940), 613, m. 13. 18 Janet Meisel, Barons of the Welsh Frontier: The Corbet, Pantulf, and Fitz Warin Families, 10661272 (1st ed., Lincoln, NE, 1980), 25. 19 J. Horace Round, ed., Calendar of Documents Preserved in France 918-1206, Calvados: Part III (1st ed., London, 1899), 209. 20 Marie Fauroux, ed., Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie, 911-1066 (Mémoires de la société des antiquaires de Normandie, 1st ed., Caen, FR, 1961),. 214-16; Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, Vol 3, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1969), 160-61. 21 Orderic, History, Vol. 3, 160-61. 22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: 1991), 6. 17

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Cersei also married Robert under similar conditions. Although Sansa did not eventually marry Joffrey, she did experience widowhood with the murder of her second husband, Ramsay Bolton. Cersei would orchestrate the death of Robert Baratheon after nearly twenty years of marriage. Upon the deaths of their husbands, each found herself with a newfound power. Isolde married five times in her life.23 Each marriage allowed Isolde to control another aspect of her estate, as she mastered the art of politics and contract negotiation. Traditionally, women of noble status had little control over their first marriage, but were no longer under the direct authority of their fathers and could exercise discretionary power when choosing their next partner.24 There is no evidence to suggest Isolde was an exception to this rule. Legal marrying age for girls of Isolde’s lifetime was seven. They were considered able to support a husband at twelve and capable of running a household at fifteen, according to Henry de Bracton.25 Peter Fleming has suggested the average age of urban elite women at their first marriage was between seventeen and twenty-four, with child marriage as an abnormality.26 There remains no clear indication of a regulated age of consent as required by the church. Similarly to marriage age, no designated age of appropriate widowhood, or rather, the age in which a girl could earn and be granted dower has been ascertained. Two cases within Bracton’s Note-Book comment on a 1225 case from Devon in which a girl was given dower without achieving the age of majority.27 The age of majority is not explicitly described. Glanvill also never addressed the minimum age required to earn dower.28 No surviving records offer insight into Isolde’s age upon her first marriage and widowhood. 23 George E Cokayne and Geoffrey White, eds.,

Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, 2nd ed., vol. 11 (London, UK: St. Catherine's Press, 1949), 295-296. 24 Rhoda L. Friedrichs, “The Remarriage of Elite Widows in the Middle Ages,” Florilegium, xxiii, no. 1 (2006), 70. 25 Henry de Bracton, Bracton’s Note-Book: A Collection of Cases Decided in the King’s Courts during the Reign of Henry III, ed. Frederick William Maitland, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 252. 26 Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 22. 27Bracton’s Note-Book, 265-6. 28 Paul Brand, “Deserving and Undeserving Wives: Earning and Forfeiting Dower in Medieval England,” Journal of Legal History 22, no. 1 (April 2001), 7. 272

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Isolde would become her father, William Pantulf’s, heir upon his death in 1194.29 Her distinction as heir did not cause any immediate inheritance concerns, as Isolde had no siblings at the time of his death. William’s wife Joan died quickly after Isolde’s birth, leaving him without a male heir. William never remarried. At the time of William’s death, Isolde had become a wealthy widow in her own right, due to the death of her first two husbands. By adding William’s land to her already growing wealth, Isolde cemented herself as a desirable heiress with close links to her paternal family. Isolde’s inheritance of the Leicestershire Pantulf lands and assets reflects a growing social and legal shift to a society built upon paternal primacy.30 Isolde’s and the Pantulf legacy, like all others, would be traced and legitimised by paternal connections, rather than give credence to maternal relatives, regardless of wealth or status. Isolde once again shares an aspect of her life with both Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Although, on paper, Sansa and Cersei were not the legitimate heirs to their father’s lands and fortunes, they were the keys to them. Sansa earned the distinction, the key to the North by Varys, indicating her value to those who sought to gain land and allies.31 Likewise, Cersei remained the most valuable bargaining chip to the Lannister wealth and armies as Jamie could not marry nor inherit and Tyrion was largely seen as undesirable due to his physical stature. Ironically, Sansa and Tyrion would wed four episodes after the conversation between Varys and Olenna.32 Following the death of Isolde’s third husband, Henry Biset, in 1208, King John disseised, or took ownership of Magorham (Gormanston), an Irish estate north of Dublin.33 John claimed Henry did not hold the land at the time of his death.34 Although she would not see the return of her Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217-1327, 1st ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 23. 30 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 49. 31 Game of Thrones, S3: Ep. 4, “And Now His Watch Has Ended,” directed by Alex Graves, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 21 April 2013. 32 Game of Thrones, S3: Ep. 8, “Second Sons,” directed by Michelle MacLaren, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 19 May 2013. 33 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli De Oblatis Et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati Tempore Regis Johannis (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835), 511-512. 34 Ibidem. 29

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land until the first sealing of the Great Charter at Runnymede. Isolde provided enough support from loyal barons in multiple regions to overturn the king’s decision and restore her dower.35 John could not risk any further insult to his already fragmented relationship with the aristocratic network. This 1213 record creates a curiosity. How was a woman able to produce enough evidence and support to overturn the decision of the King’s court? Many viewers asked a similar question following Sansa Stark’s rallying of multiple armies to fight in The Battle of the Bastards. A fatal error of the study of law, and in particular historical law, is the tendency to ignore social and familial influence on legal decisions. Henry Biset and his father Manasser had been faithful servants to Henry II and John in Scotland and Ireland. Manasser served as Henry II’s steward until his 1156 retirement.36 Isolde’s great-uncle, Ivo Pantulf, married Alicia de Verdun, sister of Bertram de Verdun, Seneschal of Ireland, and friend to King Henry II. At the time of this case, Isolde Pantulf boasted allies and sway in multiple aristocratic pedigrees. Her second husband, Walter de Tateshall, had been sheriff of Huntingdon and Cambridge.37 Her 1213 charter was guaranteed by prominent landholders Geoffrey de Longchamps, Walter of Dunstanville, Fulk Fitz Warin, and Ranulf, Earl of Chester. Fulk Fitz Warin openly rebelled against John and had been declared an outlaw. Ranulf, who at the time of signing Isolde’s document remained loyal to the crown, would ultimately turn against the king.38 The witnessing of these men demonstrates Isolde’s ability to transcend individual baronial issues both for and against the tumultuous king a short time before the 1215 revolt. While John never succeeded in uniting the aristocracy to further his own interests, Isolde found a way to convince often unbending men to her cause. It also places her widespread support on display as she garnered assistance in multiple regions. It is possible one Ibidem. Hubert Hall, ed., The Red Book of the Exchequer, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 656. 3722 George E Cokayne and Geoffrey White, eds., Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, 2nd ed., vol. 11 (London, UK: St. Catherine's Press, 1949), 296. 38 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi asservati tempore Regis Johannis (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835), 511-512. 35 36

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of the men who witnessed her documents could have been her own version of Lord Petyr Baelish. Witness lists reveal Isolde’s influence over several of England’s most powerful barons and would have been enough to force John to consider the consequences of her dissatisfaction. Similarly, Sansa Stark also boasted powerful allies due to her natal family. Her father’s friendship with Robert Baratheon promised a royal marriage. Her mother, Catelyn Tully, ensured all houses within the Riverlands would stand with house Stark. Catelyn’s sister, Lysa, married Lord Arryn, Hand of the King, gaining Sansa a crucial ally and control over the Knights of the Vale. Sansa’s marriage to Tyrion Lannister briefly provided her with security as a member of the royal family. Her second marriage to Ramsay Bolton allowed Sansa to inherit her ancestral right as Lady of Winterfell due to the Bolton occupation. It would be Sansa’s petition for help, not Jon Snow’s, who would provide House Stark with necessary troops to win the Battle of the Bastards and reclaim Winterfell. Sansa Stark was the key to the North and demanded the respect and loyalty from the northern families. Her brothers were not able to achieve the same fealty from the men of the North.39 The lordship of Westeros appears to function similarly to the aristocracy of medieval England. Although the crown boasted absolute authority, it relied upon the submission and participation of the aristocracy, which often operated outside royal decree. Henry Biset, her third husband, solidified her stance as an essential member of the royal household. He served John in Ireland on multiple occasions.40 Henry accompanied Geoffrey Luttrell (d. 1216) to Ireland in 1204, to ensure the successful transition of a new Bishop of Waterford.41 The same year, Henry Biset served with Walter de Lacy, Lord of Meath. In 1207, Henry would receive the fosterage of Walter’s nephew, Hugh, son of Robert de Lacy.42 This action forged a bond between themselves Game of Thrones, S6: Ep. 9, “Battle of the Bastards,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 19 June 2016. 40 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835), 48; Hardy, Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, 14b. 41 Ibidem. 42H.S. Sweetman, ed., Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland: Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London, 1171-1251 (London, UK: Longman & Co., 1875), 43. 39

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and one of the most powerful English families in Ireland.43 Henry provided her with deeper roots into the social arena of the aristocracy throughout his service to King John. Combined with her daughters” marriages into two baronial houses (Neville and Plessey), Isolde’s transactions spanned the entirety of England and the greater Dublin area. Henry Biset died in 1208, once again placing Isolde in a position to collect dower and open to remarry. She married Walter de Baskerville sometime between 1208 and his death in 1213.44 Once again, Isolde’s life mirrors elements of Sansa’s rise to power. As Sansa gained the favour and protection of Robert Baratheon, and, to a lesser extent, Joffrey, Isolde also secured multiple instances of debt forgiveness and gifts from King John. The young King Joffrey was advised not to execute Sansa’s father, Ned Stark, due to his influence over the lords of Westeros. Varys observed Cersei’s attempt to grasp control of a deeply fragmented aristocratic network when she petitioned Joffrey to strip Ned of his lands and titles but allow him to live out his days as a man of the Knight’s Watch.45 Rather than heed his mother’s advice, Joffrey demands Ned’s head in lieu of his submission.46 This act sparked open rebellion against the king. While Joffrey would not survive the “War of the Five Kings,” Sansa Stark utilised the period of civil war to learn from the mistakes of the men surrounding her. She fostered her connections with the Knights of the Vale and Lord Baelish to ensure the survival of her house. While the details of Isolde’s actions during the revolt may never be known, she too appears to have gained valuable skills and rights as her company of men disappeared. In her third widowhood, Isolde recognized a valuable commodity aside from land: wardships. Isolde bore two daughters married into the Neville and Plessey families, and two surviving heirs, Robert de Tateshall, and Ralph de St. Amand. While these children were all married into families of means, Isolde also sued for the wardship of her husband’s children from previous marriages. Most notably, Isolde secured the Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835), 72. 44 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1844), 286. 45 Game of Thrones, S1: Ep. 9, “Baelor,” directed by Alan Taylor, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 12 June 2011. 46 Ibidem. 43

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wardship of Henry Biset’s son and heir, allowing her to broker his marriage contract. This act, typically performed by a male member of the household, marked new territory for Isolde. She, not her father or husband, controlled the outcome of an important match. This transaction cost Isolde an astounding 1,000 marks.47 Isolde continued to demonstrate her growing agency when she sued for her free widowhood, the right to conduct her own affairs in public and private law. The average price for widows’ rights during the reign of King Henry II was eighty-seven marks.48 In 1214, Isolde once again made a fine to the Crown for 1000 marks and a palfrey (horse) to be free from the obligation of further marriage.49 At first glance, Isolde’s fine for her free widowhood appears marginally higher than the average of 87 marks for noble women.50 As an untitled widow, she should not have posed an immediate threat to the Crown. Isolde continuously proved her loyalty by only contracting marriages which posed no compromise to the king’s interests. Her higher fee can be attributed to her aristocratic rapport and wealth in both England and Ireland. She held a formidable estate at Gormanston, which was a profitable corn exporter, and two carucates of land in Fingal. Gormanston would remain with her descendants until the mid-fourteenth century, when it became the seat of the prominent Preston family.51 Isolde also held lands in Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Sussex, Wiltshire, and Warwickshire.52 In essence, Isolde’s widespread landholdings and social connections harken back to Sansa’s status as the “key to the North.” Both women quietly controlled seats of power. Doris Mary Stenton, ed., The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1211 (Pipe Roll 57) (London, UK: Pipe Roll Society, 1953), 172, 177. 48 Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217-1327, 1st ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 161. 49 Stenton, Pleas before the King, 113. 50 Waugh, The Lordship of England, 161. 51James Mills and M.J. McEnery, eds., Calendar of the Gormanston Register, from the Original in the Possession of the Right Honourable the Viscount of Gormanston (Dublin: Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1916), 20. 52 Doris Mary Stenton, ed., Pleas before the King or His Justices 1198-1202. Vol. II, Rolls or Fragments of Rolls from the Years 1198, 1201 and 1202 (London, UK: Bernard Quaritch, 1952), 193; Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1844), 286b; Doris Mary Stenton, ed., The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Tenth Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1208 (Pipe Roll 54), vol. 61 (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1947), 24, 198-199. 47

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Isolde’s marriage to Henry Biset undoubtedly elevated her social status and net worth, as she nurtured relationships with barons ready to depose the king. With Henry regularly abroad, Isolde would have ensured the maintenance of their properties and social alliances. Following Henry’s death, in 1208, Isolde was once again available for suitors. Her third marriage left her incredibly desirable, as she was still a young heiress. In accordance with law, Richard Neville made a fine of twenty palfreys to obtain the king’s permission to ask Isolde’s hand in marriage.53 Isolde rejected the match. No documentation survives to reveal why she declined his request. Cersei Lannister experienced a similar struggle when her father, Tywin Lannister, negotiated her marriage to Loras Tyrell without her consent. Cersei ensured her continued freedom by removing Loras as a possible suitor when she revealed his sexual orientation to the High Sparrow. This action guaranteed the removal of Loras’s claim to the Tyrell lands and title, therefore saving Cersei from an unwanted marriage and loss of agency.54 Both Cersei and Sansa found themselves in positions of extreme power following the death of their husbands and fathers. Cersei wrestled to maintain control of the realm following the elevation of her son to King. She would reset the power dynamic by destroying the Sept of Baelor with wildfire and nearly all major political rivals inside.55 Cersei’s actions, while grotesque, exhibited her ultimate loyalty toward her family, or, more accurately, herself rather than the realm. The question of motivation can be explored in the women of Westeros, yet largely eludes scholars of medieval history due to the lack of surviving narrative sources. Each personal connection strengthened the visibility of Isolde’s loyalty and commitment to the crown. She continued to marry up the social hierarchy by carefully marrying influential suitors within the king’s household. Although Isolde would eventually lose four husbands, there remains no evidence to suggest she played a part in any of their deaths. While it is curious, they each died while married to the heiress, she should 53 T.S. Hughes, The

History of England, By Hume and Smollett with a Continuation of the Accession of George III to 1835, 2nd ed. (London, UK, 1835), 103. 54 Game of Thrones, S5: Ep. 6, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” directed by Jeremy Podeswa, written by Bryan Cogman, HBO, 17 May 2015. 55 Game of Thrones, S6: Ep.10, “The Winds of Winter,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 26 June 2016. 278

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not be confused with the character of Cersei, who desired and orchestrated the death of her husband Robert Baratheon. While widowhood could indeed be a profitable adventure, it also allowed a woman to be legally and socially vulnerable. The birth of Isolde’s son allowed temporary political stability as she gained dower from the Tateshall family with ease, yet she desired more control. Her status as an heiress made Isolde a highly sought-after commodity. Men relished the opportunity to marry an heiress as she brought wealth and often a higher status than the suitor.56 At the close of her second marriage, Isolde had become a mother, a widow, and an heiress in a time of immense political upheaval. Her status as a multiple widow allowed Isolde the opportunity to choose her own mate upon her next marriage.57 This change granted Isolde a new set of rights and responsibilities seemingly overnight. Her relationship with English Common Law had already endured extreme stress due to her lengthy first dower battle. Isolde’s early life and first two marriages exemplify her tenuous relationship with liminality. Legally, Isolde existed between the identity of others, yet culturally and financially, she was free to express herself within the confines of the law. It is within this extended stay in a liminal space, Isolde’s identity can be parsed and categorised. John took notice of Isolde’s plight and her ever-growing list of deceased husbands. He instructed the sheriff of Nottinghamshire she would not be distrained for the debts of yet another dead husband; he also sent letters to the Justicier of Ireland ordering the immediate restoration of her lands.58 Had Isolde remarried quickly, her estates would not have reverted to her even though by law they were her dower lands. Instead, they would revert to her living husband or heir. In 1216, Isolde sued once more, this time in Gloucestershire, for dower owed from her fourth husband, Walter de Baskerville.59 As long as Isolde remained a widow, she was free to collect rent and oversee each estate as she saw fit, so long as her actions did not displease the King of England, Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217-1327, (Princeton: 1988), 196-7. 57 Rhoda L. Friedrichs, “The Remarriage of Elite Widows in the Middle Ages” in Florilegium, v. 23.1 (2006), 70. 58 J.C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 184. 59 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1844), 298. 56

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who remained lord over all lands.60 Isolde utilised her newfound income to progress her security and independence. She managed estates throughout England and Ireland, while also tending to her fictive ties through several wardships. Both Sansa and Cersei utilised their times as widows in a similar capacity, as they both built their respective social empires in the absence of their husbands. Isolde’s free widowhood would be short-lived, as she married a fifth and final time to crusader Amaury de St. Amand in 1218.61 This marriage again strengthened her ties to Ireland, as Amaury served, like Henry Biset, as a steward to the king in Ireland.62 Amaury joined the Magna Carta barons against King John in 1215, as did Isolde’s frequent ally and most likely comparable character to Littlefinger, William de Huntingfeld.63 This would not mark the first blemish on Isolde’s familial reputation, but it was the first and only direct relative to rebel against the Crown. Amaury later enjoyed the favour of King Henry III, as did his wife. Due to the surviving records, we may never know if Isolde supported her husband’s decision to oppose John openly. Given her ability to lose husbands at a rapid pace, she likely held no objections to Amaury’s actions. They remained married until her death in 1222/3. Amaury continued to utilize Gormanston and her Irish lands to his benefit. He continued to export corn from Gormanston to England with the permission of the Crown.64 This estate remained with the St. Amand family, passing to Amaury and Isolde’s son, Ralph de St. Amand.65

60Frederick

Pollock and Frederick William Maitland, A History of English Common Law before the Time of Edward I, 1st ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1895), 3. 61 Cockayne, Complete Peerage, 295. 62 Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum, 48; Thomas Duffy Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati (London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835), 14b; H.S. Sweetman, ed., Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland: Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London, 1171-1251 (London, UK: Longman & Co., 1875), 43. 63 Victoria County History: A History of County Worcestershire, vol. 3 (London, UK: Victoria County History, 1913), 158-173. 64Gormanston Register, 21. 65 Gormanston Register, 23. 280

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IV. Conclusion Isolde Pantulf is one of many medieval women who have never been silent in the surviving sources, but who have been silenced by the very academy who should give them a voice. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury legal works, such as Pollock and Maitland’s History of English Law, reveal more about the men who wrote the text rather than the women who experienced medieval law. As scholars continue to re-evaluate sources for a myriad of up-and-coming trends, perhaps it is finally time to consider feminism is not purely a modern construct. Women, as demonstrated by this case study, exercised power in public and private law without interruption and were anything but silent. How many women like Isolde must we elucidate before we acknowledge the validity of their individual voices? Perhaps it is time to transcend nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about how women should behave and instead consider each voice within its individual context. This case study has presented a few key elements of the life of Isolde Pantulf against the ornate detail found in characters from HBO’s Game of Thrones. While historians grapple with considering a world in which women such as Isolde may be considered as an example rather than the exceptional example, Game of Thrones places these so-called “exceptional” women in a wider context. Both the real medieval English widow and the widows of Westeros remind us to heed the words of medieval historian Robin Frame, who warned we should not deny medieval men the same complexities of identity as found in modern men.66 Sansa and Cersei are presented as two sides of the same coin. Women in power are often seen as exceptional, evil, or innocent bystanders. Above all, the three women discussed in this chapter were anything but passive. Adrienne Rich argued history remembers women who are independent or strong-minded as “freaks of nature, unsexed, frigid, castrating, perverted, dangerous, and controlling.”67 This reductionist view is being challenged by nuanced character development in popular media, such as Game of Thrones, and in feminist scholarship. Isolde Pantulf likely fell somewhere between the two fictional characters. When examining the Robin Frame, “‘Les Engleys nées Irlande’: The English Political Identity in Medieval Ireland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993): 83-104. 67 Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 70-1. 66

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life and actions of medieval women and their interactions with a developing legal system, we must take special care to remember they, like Sansa and Cersei, were learning and developing along the way and responding to their own time and place in a manner in which they chose. Isolde, like her Westerosi counterparts, were not simply ladies. They seized opportunity, participated in politics, and bowed to no one.

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–––. S3: Ep. 4, “And Now His Watch Has Ended,” directed by Alex Graves, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 21 April 2013. –––. S3: Ep. 8, “Second Sons,” directed by Michelle MacLaren, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 19 May 2013. –––. S5: Ep. 6, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” directed by Jeremy Podeswa, written by Bryan Cogman, HBO, 17 May 2015. –––. S6: Ep. 9, “Battle of the Bastards,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 19 June 2016. –––. S6: Ep.10, “The Winds of Winter,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik, written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, HBO, 26 June 2016. Hall, Hubert, ed. The Red Book of the Exchequer. 2. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Cambridge Library Collection. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hardy, Thomas Duffy, ed. Rotuli De Oblatis Et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati Tempore Regis Johannis. London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1835. –––. Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati. London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1844. –––. Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, (Public Records Commission, 1835). Holt, J.C. Magna Carta. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hughes, T.S. The History of England, By Hume and Smollett with a Continuation of the Accession of George III to 1835. 2nd ed. London, UK, 1835. Kelly, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Essay. In Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, 19–50. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Meisel, Janet. Barons of the Welsh Frontier: The Corbet, Pantulf, and Fitz Warin Families, 1066-1272. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Mills, James, and M.J. McEnery, eds. Calendar of the Gormanston Register, from the Original in the Possession of the Right Honourable the Viscount of Gormanston. Dublin: Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1916. Pollock, Frederick, and Frederick William Maitland. A History of English Common Law before the Time of Edward I. 1. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1895.

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Riley, Denise. “Does Sex Have a History?” Essay. In Feminism and History, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, 17–34. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rohan, K.S.B. Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1997. Stenton, Doris Mary, ed. Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Staffordshire, 1221-1222. 59. Vol. 59. Publications of the Seldon Society. London, UK: Spottiswood, Ballentine & Co., 1940. –––. Pleas before the King or His Justices 1198-1202. Vol. II, Rolls or Fragments of Rolls from the Years 1198, 1201 and 1202. 68. Vol. 68. 68 vols. Publications of the Seldon Society. London, UK: Bernard Quaritch, 1952. –––. The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Tenth Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1208 (Pipe Roll 54). 61. Vol. 61. Pipe Roll Society Publications. London, UK: Public Records Commission, 1947. –––. The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1211 (Pipe Roll 57). Pipe Roll Society Publications. London, UK: Pipe Roll Society, 1953. Stoper, Emily, and Roberta Ann Johnson. “The Weaker Sex & the Better Half: The Idea of Women’s Moral Superiority in the American Feminist Movement.” Polity 10, no. 2 (1977): 192-217. Sweetman, H.S., ed. Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland: Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London, 1171-1251. London, UK: Longman & Co., 1875. Tanner, Heather J., Laura L. Gathagan, and Lois L. Honeycutt. “Introduction.” Introduction. In Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100-1400: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalist Debate, edited by Heather J. Tanner, 1–18. The New Middle Ages. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Tanner, Heather J. “Women’s Legal Capacity-Was the ThirteenthCentury a Turning Point?” Essay. In Paradigm Shifts in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Transformations, Reformation, and Revolutions in the Pre-Modern World, edited by Albrect Classen, 81–96. Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2019.

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The Frozen Middle Ages: Elsa as a Contemporary Joan of Arc? Andrea Maraschi*

I. Hang in There, Joan! This chapter will focus on Disney animated film Frozen (2013) and, in particular, on a brief but meaningful frame which refers to Joan of Arc. In the first part, the reader will be introduced to the contribution’s rationale and to the frame in question, and Disney animated movies are going to be contextualized within the wider tradition of fairy tales. In the second section, I will analyze in detail Frozen’s female and male characters, and I will juxtapose the former to the figure of Joan. In the third part, I will present and elaborate on post-feminist readings of the film. Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to the historical reality of Joan of Arc and to the ideological propaganda which seemingly justified the reference to la Pucelle in Frozen. The story of Joan of Arc is timeless. I deliberately use the word story because, as Joan’s case shows, a given historical fact can play a much wider role than it was supposed to. It can become legend, or it can even be exploited for political or ideological purposes. It is no mystery that Joan has not only turned the tide of the One Hundred Years’ War, but she has also been useful in constructing French national identity, for instance. More importantly for this paper, she has inspired several generations of feminists and a growing number of students interested in gender studies.1 In turn, the need to re-examine the life and the experience of University of Bari, Italy. * I am grateful to Rachel Fulton Brown for her insightful and helpful suggestions. All remaining errors are my own. 1 See, for example: Marina Warner, Joan of Arc. The Image of Female Heroism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1981]); Leslie Feinberg, Transgendered warriors: From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Marlene LeGates, In Their Time. A *

Andrea Maraschi

the young girl from Domrémy has joined forces with the thriving field of medievalism.2 The reasons behind such success, then, lie in part in the undisputable uniqueness of her story itself, as well as in the purpose it can serve in our time. Being Joan an exceptional woman in a society of men, who went as far as to lead armies and influence the fate of her kingdom, it is no wonder that her figure is still resonating with women (and feminists, in general) in 2021. Notably, Joan (actually, a portrayal of the Pucelle) pops up in one of Disney’s most successful productions: Frozen (2013).3 The film’s reception has been incredibly positive, and, with its ca. $1.3 billion box office revenue, it represents the highest-grossing animated film ever made (only recently surpassed by its sequel, Frozen 2).4 The reference to Joan occurs in the beginning part of the film, as Anna is singing “Do you want to build a snowman” and jumps to the couch in the portrait room of her castle (00.09.25). She feels lonely because her sister and best friend Elsa will not play with her, and she does not grasp the reason. So, she starts “talking to the pictures on the walls,”5 and “then looks up at the painting above her of the courageous Joan of Arc.”6 History of Feminism in Western Society (New York: Routledge, 2001); Maud Burnett McIerney, Eloquent Virgins. From Thecla to Joan of Arc (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Jaime E. Hovey, “Gallantry and its discontents: Joan of Arc and virtuous transmasculinity in Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West,” Feminist Modernist Studies 1:12 (2018): 113-137. 2 Early seminal works on medievalism are: The New Medievalism, ed. Marina Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); The Future of The Middle Ages, ed. William D. Paden (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). On Disney princesses and medievalism, see the recent Francesca Roversi Monaco, “‘Damsel in distress.’ Medioevo, medievalismo e ruoli di genere nella cultura audiovisiva contemporanea,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 122 (2020): 455-75. On the importance of the “Middle Ages” in Disney movies, see Tison Pugh, “Introduction: Disney’s Retroprogressive Medievalisms: Where Yesterday Is Tomorrow Today,” in The Disney Middle Ages. A Fairy-Tale And Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave, 2012): 1-17, at 2; Matteo Sanfilippo, Il Medioevo secondo Walt Disney (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998). 3 Peter Del Vecho, (Producer), Jennifer Lee (Director), and Chris Buck (Director), Frozen [Motion Picture] (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2013). 4 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/05/frozen-2-is-now-the-highest-grossing-animatedmovie-of-all-time.html [accessed 09/10/2020]. 5 Del Vecho, Lee, Buck, Frozen, screenplay. 6 Ibidem. 288

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“Hang in there, Joan!,” Anna says to the French heroine in the painting. It is a key point in the film: Elsa, who is endowed with magical powers to create ice and snow, had accidentally harmed her sister by striking her in the head with ice. Even though their parents were able to save Anna’s life with the help of trolls, Elsa was forced to spend the following years separated from her sister in order to hide her powers and not harm anyone. Segregated in her room, Elsa lives her entire adolescence on her own, learning how to suppress her gift, while Anna deeply suffers from the temporary loss of her favourite playmate. Now, given the expected audience of an animated film like Frozen, it is fair to wonder what the purpose may be of a reference to a historical figure such as Joan. The question is all the more important, since – as earlier said – the film in question has met huge success among the younger generations (and not only them). In fact, Frozen has drawn considerable attention from scholars of many disciplines (among which humanities, psychology, folk studies), for reasons which are worth investigating.7 Firstly, Disney movies have long been the object of interest and discussion of scholars of comparative literature and cultural studies, as well as of psychoanalysts. Despite being mainly associated with children’s entertainment, animated fairy tales represent the third stage in the development and spread of old traditional stories which were originally meant to “explain natural occurrences,”8 and to record Sarah Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess: A Post-feminist Reading of Modern Day Fairy Tales,” Journal of Promotional Communications, 2, 1 (2014): 132-53; Alexandra Heatwole “Disney Girlhood: Princess Generations and Once Upon a Time,” Studies in the Humanities 43, 1 (2016), law-journals-books.vlex.com/vid/disney-girlhood-princessgenerations-661482493; Michelle Resene, “From Evil Queen to Disabled Teen: Frozen Introduces Disney’s First Disabled Princess,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37(2) (2017). DOI 10.18061/dsq.v37i2.5310; Catherine Hickey, “Freud and Frozen: Using Film to Teach Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 20, 1 (2017): 1-13; Lauren Dundes, Madeline Streiff, and Zachary Streiff, “Storm Power, an Icy Tower and Elsa’s Bower: The Winds of Change in Disney’s Frozen,” Social Sciences 7, 6 (2018), 86. DOI 10.3390/socsci7060086; Molly Stehn, “A Brilliant but Frosty Solution: Frozen® as an Allegory for the Central Relational Paradox,” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health (2018): 1-8; Christopher Kowalski, Ruchi Bhalla, “Viewing the Disney Movie Frozen through a Psychodynamic Lens,” Journal of Medical Humanities 39 (2018): 145-50. 8 Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell,” in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 21-42, at 22. 7

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experiences and beliefs which were deemed fundamental for the community. In Europe, oral folktales went through their first huge (r)evolution with the invention of print, during the fifteenth century, when they slowly turned into mass-consumed written stories. Such a transition from orality to literacy also changed some of their features (while retaining their moral purposes), for their contents were conformed to appeal to their expected middle- and high-class audience. They were also divided into many categories (i.e., legends, myths, fables), one of which was that of fairy tales. Then, in the nineteenth century, folklorists and linguists such as the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi, turned another page in the history of fairy tales by collecting them and drawing a line between the old oral tales (open to everyone) and their new literary transpositions (which excluded all the – still numerous – illiterate people).9 Fairy tales lost their communal dimension (and part of their common moral messages) and became more individualistic, while also being influenced by their authors’ political ideologies. Furthermore, they were split into adults’ and children’s tales, for the former were not always deemed appropriate for young kids. Fairy tales emerged profoundly changed from this transition, and were now intended to teach middle-class children about then-current moral cornerstones such as patriarchy, traditional gender roles, and true womanhood.10 A third crucial passage was represented by Walt Disney’s transposition of fairy tales on film at the beginning of the twentieth century. His cartoon films appropriated the genre, and he did not mind editing the original stories and integrating in them his own conservative socio-political views.11 He filled a certain need in Western society by making the best use of the latest technological developments of his time,

Jack Zipes, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1997). 10 Tolkien stated that “the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history.” He did not like Disney’s approach to such impressing products of human civilization. J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2008 [1947]), 50. 11 Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell,” 27-35; Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2010), 125ff. 9

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which made old stories a new mass-selling product for children.12 This leads us back to our days and, specifically, to Frozen. II. Frozen: the Fourth Revolution? It is fair to assume that Disney’s films mirrored a certain political ideology (and thus, certain moral values) from the very beginning, but then one can wonder whether this has been true of more recent productions as well, and if basic ideologies have or not remained the same. So, back to our question: why Joan of Arc? Arendelle, the location where Frozen is set, is inspired by Norway’s western fjords, and the story takes place in July 1843. The castle’s portrait room has therefore no reason to include a picture of the French heroine unless the directors deliberately decided to put it there – one could say – out of context. Such a choice cannot be fortuitous, so much so that Anna mentions Joan and points her finger at her. What ideological purpose can Joan’s story/legend serve, then, and does Joan’s historical experience really match such an ideology? Scholars from different fields who sympathize with post-feminist ideas seem to agree that Frozen is another step (alongside other productions such as Maleficent, for instance) in a long-awaited turn in Disney’s moral and social messages.13 This may actually represent the Zipes, Happily Ever After, 90-1; Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012). 13 Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario, “The Prince and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27, 1 (2004): 34-59; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Excelsior Editions: Fairy Tales: A New History (New York: SUNY Press, 2009); Bridget Whelan, “Power to The Princess: Disney and the 20th Century Princess Narrative,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 29, 1 (2012): 21-34; Cassandra Stover, “Damsels and Heroines: The Conundrum of the Post-Feminist Disney Princess,” Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 2, 1 (2013): 1-10; Benjamin Justice, “Maleficent Reborn: Disney’s Fairytale View of Gender Reaches Puberty,” Social Education 78, 4 (2014): 194-8; Michael Macaluso, “The postfeminist princess: Disney’s curricular guide to feminism,” in Disney, Culture, and Curriculum, ed. Jennifer. A. Sandlin and Julie. C. Garlen (New York: Routledge, 2016), 73–86; Beatrice Frasl, “Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to . . . consume? The construction of postfeminist femininity in Disney’s The Little Mermaid,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2018): 341–54; Dikaia Gavala, “Let it Go: Revising ‘The Princess Story’ in Disney’s Frozen,” Gramarye, 15 (2019), 67-79. The internet teems with articles and blogs celebrating the queerness of the new Disney princesses, for instance: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/maleficents-queer12

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fourth revolution of fairy tales: one which does not concern the medium of consumption of such stories, but the main characteristics of female protagonists as opposed to the traditional patriarchal models. The new Disney princesses are praised for their independence from male characters, their queerness, their bravery, talents and, in general, for a plethora of characteristics which differentiate them from the stereotypical old-fashioned Disney princesses. The new princesses embody post-feminist campaigns about freedom of oppression, autonomy, and empowerment for women.14 Part of the success behind Frozen is probably to be associated with the role that Elsa and Anna play, as opposed to that of male characters (Kristoff, Hans). The former is Anna’s helper in her journey to bring back Elsa, and “their relationship utilises the notion of post-feminism and gender equality.”15 In fact, Kristoff is depicted as stereotypically rude and chauvinist (00:51:35: he tells Anna that she cannot be able to climb a mountain because she is a girl), and he himself contributes to depicting males as loutish (00:41:35: he tells Anna that Hans most likely “picks his nose…and eats it”, because “all men do it”). Furthermore, he initially decides to accompany Anna for sheer opportunism.16 As a matter of take-on-sleeping-beauty.html [accessed 12/10/2020]; https://www.cbr.com/disneycharacters-queer/ [accessed 12/10/2020]; www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/22/2097 5178/frozen-2-elsa-girlfriend-lesbian-queer-review [accessed 12/10/2020]. 14 Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 2000); Litsa R. Tanner, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni S. Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund, “Images of couples and families in Disney feature-length animated films,” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31, 5 (2003): 355–73. ; Carolyn M. Byerly, Karen Ross, Women & Media: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Rosalind Gill, Gender and The Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An introduction, 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2008); Stéphanie Genz, Postfemininities in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Dawn E. England, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek, “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses,” Sex Roles 64, 7/8 (2011): 555-67; Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 133. 15 Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 146. 16 “Of course I don’t want to help her anymore […]. But you won’t get your new sled if she’s dead…” (Del Vecho, Lee, Buck, Frozen, screenplay). Furthermore, there returns the old stereotypical association between peasants (Kristoff) and bad smell, very common in medieval times (Massimo Montanari, “Immagine del contadino e codici di comportamento alimentare,” in Per Vito Fumagalli. Terra, uomini, istituzioni medievali, ed. Massimo Montanari and Augusto Vasina (Bologna: CLUEB, 2000), 199-213). This is quite surprising, since smelliness seems to be a sensitive topic in discourses about race, ethnicity, body weight, and the likes. See: Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue (London: 292

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fact, it is Anna who saves him from wolves, it is she (not he) who proves fearless before the snow monster, thus subverting “stereotypical masculine gender codes” of courage.17 In turn, Kristoff is seen cleaning his sleight which Anna dirtied, endorsing the post-feminist ideal of equality.18 As for Hans, the prince of the southern islands is a charming man with whom Anna naively falls in love at first sight, despite her sister’s opposition. Eventually, he will end up betraying her and Elsa, and playing the role of the villain. At the end, the “act of true love” which saves Anna is neither Hans’ nor Kristoff ’s kiss, but an act of love between sisters, instead. The message is clear: a princess does not necessarily need a prince.19 Within such a context, Joan’s reference seems to make total sense. La Pucelle is no ordinary woman of her time: she did not get married, did not have family and children, she acted masculine and wore masculine clothing. In a society where women were linked with heterosexual family, reproduction, and housework, those who did not conform to such patriarchal standards were looked upon with suspicion.20 What is more, both Elsa’s and Anna’s actions match Joan’s experience to some extent. Joan was accused of witchcraft (and of having learned such a diabolical art from the old women of her village),21 while Elsa is accused of

Arrow Books, 1978), passim; Breanne Fahs, “The dreaded body: disgust and the production of ‘appropriate’ femininity,” Journal of Gender Studies (2015), DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2015.1095081; Angela C. Incollingo Rodriguez, A. Janet Tomiyama and Andrew Ward, “What does weight stigma smell like? Cross-modal influence of visual weight cues on olfaction?,” International Journal of Obesity 39 (2015): 1030-2; Ben Barry, “Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body,” Fashion Theory. The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (2019), DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1567064; https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-obesity-smells-foul-20150320story.html [accessed 12/10/2020]. 17 Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 145. 18 Ibidem. 19 Justice, “Maleficent Reborn,” 194-5. 20 Heidi Breuer, Crafting the Witch. Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2009), 156. 21 Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers, 3 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1960-71), I, 196. See also Andrea Maraschi, “The Tree of the Bourlémonts. Gendered Beliefs in Fairies and Their Transmission from Old to Young Women in Joan of Arc’s Domrémy,” in Cultural Exchanges: Some Cases in the Domain of Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft, ed. Marina Montesano (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 21-32. 293

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performing “sorcery,”22 and thus of being a sort of “monster” (00:27:40).23 Curiously, this specific term recalls the words that the bourgeois of Paris utilized to describe Joan in his journal, in 1429.24 At the same time, Anna’s self-sacrifice to save her sister’s life can be seen as a proper act of duty and devotion (true love), which resembles the sense of duty and devotion to God (through her voices) that moved Joan to achieve her extraordinary goals. III. Archetypes and Propaganda There is a bit of Joan in both the female protagonists, then, but the overall tone of the film seems to point more to the side of the subversion of archetypal gender roles25 than to a sense of “religious” duty and devotion. In fact, Frozen seems to have hit many nerves with regard to post-feminism and the LGBTQ+ community – as did Joan, by the way. This became more apparent as soon as Disney announced the release of Frozen’s sequel. The GLAAD (Gays and Lesbians Alliance Against Defamation),26 which rates films on the basis of their LGBTQ+ representation, gave Frozen a poor grade for not featuring actual LGBTQ+ characters. Consequently, a twitter user by the name of Alexis Moncada famously launched the hashtag #GiveElsaAGirlfriend, with reference to the upcoming Frozen 2, also tweeting: “I hope Disney makes Elsa a lesbian princess; imagine how iconic that would be.” Other users endorsed the campaign and asked, among other things, for a biracial princess couple. This is how the Duke of Weselton calls it, even though in the screenplay it is more commonly addressed to as “magic”. 23 “Is there sorcery in you, too? Are you a monster, too?”. Del Vecho, Lee, Buck, Frozen, screenplay. 24 Parisian Journal, 1405-1449, trans. Janet Shirley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 240: “…they relied upon the advice of a creature in the form of a woman, whom they called the Maid – what it was, God only knows…” 25 On Jungian archetypes see: Carl G. Jung and Marie-Louise von-Franz, ed., Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964); Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel and the History of Archetypes (York Beach, ME: Nicolas Hays, 1995); Murray Stein, ed., Encountering Jung: Jung on Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Carl. G. Jung, “The Principal Archetypes,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 3rd ed. (Boston: Bedford Books, 2007), pp. 554-64; Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning. The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999), 92ff. 26 The organization’s site can be found at: https://www.glaad.org/. 22

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Such a request is understandable in principle: Disney’s fairy tales (and the previous ancient tradition of oral and written fairy tales) usually proposed a “prince + princess” model, with little regard for unions which do not conform to heterosexual love. However, this also poses the question of the purpose of fairy tales (present and past). Much of the criticism against the traditional structure of fairy tales (where a princess is saved by a prince) is flawed by a superficial interpretation of such stories, which – on the contrary – are probably much more complex than it may seem. For thousands of years,27 fairy tales have served the purpose of teaching moral lessons to adult listeners, and in medieval times they became tightly related to Latin literature, especially wonder tales.28 After their late adaptation for a much younger audience in the eighteenthnineteenth century, the modern post-psychoanalytic perspective has begun to emphasize their capacity to explain to younger generations the nature of their inner tensions, to offer solutions on how to cope with them, specifically because such things are mostly incomprehensible.29 They have been seen as a pedagogic tool to help children to face a hostile world where they are no longer protected by their parents: a necessary – and often troublesome – development which comes at a cost. Included in this dangerous journey is one’s sexual maturation during adolescence.30 From such a perspective, children’s stories store invaluable information which their audience cannot consciously understand, but that they can access unconsciously through them. In order for this process to happen, stories need to be structured in accordance with

Kendra Magnus-Johnston, Pauline Greenhill, and Lauren Bosc, “Preface. Traveling Beyond Disney,” in Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney: International Perspectives, ed. Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2015), xii-xviii; Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Justice, “Maleficent Reborn,” 194; Stein, ed., Encountering Jung, 447. 28 Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Jack Zipes, “The Evolution of Folk- and Fairy Tales in Europe and North America,” in Teaching Fairy Tales, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 34-53. 29 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 6ff. On the elasticity of fairy tales, see Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales, 9-10. 30 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life. An Antidote to Chaos (New York: Penguin, 2018), 107-9. 27

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archetypal patterns, which a child can instinctively grasp.31 In archetypal terms, the constituent elements of human experience are three: 1) chaos, which is feminine and is metaphorically represented by nature (unpredictable, creative, and destructive); 2) order, which is masculine and is metaphorically represented by culture (predictable, protective, disciplined); and 3) the hero, who mediates between nature and culture, and who metaphorically “replaces disorder and confusion with clarity and certainty.”32 It is not surprising that such ideas trigger hostile reactions among post-feminists but, again, it depends on how superficially one analyses the categories of nature (the eternal unknown), culture (the eternal known), and hero (the eternal knower). These are cognitive categories, which our brains are wired for recognizing as gendered: they do not refer to women and men, but to femininity and masculinity, which are respectively present in males and females. The feminine features of chaos do not at all imply that “feminine is bad,” for chaos is the domain from which new life and forms emerge, and it is rich in potential. This is to say that the “prince + princess” model can be either read literally (a woman needs a man to rescue her), or symbolically (a woman needs her masculine spirit – that is, consciousness – to rescue her).33 The GLAAD and, more in general, the part of Frozen’s audience that is more sympathetic towards inclusivity, gender equality, and the likes, has been more concerned with the former (literal) interpretation. Consequently, Frozen has been praised because Elsa “may stand as well for the individual that fails to meet the social – and by default gender – norms.”34 Frozen has the merit of speaking to queer children, comforting them about their yet-socially-unaccepted “powers:” Elsa has to hide them for years, alone in her room, while her parents force her to wear gloves to “limit her interaction with the outside world”35 until the princess is finally ready to Hamida Bosmajian, “Reading the unconscious: psychoanalytical criticism,” in Understanding Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 10313, at 105-7. 32 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 20. See also Gareth S. Hill, Masculine and Feminine. The Natural Flow of Opposites in the Psyche (Boston: Shambhala, 2013). 33 Peterson, 12 Rules for Life, 107-9. A seminal work on the structure of folktales is, of course, Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968). 34 Gavala, “Let it Go,” 71. 35 Ibidem. 31

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become a queen (i.e., she comes of age). Frozen’s success is also due to its renewed presentation of traditional archetypes: it touches current progressive topics about repressed sexuality, queerness, social alienation, gender equality, toxic masculinity, oppressive patriarchy. Anna proves stronger than Hans (who, in turn, looks rather “toxic”), whereas Kristoff is anything but the archetypal, masculine, and threatening hero (he is harmless and is domesticated by Anna).36 Now, to what extent is this ideological propaganda, and to what extent is it a fair use of archetypes and fairy tales? Trying to answer such questions could help us better understand the film’s reference to Joan of Arc. IV. Why Joan? Frozen’s directors loosely based their story on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, entitled The Snow Queen. In fact, producer Peter Del Vecho stated that the inspiration from Andersen’s tale is limited to the presence of ice, snow, and a queen.37 Andersen’s queen (a villain) is radically different from Elsa, and despite the two stories seeming to converge toward the same moral territory (sexual maturation, coming of age) one can hardly fail to notice that Frozen’s characters are in line with Disney’s recent turn toward gender issues. Benjamin Justice has linked this to the positive “social change in the Obama era,”38 which also included the (similarly positive) post-crisis increasing number of breadwinner women. He celebrates the end of “old fairy tales about female inferiority and dependency”39 and, on a literal level, this is a sensible opinion. The problem is that the ideological propaganda surrounding Frozen promotes other ideas as well, such as toxic masculinity and the identification of the Western world as an oppressive patriarchy (and, even worse, a Christian, white-dominated, and capitalistic one).40 36

Ibid., 76.

37 https://web.archive.org/web/20131013234112/http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013

/09/25/inside-the-research-design-and-animation-of-walt-disneys-frozen-with-produce r-peter-del-vecho/ [accessed 13/10/2020]. 38 Justice, “Maleficent Reborn,” 198. 39 Ibidem. 40 Ibidem; Linda T. Parsons, “Ella Evolving: Cinderella Stories and the Construction of Gender-Appropriate Behavior,” Children’s Literature in Education 35 (2004): 135-54; Jeanne Dubino, “The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism,” Journal 297

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Potentially, then, underneath the ice of Arendelle is a great deal of political and ideological rhetoric. In a recent interview by ABC News with creators and stars of Frozen’s Broadway adaptation, black American actor Jelani Alladin (who interprets Kristoff, “the good guy”) states that “it’s great to be part of the revolution,” referring to new Disney princesses who do not need men, while men need them.41 Alladin himself represents another side of such “rethinking” of traditional models, since in the movie Kristoff is a (stereo-)typical Scandinavian white-and-blonde guy. Such an ideological agenda is at play in different forms, nowadays: no later than September 8, 2020, “the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category:”42 for instance, the presence of at least one leading actor or significant supporting actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, and a share of at least 30% of all the other actors must be either women, racial/ethnic group, LGBTQ+, or people with cognitive/physical disabilities; the same applies to the storyline, the project team, marketing, etc. Whether this is meant to make a step toward inclusivity, one cannot ignore the hostile propaganda against those who do not conform to such new standards and to everything relating to them.43 One example is J.K. Rowling, who has been attacked for defending the (apparently mythical)44 concept of biological sex45 and, more recently, for writing a novel – Troubled blood – where the male protagonist dresses as a woman to dupe and kill his victims.46 of Popular Culture 27, 3 (1993): 103-18; Petra L. Doan, “The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy,” Gender, Place & Culture 17 (2010): 635-54. 41 ABC News, “Frozen comes to Broadway with the new songs and a feminist twist,” posted 23/03/2018: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpeT5PXMcyo&t=309s [accessed 13/10/2020]. 42 www.oscars.org/news/academy-establishes-representation-and-inclusion-standards-o scarsr-eligibility 43 Mia Adessa Towbin, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman et al., “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films,” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 15, 4 (2004): 19-44, at 23. 44 Elaine Craig, “Trans-Phobia and the Relational Production of Gender,” Hastings Women's Law Journal 18, 2 (2007): 137-72, at 172. 45 https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/j-k-rowling-under-fire-for-defending-researcher-fir ed-for-transphobic-tweet-sex-is-real/. 46 https://www.insider.com/jk-rowlings-book-features-a-cross-dressing-male-serial-kill er-2020-9. 298

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This may be all good propaganda – equality of opportunity is certainly a major goal of our society; the same cannot necessarily be said about equality of outcome – but it is propaganda nonetheless.47 It is then fair to wonder whether propaganda is a fair purpose for children’s fairy tales. If one criticizes Walt Disney for originally imbuing his production with conservative ideas,48 there is no reason not to react similarly before progressive stances. “The artists that produced Frozen,” a recent study observes, “present a cautionary tale about how a female imperils the status quo. The inexorable changes of the future, such as expanding fertility options and the re-conceptualization of the gender binary, make Frozen relevant to cultural shifts that engender ambivalence about a growing number of women who steal the thunder of men.”49 In other words, Frozen represents a needed turn in “Disney’s questionable history of perpetuating dangerous stereotypes on film.”50 Now, as noted previously, gender issues are tightly connected with society’s socio-political system. The sexist and patriarchal societies which originally produced the ancient oral fairy tales51 aimed at reproducing their “patriarchal values,”52 and Disney’s productions (up until Maleficent and Frozen, that is) have indoctrinated “the American girl” (actually, many other children all around the world) with the idea of “a rigid set of patriarchal gender norms,”53 according to which girls (princesses) have to conform to a conservative, heteronormative model and achieve Michael Macaluso, “Postfeminist Masculinity: The New Disney Norm?,” in The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies, ed. Lauren Dundes (Basel: MDPI, 2019), 192-201, at 198; Towbin, Haddock, Zimmerman et al., “Images of Gender,” 24. 48 Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney; the Manufacture of Fantasy (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); Lee Artz, “The righteousness of self-centred royals: The world according to Disney animation,” Critical Arts 18 (2004): 116–46; Michelle Anya Anjirbag, “Mulan and Moana: Embedded Coloniality and the Search for Authenticity in Disney Animated Film,” in The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies, 88-102; Heatwole “Disney Girlhood.” 49 Lauren Dundes, Madeline Streiff, and Zachary Streiff, “Storm Power, an Icy Tower and Elsa’s Bower: The Winds of Change in Disney’s Frozen,” in The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies, ed. Lauren Dundes (Basel: MDPI, 2019), 202-30, at 223. 50 Macaluso, “Postfeminist Masculinity,” 192. 51 Justice, “Maleficent Reborn,” 198. 52 Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 137. 53 Heatwole “Disney Girlhood.” See also Dubino, “The Cinderella Complex”; Colette Dowling, “The Cinderella Syndrome,” New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1981; Rebecca C. Hains, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess- Obsessed Years (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2014). 47

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certain standards: domesticity, marriageability, passiveness.54 And this is where Frozen’s reference to Joan of Arc proves particularly powerful, from such a perspective: Joan is exactly the kind of woman who rejects patriarchal norms and determines her own life.55 The problem is that Joan’s society was profoundly different from ours, and so were her worldview, goals, and experience. There is little doubt that Joan’s society was patriarchal, but such a concept should not be oversimplified, neither should Christianity be uncritically associated with misogyny. In fact, the vast majority of medieval people (not only women) lived an extremely hard life, and there are numerous examples which contradict the traditional assumption that women were merely oppressed by males. Consider, for instance, the Christian devotion to Mary; the Church’s insistence on the importance of the mutual expression of consensus by the spouses; theological discussions on women’s bravery in the Gospels as opposed to the Apostles’; courtly love literature, where women are idolized by poets.56 Even worse, categorizing our current society as patriarchal is a dangerous mystification. “Patriarchy literally means ‘rule by fathers’”, observes Derek Neal. “Modern feminist criticism, however, employs the term to denote a social and cultural system wherein positions of greater authority and legitimacy are reserved, preferentially or exclusively, for males.”57 Elsa and Anna are supposed to inspire younger generations to fight male authority and dominance, like Joan did in her times: a patriarchal system which also dictates a totally unnatural “dichotomization of gender.”58 Unnatural as it may seem, data suggest that ca. 99.7% of the American population experience a concordance between biological sex (either male or female) and gender identity.59 Ashlee Hynes, “Raising Princesses? Gender Socialisation in Early Childhood and the Disney Princess Franchise,” Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice 2 (2010): 205-16. 55 McIerney, Eloquent Virgins, 195. 56 Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, Eloisa e Abelardo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2014). 57 Derek Neal, “Patriarchy and Patrilineage,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (London: Routledge, 2006), 633-4, at 633 (emphasis in original). 58 Doan, “The tyranny of gendered spaces,” 635. 59 Gary J. Gates, “How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender?,” UCLA: The Williams Institute, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09h684x2#page-1; Valerie A. Arboleda, David E. Sandberg, Eroc Vilain, “DSDs: Genetics, Underlying Pathologies and Psychosexual Differentiation,” Nature Reviews Endocrinology 10 (2014): 603-15. 54

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Joan works perfectly as the champion of transgenderism and of the subversion of gender roles. This was Leslie Feinberg’s and Susan Crane’s opinion,60 for instance, but not all scholars agree with them. During the trial, at one point, Joan boasts her “feminine skills,”61 saying that she did not fear any woman in Rouen ad suendum pannos lineos et nendum (“for sewing and spinning”, feminine-gendered skills).62 Vita Sackville-West suggested that Joan might have been lesbian,63 whereas Marina Warner categorized her as androgyne, neither male nor female, though not in today’s non-binary terms: she referred to the domain of the “unearthly, like the angels whose company she loved,” a transcendent identity.64 Régine Pernoud, basing her observations on Guillaume Manchon’s testimony at the Rehabilitation trial, held that the choice of masculine clothing depended on necessity (against rape) and on her voices’ will.65 Joan was also surely different from the holy transvestites, who entirely hid their biological feminine markers.66 Joan acted as a man because that was one of the ways through which she could claim agency in her world, but she always linked such a choice to her voices, that is, to God.67 “By the end of the interview,” notes Daniel Hobbins about Joan’s relapse, “the clothes have become a secondary issue: she is willing to put women’s clothes back on, but she will not deny her voices.”68 This is to say that, although Joan was hardly a stereotypical woman, it does not mean that her behaviour should be interpreted according to our modern categorizations. In fact, several Feinberg, Transgendered warriors; Susan Crane, “Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, 2 (1996): 298-320. 61 Warner, Joan of Arc, 141. 62 Procès de condemnation II, 46. 63 Vita Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc (New York: The Grove Press, 1936). 64 Warner, Joan of Arc, 146. 65 Régine Pernoud, The Retrial of Joan of Arc. The Evidence for Her Vindication, trans. J. M. Cohen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007 [1955]), 213. See also Susan Hayward, “Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc,” in Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 129-46. 66 Susan Schibanoff, “True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc,” in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles Wood (New York: Garland, 1996), 31-60. 67 Here I disagree with Meltzer’s assumption that women could not claim agency whatsoever. Françoise Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9. 68 Daniel Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 25. 60

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other female prophets had emerged in France in the decades preceding Joan’s life: it was a plausible way for women to become agents in a patriarchal society, but there is no cogent reason to go further than that.69 Surely wearing men’s clothing was “her most visible transgression,”70 the “outward emblem of her restored belief in her voices,”71 but there were other important reasons behind the verdict: for instance, her involvement in the supposedly non-Christian rituals around Domrémy’s Fairy tree,72 or the corporeal features of the angels visiting her,73 not to mention the political context encompassing the whole process. Joan followed the example of many other female mystics of her time, but she originally added the desire to be a protagonist on the battlefield, and the choice of men’s clothing suited her military lifestyle. So, saying that Joan “was burned alive at the stake because she refused to stop dressing in men’s clothing”74 may be a wild oversimplification.75 Joan stated that she preferred men’s clothing while she was among men, but that she would wear women’s clothes if released from prison or put in a prison with other women. In any case, the judges were more concerned with the fact that she heard her angels’ voices after abjuration. Whether gender transgression plays an important role in the trial, it is instrumental to establish heresy.76 In summary, given the propagandistic celebration of Frozen as another step toward the right moral behind fairy tales, it is fair to assume that the film’s reference to Joan of Arc is based on the presumed association of la Pucelle with feminist and post-feminist ideologies. Elsa’s story matches Anne L. Barstow, Joan of Arc. Heretic, Mystic, Shaman (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 38. 70 Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc, 21. 71 Ibid., 25. 72 Still a matter of debate at the Rehabilitation trial. See, for instance: La réhabilitation de Jeanne la Pucelle: la redaction épiscopale du procès de 1455-1456, ed. Paul Dancoeur and Yvonne Lanhers (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), 110. See also Richard F. Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 54; Maraschi, “The Tree of the Bourlémonts.” 73 Procès de condemnation, I, 71. 74 Craig, “Trans-Phobia and the Relational,”, 137. See also Hovey, “Gallantry and its discontents,” 133-4. 75 Even those who emphasize the gender component of the trial recognize this: e.g., Daniel Grigat and Gregory Carrier, “Gender Transgression as Heresy: The Trial of Joan of Arc,” Past Imperfect 13 (2007): 188-207, at 189. 76 Schibanoff, “True Lies,” 31. 69

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in part that of Joan (to a greater extent than Anna’s), hence the “Hang in there, Joan!” verse. However, as a thriving scholarly tradition suggests, there is more to Elsa than a story of “witchcraft,” and the same applies to Joan.77 A certain ideology seethes underneath the film, which has been openly celebrated. Whether there is no doubt that all possible efforts should be made in Western society in order to pursue equality and justice, it is also important not to promote dangerous equations such as that between Western society and tyrannical patriarchy, masculinity and toxicity, or equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. While it is understandable why part of the audience may deem Frozen “remarkable for […] turning the traditional prince figure into a villain” and for subverting “the entire set of tropes the Disney franchise is based on,”78 one may argue that “traditionalists gender roles encoded therein [i.e., in Disney movies]”79 have much more to do with deep-rooted cognitive categories than to social ones. “This shift in focus gives rise to a new, more feminist Disney ideology,”80 remarks Catherine Hickey, assuming that this is a better doctrine to teach children. As said, though, this doctrine carries other messages within itself. Elsa does not bless her sister’s marrying Hans: she is a queen, and cares more about facts than feelings. Then – after her argument with Anna – she lets go of her emotions and sets her entire kingdom into an icy state: her own feelings are worth more than anything else. Such a behaviour matches the “Let it go” theme of the film’s soundtrack, according to which “there is not right or wrong, no rules for me.” So, such an “icy, murderous impulse,”81 which makes all of Arendelle suffer, is somehow justified. The reason, according to some scholars, is that Elsa makes the decision of not conforming to her patriarchal society’s expectations of her (much like Joan of Arc) and can eventually free herself from the chains of such tyranny.82 This should be a metaphor for the collision between today’s (patriarchal) harmful societal standards about the “perfect girl” and a girl’s true identity.83 Gavala, “Let it Go,” 76. Heatwole, “Disney Girlhood.” 79 Ibidem. 80 Hickey, “Freud and Frozen,” 4. 81 Ibid., 7. 82 E.g., Stehn, “A Brilliant but Frosty Solution,” 5, and related bibliography. 83 Ibidem. The author adds that “these metaphors could be even more salient with clients who are gay, gender non-binary or otherwise non-conforming…” (ibid., 6). 77 78

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“Perhaps one of the most disturbing facets of Disney movies,” reads a paper published in the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, “is the way in which stories are reinterpreted,” because “Disney animated films often retell stories to fit into the dominant paradigm of our society, regardless of the story’s original moral.”84 Funnily enough, this turns out to be a particularly accurate description of what happened with Frozen in comparison with Andersen’s original.85 All this, however, stems from the assumption that today’s Western society resembles in many regards fifteenth-century society as to its patriarchal features,86 as post-feminists like to describe it: a society where women are oppressed and exploited by (white) men, and in which women “are only judged on this spectrum, youthful and beautiful or old and undesirable,”87 like princesses and witches. This is, if there is one, a pretty bad use of the Middle Ages, which neither does justice to today’s younger generations, nor to Joan herself.

Bibliography Anjirbag, Michelle Anya. “Mulan and Moana: Embedded Coloniality and the Search for Authenticity in Disney Animated Film.” In The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies, ed. Lauren Dundes, 88-102. Basel: MDPI, 2019. Arboleda, Valerie A., David E. Sandberg, and Eroc Vilain, “DSDs: Genetics, Underlying Pathologies and Psychosexual Differentiation.” Nature Reviews Endocrinology 10 (2014): 603-15. Artz, Lee. “The righteousness of self-centred royals: The world according to Disney animation.” Critical Arts 18 (2004): 116–46. Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Barry, Ben. “Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body.” Fashion Theory. The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (2019), DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1567064. Towbin, Haddock, Zimmerman et al., “Images of Gender,” 39. Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 146: “Frozen resembles a feminist genre of fairy tale…” 86 Grigat and Carrier, “Gender Transgression as Heresy,” 206; Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 133. 87 Wilde, “Repackaging the Disney Princess,” 136. 84 85

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Barstow, Anne L. Joan of Arc. Heretic, Mystic, Shaman. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Excelsior Editions: Fairy Tales: A New History. New York: SUNY Press, 2009. Breuer, Heidi. Crafting the Witch. Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2009. Byerly, Carolyn M., and Karen Ross. Women & Media: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Craig, Elaine. “Trans-Phobia and the Relational Production of Gender.” Hastings Women’ ’s Law Journal 18, 2 (2007): 137-172. Crane, Susan. “Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, 2 (1996): 298-320. Del Vecho, Peter, (Producer), Jennifer Lee (Director), and Chris Buck (Director). Frozen [Motion Picture]. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2013 (film and screenplay). Dikaia Gavala. “Let it Go: Revising ‘The Princess Story” in Disney’s Frozen.” Gramarye, 15 (2019), 67-79. Do Rozario, Rebecca-Anne C. “The Prince and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess.” Women’s Studies in Communication 27, 1 (2004): 34-59. Doan, Petra L. “The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy.” Gender, Place & Culture 17, 5 (2010): 635-54. Dowling, Colette. “The Cinderella Syndrome.” New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1981. Dubino, Jeanne. “The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism.” Journal of Popular Culture 27, 3 (1993): 103-18. Dundes, Lauren, Madeline Streiff, and Zachary Streiff. “Storm Power, an Icy Tower and Elsa’s Bower: The Winds of Change in Disney’s Frozen.” Social Sciences 7, 6 (2018), 86. DOI 10.3390/socsci7060086. Dundes, Lauren, Madeline Streiff, and Zachary Streiff. “Storm Power, an Icy Tower and Elsa’s Bower: The Winds of Change in Disney’s Frozen.” In The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies, ed. Lauren Dundes, 202-30. Basel: MDPI, 2019. Encountering Jung: Jung on Evil. Ed. Murray Stein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 305

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England, Dawn E., Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses.” Sex Roles 64, 7/8 (2011): 555-67. Fahs, Breanne. “The dreaded body: disgust and the production of ‘appropriate’ femininity.” Journal of Gender Studies (2015), DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2015.1095081. Feinberg, Leslie. Transgendered Warriors: From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Frasl, Beatrice. “Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to . . . consume? The construction of postfeminist femininity in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2018): 341–54. Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, Mariateresa. Eloisa e Abelardo. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2014. Gates, Gary J. “How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender?” UCLA: The Williams Institute, https://escholar ship.org/uc/item/09h684x2#page-1. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An introduction, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and The Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Giroux, Henry A., and Grace Pollock. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2010. Green, Richard F. Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Grigat, Daniel, and Gregory Carrier. “Gender Transgression as Heresy: The Trial of Joan of Arc.” Past Imperfect 13 (2007): 188-207. Hains, Rebecca C. The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2014. Hayward, Susan. “Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc.” In Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, 129-46. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Heatwole Alexandra. “Disney Girlhood: Princess Generations and Once Upon a Time.” Studies in the Humanities 43, 1 (2016), law-journals-books .vlex.com/vid/disney-girlhood-princess-generations-661482493.

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International Perspectives, ed. Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston, xii-xviii. New York: Routledge, 2015. Man and His Symbols. Ed. Jung, Carl G., and Marie-Louise von-Franz. New York: Dell Publishing, 1964. Maraschi, Andrea. “The Tree of the Bourlémonts. Gendered Beliefs in Fairies and Their Transmission from Old to Young Women in Joan of Arc’s Domrémy.” In Cultural Exchanges: Some Cases in the Domain of Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft, ed. Marina Montesano, 21-32. Leiden: Brill, 2021. McIerney, Maud Burnett. Eloquent Virgins. From Thecla to Joan of Arc. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Meltzer, Françoise. For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Montanari, Massimo. “Immagine del contadino e codici di comportamento alimentare.” In Per Vito Fumagalli. Terra, uomini, istituzioni medievali, ed. Massimo Montanari and Augusto Vasina, 199213. Bologna: CLUEB, 2000. Neal, Derek. “Patriarchy and Patrilineage.” In Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus, 633-4. London: Routledge, 2006. Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue. London: Arrow Books, 1978. Parisian Journal, 1405-1449. Trans. Janet Shirley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Parsons, Linda T. “Ella Evolving: Cinderella Stories and the Construction of Gender-Appropriate Behavior,” Children’s Literature in Education 35 (2004): 135-54. Pernoud, Régine. The Retrial of Joan of Arc. The Evidence for Her Vindication, trans. J. M. Cohen. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007 [1955]. Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life. An Antidote to Chaos. New York: Penguin, 2018. –––. Maps of Meaning. The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge, 1999. Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc. Ed. Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers, 3 vols. Paris: Klincksieck, 1960-71. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968.

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Pugh, Tison. “Introduction: Disney’s Retroprogressive Medievalisms: Where Yesterday Is Tomorrow Today,” in The Disney Middle Ages. A Fairy-Tale And Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein, 117. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Resene, Michelle. “From Evil Queen to Disabled Teen: Frozen Introduces Disney’s First Disabled Princess.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37(2) (2017). DOI 10.18061/dsq.v37i2.5310. Robertson, Robin. Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel and the History of Archetypes. York Beach, ME: Nicolas Hays, 1995. Roversi Monaco, Francesca. “‘Damsel in distress.’ Medioevo, medievalismo e ruoli di genere nella cultura audiovisiva contemporanea.” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 122 (2020): 455-75. Sanfilippo, Matteo. Il Medioevo secondo Walt Disney. Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998. Sackville-West, Vita. Saint Joan of Arc. New York: The Grove Press, 1936. Schibanoff, Susan. “True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc.” In Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles Wood, 31-60. New York: Garland, 1996. Stehn, Molly. “A Brilliant but Frosty Solution: Frozen® as an Allegory for the Central Relational Paradox.” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health (2018): 1-8. Stover, Cassandra. “Damsels and Heroines: The Conundrum of the Post-Feminist Disney Princess.” Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 2, 1 (2013): 1-10. Tanner, Litsa R., Shelley A. Haddock, Toni S. Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of couples and families in Disney feature-length animated films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31, 5 (2003): 355–73. The Future of The Middle Ages. Ed. Wiiliam D. Paden. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. The New Medievalism. Ed. Marina Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee and Stephen G. Nichols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy-Stories. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2008 [1947]. Towbin, Mia Adessa, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman et al. “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney

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Feature-Length Animated Films.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 15, 4 (2004): 19-44. Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc. The Image of Female Heroism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1981]. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney; the Manufacture of Fantasy. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Whelan, Bridget. “Power to The Princess: Disney and the 20th Century Princess Narrative.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 29, 1 (2012): 21-34. Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 2000. Wilde, Sarah. “Repackaging the Disney Princess: A Post-feminist Reading of Modern Day Fairy Tales,” Journal of Promotional Communications, 2, 1 (2014): 132-53. Ziolkowski, Jan M. Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales. The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 21-42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. –––. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 1997. –––. “The Evolution of Folk- and Fairy Tales in Europe and North America.” In Teaching Fairy Tales, ed. Nancy L. Canepa, 34-53. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. –––. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012.

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Beyond the Bounds of Camelot and Hogwarts: The Medieval Quest Becomes Political Activism Through Harry Potter Monica J. Stenzel,* Josephine C. Stenzel**

I. Foundations A. Introduction One way for devotees to immerse themselves in a favorite romance or fantasy tale is to pull elements of those stories into the modern world. It could be a small decoration, such as a museum gift shop print of a unicorn tapestry. Others may adopt more lively realizations, such as cosplay and reenactments of scenes from Tristan and Iseult. While these activities may be charming to the participants, they do little to affect the world around them. Though decoration with unicorns and declarations of mad love (and perhaps an overabundance of wine?) mimic the romances, the heart of many medieval stories lies in the exploits of the protagonists. They chase mythical beasts, pursue hidden knowledge, and seek the Holy Grail. In short, they embark upon a quest. King Arthur’s quest for the Grail has become so central to the English-speaking tradition, that the term “Holy Grail” may now be applied to any desirable, but hard-won goal. This questing element of the romance manifests in modern times through a surprisingly practical and poignant way. The historically popular Harry Potter series by British author, J.K. Rowling, unabashedly and playfully plunders myth, fable, and Arthurian stories in particular, to tell the tale of an orphaned boy who finds his true identity, unknown powers, a righteous sword, and a “goblet of fire.” All these components *

Department of Social Sciences, Spokane Falls College, United States of America. Department of History, Lewis & Clark College, United States of America.

**

Monica J. Stenzel, Josephine C. Stenzel

clearly flow from Arthur’s story. While the Potter readers, or “Potterheads,” do indeed decorate with items from Rowling’s “Wizarding World,” wear costumes, perform reenactments, and write their own fan fiction, they also undertake some actions quite beyond that of other fandoms. Potter fans take the idea of a quest and apply it to political activism. The stories lend themselves to this idea, as protagonists Harry, Hermione, and Ron agitate against school, police, terrorist, and government leaderships to bring about a more just society. In this paper, I will mark the map of how the quests featured in Arthurian stories manifest through progressively more dedicated steps from Potter fans. First, I will compare the Arthurian story to Harry’s, using imagery, locations, artifacts, personas, and situations that appear in both tales. Then, I will show the progressive actions the fans take to recreate this Wizarding World. The lowest level of commitment comes in the “quest” of material goods or “merch.” In a more involved role, others seek to craft the knitted scarves or brew the butterbeer that feature in the story. The next step of involvement may include fund-raising goals for a social justice cause, taking cues from the character Hermione, and even author Rowling. Lastly, I will demonstrate that the most dedicated Potter fans similarly challenge actual academic, civic, and institutional injustice through marches, campaigns, boycotts, and other legitimate forms of political activism, much like a quest of Arthur’s knights. Sometimes calling themselves “Dumbledore’s Army” or “Order of the Phoenix,” after the activists in the books, these modern adventures are literally in the streets, on the beaches, and outside the corporate headquarters, demanding fair pay, humane conditions, and ecological justice in a way that no other fandom has. The idea of a quest to create a better world moves beyond a mythical cup story to the literal movement of readers to the streets, fighting for social justice. B. Questing Beasts and Basilisks Medieval imagery ranging from alchemy to unicorns manifests widely in the Harry Potter series, appearing in the books, films, and souvenir shops. Elizabeth Scala notes “…the Middle Ages seems very much alive and well in its popular formations. Both youth and adult cultures are obsessed with the Middle Ages, … the castle-inhabiting, wizarding narratives of [J.K.] Rowling that have made Harry Potter the best-selling series in 312

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publishing history.”1 Yet, the colorful house crests and magic mirrors are not the only gifts given from an earlier age. The boy wizard’s quests to find powerful objects, hidden knowledge, and, indeed, a path to a just and good life, project the medieval romances, particularly Arthur and the Matter of Britain. This paper will set the stage for modern-day activistserrant, first making the robust links from Hogwarts to the artifacts and motivations of Arthurian myth; then exploring the first steps of realizing the Harry Potter wizarding world, through material trappings such as cosplay and decoration; and finally exploring the readers’ own progress from play-acting to literal political action, revealing how these two British traditions both rely on the idea of a world-changing quest. Before J.K. Rowling’s readers enter into the medieval, magical world of Harry Potter’s birth, she firmly establishes what is “normal,” from the first sentence of the series.2 This normal world consists of modern suburban row houses, mothers who raise children, fathers who run factories, and the overriding concept of mass-produced, consumerist, and conservative uniformity. The first inkling of that other world manifests in the form of a sentient, reading cat. Too outlandish for Harry’s conservative Uncle Vernon, he quickly dismisses the unusual animal. The first strange element to penetrate Vernon’s consciousness appears as a group of people wearing brightly-colored cloaks, whom he assumes are political activists, out on the streets, perhaps with a collecting tin. Under this guise, Rowling slyly introduces her “wizarding world,” where purposeful people signal their identity and mission in much the same way Arthur’s knights-errant did, with bright, heraldic colors on display. Even as the Harry Potter series has permeated the actual consumerist world with any number of products, from such colorful cloaks to whimsical wands available at big box stores, many readers’ engagement with the wizarding world has progressed from mere decoration and cosplay to the literal quest of social-political engagement. Elizabeth Scala, “Cloaks of Invisibility: The Status of Arthurian Studies.” Arthuriana 17, no. 4 (2007): 93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27870875. 2 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). Hereafter the Harry Potter novels will be referred to by a shortened title, without “Harry Potter and the….”; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 1

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Just as the Knights of the Round Table sought salvation and peace through the Holy Grail, modern-day Potter fans are inspired to seek a better future though a program of social and ecological justice, including literacy promotion, civil rights education, government petition, and public protest. To introduce the readers (and Harry himself, in the narrative) to this new, purposeful way of thinking, Rowling must remove the boy from his “normal” childhood and equip him for a new life as a wizard. Indeed, after Harry’s revelation of his magical origins, his protector and guide, Hagrid, initiates a homecoming journey for the purpose of gathering of medieval, or otherworldly, objects. During this trip to London, Harry first enters a common destination for any pre-modern traveler, a tavern. The Leaky Cauldron serves as a symbol of hospitality, but also as a kind of time travel liminal locale. In a single afternoon, Harry seeks the inheritance left by his parents from a bank run by goblins, secures his own heraldic robes, and then embarks on his first modest iteration of a quest, this one for mere school supplies. His supply list, handwritten upon parchment, lists items such as a wand, a cauldron, brass scales, and, tellingly, dragon hide gloves, clearly indicating that he has left the twentieth century and “returned” to his proper medieval time. Such is the invitation to the medieval wizarding world, where readers leave the suburbs and factory-made goods for Diagon Alley. This busy marketplace offers witches and wizards handcrafted cauldrons, herbs and potion ingredients, spell books, and a pet shop for familiars. Not everything in Harry’s new life predates the modern age, however, with the magical community often combining the best from both present day and previous periods. Charmed chocolate frogs, a bewitched Ford Anglia, and a profound number of trips to the haunted girls’ lavatory appear in the first few novels, proving that even witching folk support innovation beyond carriages and outhouses. These medieval trappings, however, are what demonstrate that Harry has left the mundane, or “muggle” world, the one in which the fans celebrate. As scholars Maria Sachiko Cecire, Heather Arden, Kathryn Lorenz, and others have discussed, many physical trappings of this magical world indicate an overwhelmingly medieval one.3 Seeming to Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Heather Arden and Kathryn 3

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travel back in time, by boats or carriages, students arrive at Hogwarts castle, represented by a coat of arms that features heraldic beasts and colors of the schools’ founders. Full of tapestries, stone statuary, and suits of armor, the Medieval Gothic Hogwarts castle warms students, faculty, and staff only with fireplaces, offers them meals in a great hall like Camelot or Tintagil. Through Hogwarts, the nearby Forbidden Forest, and the town of Hogsmeade, the students encounter a marvelous medieval bestiary. Some beasts are met through references, such as a school founder’s name, “Ravenclaw,” and others literally, such as the unicorns that Hagrid tends. Many mirror the fauna in Arthurian tales, such as Yvain’s battle with a lion against a serpent, now re-enacted through a long-standing feud between the Hogwart houses, the golden lions of Griffyndor and the green serpents of Slytherin.4 In the second novel, The Chamber of Secrets, Harry battles a strangely secret giant basilisk, as Lancelot fought a dragon immediately before meeting King Pellas.5 For much of the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry searches for a pale, glowing, ethereal stag, reminiscent of the White Hart that appears at Gwynevere and Arthur’s wedding, prompting a significant quest for his knights.6 More medieval monsters, such as dragons, trolls, and giants lumber through Rowling’s chapters. Any number of chimerical creatures, such as Hagrid’s horse-haunched, lion-clawed, and eagle-headed hippogriff, resemble Malory’s Questing Beast, with “a head like a serpent’ ’s head, and a body like a leopard, buttocks like a lion, and footed like an hart.”7 Once Rowling builds the medieval scene and setting, she establishes Harry as a boy of action by awarding Harry a place on a school Quidditch team as a literal “seeker.”8 This position, unlike the rambunctious chasers, beaters, and keeper, flies separately from the team, looking for an elusive and valuable magical “snitch” that turns the course of the game to his team’s advantage. Usually players of uncommon speed, agility, and Lorenz, “The Harry Potter Stories and French Arthurian Romance,” Arthuriana 13, no. 2 (Summer 2003). 4 Chrétien de Troyes, The complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. David Staines (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990) 297. 5 Thomas Malory, Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. by Keith Baines. (New York: New American Library, 1962), 337. 6 Ibidem, 60. 7 Ibidem, 217. 8 Philosopher’s Stone, 112. 315

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vision, the position of seeker seems suited to characters like Sirs Lancelot or Galahad, who sometimes venture apart from the Knights of the Round Table. Both often find themself the only one with the qualities to win a contest, or wield a sword, as when Galahad pulls a magic sword from its scabbard, a sword that seems to describe him with an engraving, “There shall never man begrype me, that is to sey, the handyl, but one; and he shall passe all other.”9 Yet, Harry Potter’s hidden birth, a return to his rightful place in the world, along with some impressive sword wielding for a millennial twelve-year-old, seem to mark him as an Arthurian figure.10 Harry, however, does not welcome as a host, call for the feasts, or organize the contests at Hogwarts. Indeed, Alessandra Petrina argues that Harry bears more resemblance to Sir Gawain, in his personal discovery of a magic castle, or adventures in a magical forest, and that Headmaster Dumbledore represents the king of the court.11 Furthermore, Dumbledore himself shares traits with multiple characters from Arthurian or Medieval fiction. His names give a variety of clues to his function and personality. The unlikely chain of given names includes Albus Percival Wulfric Brian, cueing readers to understand that he is “white,” pertaining to goodness or the second stage of alchemy;12 that he has a quest of his own and dies “soon after drinking from a chalice;” that he is a leader and miracle worker, like the twelfthcentury Wulfric of Haselbury; and that he has noble qualities.13 In this monarchial role, he leads the school, confers with government leadership, welcomes students and guests to a grand feasting hall, and hosts the Triwizard Tournament.14 Dumbledore’s first appearance in the first chapter of the series, however, directly mimics that of Arthur’s Le Morte D’Arthur, 409. Ming-Hsun Lin. “Fitting the Glass Slipper: A Comparative Study of the Princess’s Role in the Harry Potter Novels and Films,” in Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, ed. by Greenhill Pauline, Matrix Sidney Eve, and Jack Zipes, 79-98. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010), 95; Wendy Doniger. “Harry Potter Explained: Can you Spot the Source?” London Review of Books, 22 (4) (February 17, 2000), 26-7; and others. 11 Alessandra Petrina, “Forbidden Forest, Enchanted Castle: Arthurian Spaces in the Harry Potter Novels,” Mythlore 24, no. 3/4 (93/94) (2006), 103–104. 12 The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK. “Alchemy and Colour,” www.fitzmuseum. cam.ac.uk/colour/explore/6. 13 Jacob Shamsian, “The Real Meanings Behind 46 Different Names in the ‘Harry Potter’ Universe,” Business Insider (November 14, 2018), www.businessinsider.com.au/harrypotter-character-name-meaning-v2-2017-4. 14 The Goblet of Fire, 221. 9

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advisor, the wizard Merlin, leaving a child of mysterious and important lineage with an unknown foster family.15 In addition to his other accomplishments, Dumbledore has earned a government honor, the Order of Merlin, First Class, for his services to the country.16 He continues to advise Harry’s actions and thoughts throughout the series, in much the same way Merlin does for Arthur. Rowling then assembles an entourage for Harry that could come directly from the Court of Camelot. Harry’s friends bear resemblance to a variety of Arthurian characters. Hermione and Ron’s multiple roles sometimes have a surprising manifestation, as Farah Mendlesohn asserts, both as courtiers to a half-Arthurian boy, but also as a kind of outsourced intellect and impetus to act for a rather passive hero.17 For his part, Ron serves neither as “hero nor royalty” but as “antihero/sidekick” to Harry. Sometimes, he acts as a knight in Harry’s court, the literal role he claims in a human-scale chessboard,18 and sometimes as a guide to local customs, such as Morley’s hermits that frequent the woods where Arthur’s knights wander.19 Hermione embodies a more complex role. Elizabeth Heilman finds royal qualities in Hermione that well match Morley’s unnamed beautiful and guiding “noblewomen.”20 In contrast, Min-Hsun Lin finds that Hermione’s ability to manage and even save her friends often puts her closer to the role of hero, rather than helpless princesses such as Elayne, or even Gwynevere.21 A third role for Hermione includes that of a “wise, active, and clever” female, resembling Iseult, Chrétien’s Lunette,22 or Morley’s unnamed, but famed woman

15Le

Morte D’Arthur, 23. Philosopher’s Stone, 42. 17 Mendelson, Farah. “Crowing the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12, no. 3 (47) (2001), 291. 18 Philosopher’s Stone, 205. 19 Ron serves this function in all the novels, but particularly in Philosopher’s Stone (on the Hogwarts express), Chamber of Secrets (at the Burrow), and The Goblet of Fire (summer holidays and professional sports). 20 Heilman, Elizabeth. 2003, 229. 21 Lin, Min-Hsun. “Fitting the Glass Slipper: A Comparative Study of the Princess’s Role in the Harry Potter Novels and Films,” in Fairy Tale Films, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix. University of Colorado, 2010, 92. 22 Arden, Heather, and Kathryn Lorenz. “The Harry Potter Stories and French Arthurian Romance.” Arthuriana 13, no. 2 (2003): 60. 16

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physician.23 Whatever part Hermione or Ron plays throughout the tale, each one is a familiar adventuring role from medieval romances. Assured of guidance and encouragement from Dumbledore, Harry embarks on a series of quests, seeking or employing magical objects which prove his worth or save his community. Many have close ties to Arthurian myth, such as swords, stones, and goblets. For example, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry, Hermione, and Ron seek the titular gem, said to give eternal life and everlasting wealth to the owner. While the story incorporates the historical fourteenth-century alchemist of Parisian Nicholas Flamel (via a chocolate frog card), the philosopher’s stone itself also bears similarity to the Holy Grail sought by the Knights of Arthur’s Round Table, for its ability to heal and bring eternal life. Often depicted as a cup, or goblet (see discussion below), in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem, Parzival, the grail becomes a powerful gem with life-giving qualities, much like the Philosopher’s Stone.24 Additionally, Harry begins this quest for the Stone with his newly inherited invisibility cloak which Arden and Lorenz compare to Sir Yvain’s ring of invisibility in Le Chavalier au lion.25 Furthermore, with virtue reminiscent of Galahad’s, Harry succeeds in the challenge set by Dumbledore, when he finally locates the Philosopher’s Stone because he, unlike others, “wanted to find the Stone – find it, but not use it.”26 The remaining books have similar Arthurian quests. During The Chamber of Secrets, Harry seeks that magical chamber, but, on the way, he questions giant spiders in a Brocéliandian Forbidden Forest; saves an innocent girl; seeks and slays the above-mentioned basilisk; and pulls a magical sword from a hidden location, which, like Arthur, confirms his identity, here as “a true Gryffindor.”27 In The Prisoner of Azakaban, Harry is directed not to “go looking for Black,” the proposed villain of the novel, which is contrary to Harry’s seeking nature.28 He cannot resist and both Le Morte D’Arthur, 176. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: A Knightly Epic, trans. by Jessie Laidlay (New York: G.E. Stechert, 1912), 270. 25 A & L p. 56, referring to Chretien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Honor? Champion, 1971), 11.1032-37. The translation is from Chretien de Troyes, Ywain: The Knight of the Lion, trans. Robert W. Ackerman, Frederick W. Locke, and Carleton W. Carroll, (1957; rpt. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992), 18. 26 PS 217. 27 CoS, 245, Lots of footnotes here. 28 POA, 59. 23 24

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locates the unjustly endangered prisoner, and proves him innocent. During The Goblet of Fire, Harry finds himself finds himself entered in an actual tournament to win a Holy Grail analog. Each contestant must demonstrate “prowess, daring, powers of deduction, and ability to cope with danger”29 in order to enter the contest, then vying for “the Triwizard Cup, the glory of their school, and a thousand Galleons of personal prize money.”30 After the death of a student champion in The Goblet of Fire, Harry’s trials become rather darker, more complex, and sometimes less successful. The Order of the Phoenix recounts his mission to find a glowing glass orb which holds a prophecy about himself, as well as to save his godfather from torture. He finds both the orb and his godfather, Sirius Black, but, by the end of the story, both are again lost. This motivates Potter to seek a special set of artifacts in the sixth and seventh books that will provide a means to destroy the villain, Voldemort. Many of these shine with a particularly medieval gleam. Each of the Hogwarts founders left an item indicative of her or his temperament: Brave Gryffindor left the aforementioned sword; intellectual Ravenclaw left a brow-gracing diadem; hospitable Hufflepuff left a golden goblet; and vain Slytherin left a jeweled locket, bearing his initial. Voldemort has cursed the goblet, diadem, and cup, as well as a magic ring, book, and living snake, in order to make himself immortal. Potter and his friends must search for each, and eventually discover that Gryffindor’s sword provides one way to destroy them. In the final book, The Deathly Hallows, Rowling introduces one last set of articles, the titular Deathly Hallows themselves. Combined, these items provide an alternate route to immortality, and revealed in a fairy tale, prove to be three objects already present in Harry’s narrative. Dumbledore’s wand is the unbeatable Elder Wand, the previously cursed magic ring contains the Resurrection Stone, and Harry’s own cloak of invisibility. For once, Harry must choose which set of objects to win; he must decide on his quest, rather than pursue a singular option set before him. At the conclusion of Harry’s adventures, only the sword and his cloak remain; the remaining powerful objects are lost or destroyed.

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II. Seeking the Solutions A. The Wizarding Material World Despite the fact that Rowling’s narrative removes Harry from a massproduced world to begin his life anew, the Harry Potter books, and especially the movies, spawned a vast commercial empire in retail sales of toys, video games, costumes, jewelry, and home goods. The easiest way for readers to “experience the magic,” of course, is to buy a Hogwarts robe from Walmart, where their current best seller, “Child’s Deluxe Gryffindor Robe – Harry Potter in Black” retails for $29.99 (adult sizes also available).31 In fact, muggle versions of any of the magical objects that Harry purchased, discovered, or won in the books can be found through retail outlets such as Target, Party City, Hot Topic, and even Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma, for shoppers with more golden Galleons than copper Knuts. In this way, fans can build a wizarding home of their own and dream of getting their invitational “letter from Hogwarts.” More adventuresome Potter fans venture into the outside world, where many of the medieval-period filming sites offer tours and packages, as well as Leaky Cauldron-inspired sweets, and souvenirs. Viator Tours offer several Harry Potter Oxford packages, where fans can walk through the halls of that university, and especially the Divinity School, prominently featured in the films.32 The British Tourist Board has compiled an extensive list of authentically medieval Potter filming locations, including Durham Cathedral, Alnwick Castle, and Lacock Abbey, in order to promote tourist trade and visibility.33 In Poland, fans can attend an unofficial College of Wizardry at Czocha Castle for a weekend, or the Bothwell School of Witchcraft at Herstmonceux Castle in England, for a similar experience.34 Additionally, Universal Studios has

Walmart, https://www.walmart.com/ip/Child-s-Deluxe-Gryffindor-Robe-HarryPotter-in-Black/32789346, accessed Dec 2020. 32 Viator, Incorporated, https://www.viator.com/, accessed Dec 2020. 33 Britain Tourist Board, “Harry Potter filming locations guide,” Visit Britain, https://www.visitbritainshop.com/world/articles/harry-potter-film-locations/, Accessed Dec. 2020. 34 College of Wizardry, https://www.cowlarp.com/; Katie Forster, “Harry Potter roleplaying at real-life Hogwarts,” The Guardian, March 6, 2016, www.theguardian.com/tra 31

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opened Wizarding World theme parks in Orlando, Florida; Hollywood, California; Osaka, Japan; and, in 2021, one in Beijing, China.35 Conventions offer fans the most creative opportunities in this neomedieval world. LeakyCon, founded in 2009, now occurs yearly in both Orlando, Florida, and Denver, Colorado. Similar fan-created gatherings take place in New Hampshire, Washington, Georgia, and, until recently, in New York, and at more general comic- or fan-cons around the world; where readers dress up, play Wizard rock, debate plot points, and, of course, buy “merch.” Smaller events include themed symphony concerts, trivia nights, Harry Potter birthday parties hosted by bookstores, libraries, and schools, as well as a Bloomsbury Publishing-supported Harry Potter Book Night, held every February since 2015.36 Some of the craftier Hogwarts devotees take DYI direction from the texts, where mother figure Molly Weasley cooks and knits for her family and Harry. Literally dozens of Potter cookbooks offer muggles the opportunity to create a Weasley or Great Hall feast for themselves. The titles range from several iterations of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (from authors Joey Barrow, Aurélia Beaupommier, Dinah Bucholz, Marie Whipkey, and more), to Happee Birthdae Harry! By Luna Loomas, The Potterhead Cookbook, by James Keller, and Spice Things Like a Wizard, by Penny Potter, to name the barest few. The recipes within make a passing nod at the classic British fare of meats, breads, and fruitcakes. As for knitting, the craft appears prominently within the storyline and feature films, as do the topics of sweaters, socks, hats, and scarves. The iconic school house scarves provide a unique opportunity for enthusiasts to bring the story to life, as they signal not only the house itself, but a marked ideology and allegiance to the fictional Hogwarts founders, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Slytherin. Alison Hansel, author of Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter, writes, “This scarf has been the starting point for countless fans-turned-knitters over the years. vel/2016/mar/06/harry-potter-college-of-wizardry-poland-hogwarts; Bothwell School of Witchcraft, https://www.bothwellschoolofwitchcraft.com. 35 Ben Fritz, “Harry Potter heads to Universal Studios Japan,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2012, https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/05/harry -potter-heads-to-universal-studios-japan.html. Accessed Dec. 2020; Masha Goncharova, “Events to Shake, or Gently Rattle, the World in 2021,” New York Times, Dec. 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/opinion/events-world-2021.html?searchResul tPosition=8. Accessed Dec. 2020. 36 harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/uk/harry-potter-book-night/, accessed Dec. 2020. 321

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How better to show your (or a friend’s) house loyalty and fannish pride than with the original scarf?”37 Available books on how to stitch together one’s own Harry Potter knitworks include Hansel’s Charmed Knits, Amy Clarke Moore’s Knitting Wizardry, and Tanis Gray’s Knitting Magic. Popular fan sites, such as MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, feature knitting projects, as well as other crafts for creating clothing, toys, and home décor.38 Many attendees wear their creations to the conventions and parties. Like coats of arms or colorful favors gifted to knights, the Hogwarts house colors communicate an allegiance and possibly a purpose. Blending the actions of crafting with public gathering provides another next step on the way to more activist-minded functions. B. Witch Craftivism In the pivotal fourth book of the Harry Potter series, The Goblet of Fire, the collecting tins from Uncle Venon’s taxed imagination finally become a reality. Hermione Granger, Harry’s intellectually high-minded friend, discovers and researches the extent of slavery used within the wizarding world. She founds an activist group called the Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare, or S.P.E.W., which is initially mocked by Harry, Ron, and the other students. She has made herself president, Harry the secretary, and Ron the treasurer, who now has care of the dues-collecting tin. Each member is to pay two silver Sickles, which “buys a badge – and the proceeds can fund [the] leaflet campaign.”39 Though Hermione’s work is spurned by her schoolmates, it opens the story’s activism perspective beyond the students’ own lived experience. Every quest that Harry has undertaken before Goblet directly involves him and those he cares about. While he certainly had troubles of his own to combat, through Hermione’s campaign, Harry begins to see that he has not been the only victim of oppression. Hermione’s actions are markedly different from Harry’s quests. In a more modernized effort to effect change, she incorporates fundraising, an attempted hunger strike, and (echoing Molly Weasley) knitting as means to free the enslaved house elves. She researches legal cases in the library and consults standard legal practices of the Ministry of Magic. Alison Hansel, Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter, 70. https://www.mugglenet.com/; http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/. 39 GOF, 198-9. 37 38

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Reminiscent of a Jane Addams or an Emmeline Pankhurst, Hermione incorporates step-wise, deliberate, well-researched, and crafty actions towards her goal.40 In this, she provides a template for readers who may not know where or how to begin political activism. Hermione battles institutional dragons, not literal ones. That is Harry’s job. In the next installment, The Order of the Phoenix, Harry’s battles finally begin to resemble Hermione’s; in other words, they become more realistic. His main opponent is the fabulously named Dolores Umbridge, a truly wicked witch and maleficent government bureaucrat, placed within the school to stifle information on political events and actions against it. Flying, leaping, and sword-wielding will not do. Here, Hermione unpacks her expertise. Encouraged by Ron, she coerces Harry to found a Defense Against the Dark Arts club and teach the other students self-defense, as well as the political/military climate off the school campus.41 Hermione begins with the workaday basics of activism, such as finding a meeting place and time, recruitment, sign-in sheets, scheduling, communications, and contracts. Once Harry begins the official training, he eventually learns to lead the students himself, building a group called “Dumbledore’s Army.” This group then fosters other leaders, such as their friends, Luna Lovegood, and Neville Longbottom, as well as Ron’s siblings, Fred, George, and Ginny Weasley. Each develops their own expertise and uses these skills to defeat Umbridge within this book and to fight in the military battles of the last book. Harry realizes that he has a larger responsibility than he initially believed and finally internalizes advice from Dumbledore, that he will have to “make a choice between what is right and what is easy.”42 In this way, Rowling guides her readers away from the fantastic conflicts, where Harry and his friends battle giant spiders, boggarts, and soul-sucking dementors. All these monsters seem to become a metaphor for the true villains in the wizarding world, or the literal one: humans. C. Do Some Good When asked if Hermione plans to pursue a career in the legal field by the Minister of Magic, she disgustedly retorts, “No I’m not… I’m hoping to Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: The Mac Millan Company, 1910. Order of the Phoenix, 290-351, in particular. 42 Goblet of Fire, 628. 40 41

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do some good in the world!”43 At the beginning of the last book, The Deathly Hallows, Harry, Hermione, and Ron leave the protection of Hogwarts and its faculty to begin their final quest. Hermione frames the errand with this very exclamation of doing good. The trio will not work with nor within the government structure to achieve their goals. They will find their own way, relying on tools, knowledge, and skills collected in their six years of magical training for their quest to defeat Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters. J.K. Rowling models activism through more than just her characters, however. She published two additional books, Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in 2001, specifically to benefit the United Kingdom charity Comic Relief.44 These small publications were styled as “textbooks” from the Hogwarts reading list and gave a humorous rendering of the wizarding world’s sports and fauna. As of March 2020, the proceeds from them have also given over £22 million to Comic Relief, which aids people living with poverty, domestic violence, and homelessness.45 Following this effort, Rowling founded her own charity, Children’s High Level Group, later renamed Lumos, in 2005.46 Lumos works to support impoverished families so that they do not place their children in orphanages or similar institutions. The charity is active all over the world, including Moldova, Haiti, and the United States. In 2008, Rowling penned a third wizarding world book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Multiple editions, from mass-produced, to collector’s editions, to seven hand-written and illustrated editions went on sale, raising £4.2 million in its first week for Lumos.47 Clearly, Rowling’s own mission lies in helping children and families so like the characters she created, who need assurance and safety when those are difficult to secure.

Deathly Hallows, 105. “Comic Relief,” https://www.jkrowling.com/charity/comic-relief/, accessed Dec. 2020. 45 Richard Curtis, quoted in “Rowling In It: Harry Potter author JK Rowling raked in whopping £250k every day last year,” The Scottish Sun, 7 March 2020, by Chris Taylor; Comic Relief, “What your money does,” https://www.comicrelief.com/. 46 Lumos, “Our History,” https://www.wearelumos.org/. 47 Stephen Adams, “JK Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard raises £4.2m for charity in a week,” The Telegraph December 17, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ booknews/3812455/JK-Rowlings-Tales-of-Beedle-the-Bard-raises-4.2m-for-charity-ina-week.html. 43 44

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Growing up, members of the Harry Potter film cast have followed her example. Emma Watson, who played Hermione, and Evanna Lynch, who played Luna Lovegood, have both become activists in their own right. Similar to her character, Watson has championed fair trade, organic clothing, education, and literacy programs, began her own gender equality campaign, HeForShe, and became a UN Goodwill Ambassador in 2014.48 For her part, Lynch endorses vegan diets and cosmetics. She currently produces a veganism-promoting podcast, “The Chickpeeps,” and in 2019 co-founded a subscription vegan cosmetic delivery service, Kinder Beauty, with Daniella Monet.49 Soon after The Philosopher’s Stone was published, Harry Potter fans began to do more than knit scarves, bake pumpkins pasties, and take weekend castles tours. Many started to reach out to other fans, wanting to create a sense of community. One of the oldest fan-made websites, MuggleNet, went online in October of 1999. Founded, rather fittingly, by twelve-year-old Emerson Spartz, MuggleNet has spread its influence both in reach and content. It has hosted games, surveys, interviews, fan fiction, and even recipes.50 Over time, it has also produced live events and published books, but an impetus to build a purpose beyond parties and games came with the publication of Through the Keyhole, a 2010 publication of fan fiction. All proceeds were donated to the charity Room to Read, which supports the Potter-friendly ideas of gender equality and girls’ literacy programs all over the world.51 Many of the articles MuggleNet published began to focus more on social justice, as did a wide offering of podcasts. Accio Politics discusses the ideas of power and control in the book series, while Beyond the Veil looks at the topic of mental health. In particular, the issue of mental health has become very important to many fans, not only because of the inspirational characters, UN Women, “UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson,” https://www.unwomen.org/en/partnerships/oodwill-ambassadors/emma-watson; Nicholas L. Barber, “Emma Watson: the feminist and the fairytale,” The Guardian, 9 Feb 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/09/emma-watson-feminist-fairyt ale-beauty-and-the-beast-disney. UN Women, “HeForShe,” www.heforshe.org/en. 49 Peacock, Emma, “From ‘Harry Potter’ To Vegan Business: How Evanna Lynch Is Merging Activism and Entrepreneurship,” Forbes, 31 Oct 2019, www.forbes.com/ sites/emmapocock/2019/10/31/from-harry-potter-to-vegan-business-owner-howevanna-lynch-is-merging-activism-and-entrepreneurship/?sh=21d7f4a42277; Kinder Beauty Box, https://kinderbeauty.com. 50 MuggleNet, “History,” https://www.mugglenet.com/. 51 Room to Read, “About Us,” https://www.roomtoread.org/. 48

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but because Rowling admitted that her own depression influenced the creation of the happiness-draining dementors in the stories.52 MuggleNet offers ways for fans to join other charitable causes, which are listed on the site. “It seems only logical, therefore, that the themes of love and justice, so pivotal to the series, should inspire readers to go that extra mile, and they have,” the site conveys. Just as Harry and his friends seek to make their world a better place, with the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore’s Army, and SPEW, so too have hundreds of thousands of inspired Potterheads around the world sought to improve our Muggle world.53 Another leading center of the Harry Potter community is the website, The Leaky Cauldron, begun in 2002.54 The founder, Melissa Anelli, chose a similar function and scope to MuggleNet, with a stronger emphasis on journalism and celebrity interviews with authors, movie cast, and crew. It, too, hosts a podcast, PotterCast, provides discussion, fan art and fiction, games, craft projects, and LeakyCon, the massive yearly Harry Potter convention mentioned above. Inspired by Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts, Taylor Starr founded the Protego Foundation in 2015 to protect animal rights.55 Since then, the group has created several campaigns, including saving research chimpanzees, rhinoceros, shelter dogs and cats, wild badgers, and advocating for vegan foods at Harry Potter theme parks.56 Mostly an online community, Protego’s website hosts a blog with news items, crafts, recipes, specific causes and ways to independently support them, as well as work-arounds for non-vegan Potter merchandise. Animal lovers can buy merchandise, join the book club, as well as enjoy their podcast, “Protegocast.” Rowling, J.K, in “The Brilliant Mind Behind Harry Potter,” Oprah.com, 10 Oct. 2010, http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-brilliant-mind-behind-harry-potter. 53 MuggleNet, “Charity,” https://www.mugglenet.com/muggle-world/charity/. 54 The Leaky Cauldron, “About the Leaky Cauldron,” www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/info /siteinfo/. 55 Protego Foundation, “We Fight for Magical Creatures,” www.protegofoundation.org/. 56 Starostinetskaya, Anna. “Warner Bros. Releases Vegan Version of Harry Potter’s Butterbeer,” VegNews, 10 Sep. 2020. https://vegnews.com/2020/9/warner-bros-relea ses-vegan-version-of-harry-potter-s-butterbeer. 52

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Recently, MuggleNet, The Leaky Cauldron, Protego, and other Harry Potter-themed sites have issued a bold statement to say that they do not agree with J.K. Rowling’s 2020 statements on transgendered people,57 and that they have a “renewed commitment to serving the Harry Potter community from a more conscious standpoint than we have done in the past.”58 While these organizations may have broken with the author, they continue to support what they believe to be her original missions of inclusivity and perseverance. When Potter fans meet in person or online, they often collaborate to “do some good.” One of the more unique manifestations in this fandom is the music called “Wizard rock,” or “Wrock.” Now meriting its own entry in the reference standard of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Wizard rock came first from the 2000 song “Ode to Harry,” by Switchblade Kittens, and then from the first Wrock band, Harry and the Potters, formed in 2002.59 Hundreds of bands, particularly in the United States and Canada, feature original music and lyrics based on the Potter stories, often sung from a character’s point of view. Mostly, Wizard rockers play at conventions, schools, and local libraries. Other performers feature names such as the Hermione Crookshanks Experience, the Whomping Willows, the Moaning Myrtles, and the Remus Lupins.60 The musicians often express their affection for the Wizard rock community, the DIY spirit, and that the crusade behind their music is to help people “Fight evil. Read books.” Paul DeGeorge, of Harry and the Potters says in the film, The Wizard Rockumentary: a Movie about Rocking and Rowling, “We’re glad you’re here to join us tonight to fight evil, and we’re doing that in our own little way.” His brother, Joe DeGeorge adds, “We feel like we’re setting an example for kids to start their own bands and we want to encourage them.” The lead singer of the Switchblade Kittens, Drama, said that their music is inspired by Harry’s Rowling, J.K, “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues,” 10 Jun. 2020, JKRowling.com, https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/jk-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues. 58 MuggleNet, “Our Commitment,” www.mugglenet.com/site/our-commitment/; The Leaky Cauldron, http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/statement/. 59 Haramaki, Gordon. “Wizard rock.” Grove Music Online. July 1, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2263324. 60 The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie About Rocking and Rowling, dir. Megan Schuyler and Mallory Schuyler, GryffinClaw Productions. (Spokane, 2008) [documentary]; remaining Wizard rock quotes from the same source. 57

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trials in the series. As a young person, she felt that “If Harry could make it through Voldemort, I can make it through the music business. The Harry Potter books really helped me come alive.” Wizard rock is meant to do more than entertain, it is meant to inspire the audience to take action, to further social justice and literacy. Bands model these ideals by playing benefits for libraries and literacy groups, such as Page Ahead. The most significant agent of Harry Potter activism comes from Fandom Forward (formerly the Harry Potter Alliance.61) Founded in 2005 by Andrew Slack, Fandom Forward moves the Harry Potter fandom beyond book clubs and podcasts, and into the idea of civic engagement. The Fandom Forward strives to collect, educate, and train fans to become leading activists on the topics of gender and racial justice, education and literacy, climate change and fair trade, and the somewhat unusual issue of media reform and net neutrality.62 For example, issues needing reform are listed on their website, such as immigration. Fandom Forward provides information for immigration organizations all over the world, including how to contact them, the specific volunteer opportunities available, and how to donate funds.63 Like Wizard rock, the Leaky Cauldron, MuggleNet, and Rowling herself, local Fandom Forward chapters support literacy through book drives and even library renovation. In 2017, the latest available record, their “Accio Books” campaign gathered over 400,000 books to augment or build fifty-nine libraries in fifty countries. Other specific campaigns include education about, and scholarship drives for worldwide girls’ education, lobbying for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, fundraising over $123,000 for Haiti disaster relief, promoting slavery-free chocolate in Warner Brother’s Harry Potter chocolate frogs, and even fundraising to protect civilians in Darfur and Burma from genocide. A truly unique feature of Fandom Forward is their intent to provide activist and leadership training. There are extensive resources available online, with many levels of commitment. Several fandom-based activism kits are available to download, including many themes beyond Harry Potter, including Avatar, Doctor Who, Marvel superheroes, and Star Wars. They offer guides to starting a chapter and how to run the Fandom Forward, “Wait, Weren’t You The Harry Potter Alliance?” https://fandom forward.org/hpa. 62 Fandom Forward, “What We Do,” https://fandomforward.org/whatwedo. 63 Ibidem, “Resistance,” https://fandomforward.org/resistance. 61

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meetings. Anyone can access their online “Wizard Activist School,” comprised of several modules introducing people to the meaning of activism and social justice and how to effectively communicate, plan, lead, and build new campaigns.64 Community groups can hire an expert Fandom Forward trainer to present an online workshop to a meeting or peruse guidelines for social media posting to increase volunteer involvement. Lastly, in 2014, they began to offer a yearly conference, called the Granger Leadership Academy, after the character Hermione Granger, to train activist leaders and help them connect and collaborate with their own chapters. This extensive catalogue of formats and topics addressed by the Fandom Forward’s activism displays their dedication to addressing the root problems of injustice. The combined efforts of these and other activists have had marked success. Ashly Hinck writes that the Harry Potter fan movements “don’t leave fan-based ethical frameworks at their abstract or theoretical level. Rather, they take those ethical frameworks and argue that they should apply to public issues, ultimately pairing fan-based ethical frameworks with civic ethical modalities.”65 The Potter fans have taken to heart the medieval idea of a quest or crusade. What may have begun with a fairy tale and colorful costumes has graduated into savvy and successful political action. With hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for medical aid and education, corporate fair trade policies altered, multiple libraries built, and families reunited, Harry Potter activism now merits its own field of research. Sociologists Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport look at the ideas of fan activism, its increase and online methods.66 Communication researchers Kalen M.A. Churcher and Meghan S. Sanders analyze the use of language to indicate identity groups and how they become politically active.67 Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, a journalism

Ibidem, “Wizard Activist School,” https://fandomforward.org/wizardactivistschool. Ashly Hinck, “Fan-Based Social Movements: The Harry Potter Alliance and the Future of Online Activism,” in The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media, ed. Nathan Crick (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2021), n.p. 66 Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, “Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online,” Sociological Theory 27, no. 3 (2009): 22043. 67 Kalen M.A. Churcher and Meghan S. Sanders, “Political Activism and Harry Potter,” in From Here to Hogwarts: Essays on Harry Potter Fandom and Fiction, ed. by Christopher E. Bell, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2020) 199–217. 64 65

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scholar, looks at participatory politics and how fandoms unite and support young activists.68 From American teenagers quoting the Expelliarmus spell against the National Rifle Association in 2018 or Thai students wearing Hogwarts robes to protest their “Death Eater” military in 2020, current activism proves that Potter remains a powerful impetus for righting wrongs in the world. 69 As one sign from the March for Our Lives read, “We grew up on Harry Potter – Of course we’re fighting back.”70 Like Arthur, Harry seems to be a hero for today, as well as the future.

Bibliography Arden, Heather and Kathryn Lorenz. “The Harry Potter Stories and French Arthurian Romance.” Arthuriana 13, no. 2 (2003): 54-68. Black, Sharon. “The Magic of Harry Potter: Symbols and Heroes of Fantasy.” Children’s Literature in Education 34, no. 3 (September 2003): 237–47. doi:10.1023/A:1025314919836. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949; rep. Princeton: Princeton University, 1972. Cecire, Maria Sachiko. Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Colbert, David. The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter. Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina: Lumina, 2001. Chrétien de Troyes. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Edited by David Staines. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990.

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Arely M. Zimmerman, and Elisabeth Soep. “‘Decreasing World Suck’: Harnessing Popular Culture for Fan Activism,” in By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, 102-48. (New York: New York University, 2016). http://www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt180401m.6, 102–148. 69 Hannah Beech, “In Thailand, Students Take on the Military (and ‘Death Eaters’),” New York Times, (August 11, 2020), www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/world/asia/thailandstudent-protest-military.html. 70 De Elizabeth, “Best ‘Harry Potter’ Signs at the March for Our Lives,” Teen Vogue (March 25, 2018) https://www.teenvogue.com/story/best-harry-potter-signs-marchfor-our-lives. 68

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Dwight, Emma. “Celebrity Humanitarianism: Bridging the Gap.” Harvard International Review 37, no. 3 (2016): 18-20. www.jstor.org/ stable/26445832. Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. “Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online.” Sociological Theory 27, no. 3 (2009): 220-43. www.jstor.org/stable/ 40376135. Elder, Katherine. “Propaganda for Kids: Comparing IS-Produced Propaganda to Depictions of Propaganda in The Hunger Games and Harry Potter Film Series.” International Journal of Communication [Online], 12 (14 February 2018). https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/ article/view/6228. Feldman, Sarah. “You’re a Wizard at Making Money, Harry,” Statista. November 15, 2018. https://www.statista.com/chart/16114/harrypotter-franchise. Garlough, Christine. “Folklore and Performing Political Protest: Calls of Conscience at the 2011 Wisconsin Labor Protests.” Western Folklore 70, no. 3/4 (2011): 337-70. www.jstor.org/stable/24551262. Gierzynski, Anthony, Kathryn Eddy. Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2013. Granger, John. Harry Potter’ ’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures, New York, Penguin: 2009. Grimmer, Louise, Gary Mortimer, and Martin Grimmer. “Galloping gargoyles! Is Harry Potter losing his (earning) power?” The Conversation, March 1, 2020. https://theconversation.com/gallopinggargoyles-is-harry-potter-losing-his-earning-power-131382. Joo, Yunjeong. “Same Despair but Different Hope: Youth Activism in East Asia and Contentious Politics.” Development and Society 47, no. 3 (2018): 401-22. doi:10.2307/26506192. Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta, Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Arely M. Zimmerman, and Elisabeth Soep. “‘Decreasing World Suck’: Harnessing Popular Culture for Fan Activism.” In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, 102-48. New York: New York University, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt180401m.6, 102–148.

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Lamb, Anna. “Ithaca Wizarding Weekend not happening in 2020.” Ithaca Voice. (January 27, 2020), https://ithacavoice.com/2020/01/ithacawizarding-weekend-not-happening-in-2020/. Lavache, Carine. “The Halloween Costume Everyone Was Wearing the Year You Were Born.” Cosmopolitan. September 13, 2019, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/g12267541/thehalloween-costume-everyone-was-wearing-the-year-you-were-born/. Leckrone, J. Wesley. “Hippies, Feminists, and Neocons: Using ‘The Big Lebowski’ to Find the Political in the Nonpolitical.” PS: Political Science and Politics 46, no. 1 (2013): 129-36. www.jstor.org/stable/43284293. Lin, Ming-Hsun. “Fitting the Glass Slipper: A Comparative Study of the Princess’s Role in the Harry Potter Novels and Films.” In Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, edited by Greenhill Pauline, Matrix Sidney Eve and Zipes Jack, 79-98. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010. Malory, Thomas. Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Edited by Keith Baines. New York: New American Library, 1962. Mauk, Margaret S. “Your Mother Died to Save You’: The Influence of Mothers in Constructing Moral Frameworks for Violence in Harry Potter.” Mythlore 36, 1 (131) (2017): 123-42. doi:10.2307/26809260. Mendlesohn, Farah. “Crowning the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12, no. 3 (47) (2001): 287-308. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308531. Murphy, G. Ronald. Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s “Parzival.” Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2006. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195 306392.001.0001/acprof-9780195306392. Perrott, Kathryn. “Harry Potter: The boy whose fandom lives on, 20 years later.” ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Sunday, June 25, 2017. www.abc.net.au/news/201706-26/harry-potter-the-boy-whose-fandom-lives-on-20-years-later/ 8644838. Thomas, Paul. I Wanna Wrock: The World of Harry Potter-Inspired “‘Wizard Rock”’ and its Fandom. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018. Scala, Elizabeth. “Cloaks of Invisibility: The Status of Arthurian Studies.” Arthuriana 17, no. 4 (2007): 93-96. Accessed September 28, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27870875.

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Schafer, Elizabeth D. Exploring Harry Potter: Beacham’s Sourcebooks for Teaching Young Adult Fiction. Osprey, Florida: Beacham Publishing, 2000. Sheppard, Judith. “Faculty Forum: Harry Potter and the Sinister Measures of Merit.” Academe 94, no. 1 (2008): 62. www.jstor.org/ stable/40253621. Sperb, Jason. “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South.” Cinema Journal 49, no. 4 (2010): 25-45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40801480. Stein, Lucia. “Harry Potter: How JK Rowling’s story became a multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise,” ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sunday 25 June 2017. www.abc.net.au/ news/2017-06-26/harry-potters-billion-dollar-entertainment-franch ise/8627442. Rowling, J. K. [Newt Scamander, pseud.]. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. New York: Scholastic, 2001. –––. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Rev. ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. [Kennilworthy Whisp, pseud]. Quidditch Through the Ages. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. –––. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. London: Children’s High Level Group, 2008. Tinnes, Judith. “Bibliography: Children, Youth, and Terrorism.” Perspectives on Terrorism 14, no. 3 (2020): 125-67. doi:10.2307 /26918305.

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Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival: A Knightly Epic. Translated by Jessie Laidlay. New York: G.E. Stechert, 1912. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Katey Roden, Kevin Decker, Chris Valeo, and Mo Healy for support and advice.

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Memories of the Medieval in the Age of White Supremacy Leland Renato Grigoli*

I. Introduction I grew up in the city of Newton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, east of the first major ring road, Interstate 95 – though older locals, adhering to the good New England tradition of giving directions by what used to be there, will still call it Route 128. Route 128 follows the course of the Charles River as it runs north from Dedham and past Newton until it turns east to flow through Waltham, Watertown, Cambridge, and then finally through Boston and into Massachusetts Bay. Here, between the quiet banks of Charles and the industrial thrum of the highway, is a most curious sight. I first came upon it when I was ten or twelve. On hot summer days, my parents liked to rent a canoe from a strange boathouse that looked something like a Swiss chalet. They stuffed us kids into slightly-mildewed life jackets and paddled down the river. When I was very young, they would take us more than a mile to the playground at Auburndale Park, but, when I got older and started demanding a boat of my own, they started planning shorter trips so as to avoid having to tow me back. Once, after an arduous half mile of paddling under the July sun, we hopped ashore on the left bank of the river, tied up the boat, and set about exploring the woods. And there, set back maybe two hundred feet into the brush, was a tower. It was and is a very strange tower, built from what appeared to be the same round, large stones New England farmers have been ploughing up from the glacial till and making into loose walls for hundreds of years. It *

Brown University (History), United States of America.

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was narrow, a bit stubby, and, most disappointingly, its door was a locked metal grate which I could definitely could have squeezed through if it had not been quickly forbidden by my parents. The tower also bears an enormous granite plaque set into its side which I did not bother to read, since I was a child more interested in finding a proper stick to make a bow and arrow than odd edifices (I knew it should be yew, but did not know that I was on the wrong continent if I wanted to find it). If I had, I would have found that it said: AD 1000 AD 1889 NORUMBEGA CITY COUNTRY FORT RIVER NORUMBEGA = NOR MBEGA INDIAN UTTERANCE OF NORGEGA THE ANCIENT FORM OF NOWEGA NORWAY TO WHICH THE REGION OF VINLAND WAS SUBJECT CITY AT AND NEAR WATERTOWN WERE REMAIN TO-DAY DOCKS WHARVES WALLS FANS BASINS

COUNTRY EXTENDING FROM RHODE ISLAND TO THE ST. LAWRENCE FIRST SEEN BY BJARNI HERJULESON 985 AD LANDFALL OF LEIF ERIKSON ON CAPE COD 1000 AD NORSE CANALS DAMS WELLS PAVEMENTS FORTS TERRACED PLACES OF ASSEMBLY REMAIN TO-DAY FORT AT BASE OF TOWER AND REGION ABOUT WAS OCCUPIED BY THE BRETON FRENCH IN THE 15TH 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES RIVER THE CHARLES DISCOVERED BY LEIF ERIKSON 1000 AD EXPLORED BY THORWALD LEIF’S BROTHER 1003 AD COLONIZED BY THORFINN KARLSEENI 1007 AD FIRST BISHOP ERIK GNUPSON 1121 AD 336

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INDUSTRIES FOR 350 YEARS MASUR WOOD [BURRS] FISH FURS AGRICULTURE LATEST NORSE SHIP RETURNED TO ICELAND IN 13471 To a modern academic, learned in the history of the Middle Ages, this is nonsense of a most wonderful variety. The equation of the Norumbega, the Algonquin word for the region around Massachusetts Bay, with Norway is a near-perfect example of the sort of etymological parlor trick that defined late nineteenth-century philology; no premodern docks, wharves, walls, fans, or basins are now or were ever archaeologically evident near Watertown, nor a site for an Althing; there was no French presence, Breton or otherwise, in New England in the fifteenth century; there is no evidence that any premodern ship from Iceland ever reached the Charles River, never mind returned from it. But it was not always nonsense; despite its modern provenance, it is, in a sense, a medieval relic. Norumbega Tower, as it is now known, owes its singular existence to Eben Norton Horsford, whose main claim to fame was that, during his tenure as the Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Application of Science to the Useful Arts at Harvard University, he replaced cream of tartar with calcium biphosphate in baking powder – that is, he invented what he then sold as Rumford Baking Powder.2 Like many educated men in the late nineteenth century, Horsford was a devout adherent of racial Anglo-Saxonism. As a particular form of devotion to this idol, he was obsessed with establishing a Norse presence in Massachusetts Bay, lest the credit for discovering America be left with that degenerate Italian, Columbus. His unusual specificity in attributing a fifteenth-century and thus pre-Columbian fort to Breton, i.e., Celtic, French put them in contrast to what he would have seen as racially-debased Gauls.3 And these ideas were more for popular than academic consumption. Horsford pursued his claims not through academic publications, but Transcription is the author’s. The story of Horsford has been retold through the excellent efforts of local historians in the nearby town of Needham; see: “Vikings on the Charles | Needham History Center & Museum,” accessed November 18, 2020, https://needhamhistory.org/features/ articles/vikings/; “Imagine Weston as Home to 10,000 Vikings,” Universal Hub, accessed November 17, 2020, https://www.universalhub.com/2014/vikings-weston. 3 Cf. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20–21. 1 2

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through building monuments. In addition to Norumbega Tower, Horsford also commissioned a statue of Leif Eriksson, which now stands on Commonwealth Avenue at Charlesgate just east of the Muddy River, and a plaque at the intersection of Mt. Auburn Street and Fresh Pond Parkway in West Cambridge, marking the “site” of Leif’s home. Quod erat demonstrandum. In evaluating these monuments through the jaded, ironic eye of a twenty-first century academic, it is easy to overlook the fact that, before the trauma of the First World War, constructions like the Norumbega Tower were truly thought of as medieval. It is a fact which is true across the prewar Anglophone world, but perhaps easiest to see in the Americas due to the clear temporal disjuncture from the “proper” Middle Ages; New England in particular is littered with such relics of medieval nineteenth-century America.4 There were collectors: the Worcester Art Museum, also in Massachusetts, claims the largest collection of medieval arms and armor on the left side of the Atlantic, thanks to the eccentric collecting habits of the local steel baron John Woodman Higgins. Foreshadowing New York City’s Cloisters, Higgens also imported an entire room from a French monastery.5 There were fictions: local legend in Newport, Rhode Island, has long held that the ruined base of a nearby seventeenth-century windmill was a Norse fort.6 There was construction: the Collegiate Gothic campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, begun in 1917, combines the most recognizable features of Oxbridge with Art Deco gargoyles and bas-reliefs; the belltower now plays a rendition of the theme song to Harry Potter in the evenings. Harvard Divinity School’s Andover Hall, finished in 1911, is the university’s only example of Campus Gothic on an otherwise American Colonial and Neoclassical campus. The rest of the East Coast of the U.S. is similar. Not only does the cathedral of St. John the Divine (or, St. John the Unfinished) in New York City, started in 1892, have a medieval appearance, it also has a properly medieval history; it has suffered several fires, is the fusion of three different architectural styles (Byzantine For more on nineteenth-century medievalism, see Robin Fleming, “Writing Biography at the Edge of History,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 606–14. 5 “The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection | Worcester Art Museum,” accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.worcesterart.org/collection/higgins-collection/. 6 F.H. Shelton, “More Light on the Old Mill at Newport,” Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society 21 (1917). 4

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Revival, Romanesque, Gothic Revival), and still remains under construction after 128 years.7 The Kensington Runestone, a forged inscription with an internal date of 1362 (note the proximity to Horsford’s claim that the Norumbega colony was abandoned in 1347), was “discovered” in Minnesota in 1898. No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson had argued vehemently for the inclusion of the legendary Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa in the Great Seal of the United States.8 The list goes on. This is not mere admiration. It is the construction of a real medieval history for the United States, without which it could not claim the “authorizing length and depth” of history available to white Europeans.9 The depth of the nineteenth-century American desperation for a medieval past illustrates just how vital such a history was to the racialized nationalism of a “Western” state at the time. The ability to lay claim to the medieval, to relate one’s own identity to the European Middle Ages, was a vital component in the construction of nationalist, and thus white racial, identity from the advent of colonialism and scientific racism in the eighteenth century, and it remains so to the present day.10 The exact terms under which individuals used the Middle Ages to construct racial and national identities have, however, changed drastically since Herford laid the first stone of Norumbega Tower, and the prime mover of this shift was the First World War. It is almost impossible to overstate how important the medieval was to the white, “Western” identity of the United States and England before 1914, and thus to the soldiers who fought in World War One and their “Cathedral of Saint John the Divine,” accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.stjohndivine.org/. 8 Geary, The Myth of Nations, 6. 9 Candice Barrington, “Global Medievalism and Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 187, 189; Cord J. Whitaker, “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race, and trippin’ into the future,” Postmedieval 6, no. 1 (2015): 6. 10 See: Joshua Davies, “The Middle Ages as Property: Beowulf, Translation and the Ghosts of Nationalism,” Postmedieval 10, no. 2 (2019): 137–50; Sara Ahmed, “Race as Sedimented History,” Postmedieval 6, no. 1 (2015): 94–97; Patrick Geary and Gábor Klaniczay, eds., Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in NinteenthCentury Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Gillian Lee Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). 7

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memories of the experience. Those who fought in the War to End All Wars, particularly those officers who had received a better class of education, could not but help to see their experience through a medievalist’s eye. Some American soldiers even experienced the trenches in medieval dress, in steel helmets designed by Dr. Bashford Dean, Curator of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and mass-produced by none other than John Higgins.11 But even such an important component of European and American identity could not survive the daily artillery barrage unscathed; the realities of trench warfare were incommensurable with chivalry or knightly heroism. There were no damsels to be saved, the brave died quickest, irony trumped heroism, the mounted cavalry never swept through to victory. The ironic, pointless suffering that defined the First World War forced those who experienced it to separate their medieval identity from the real, modern world and to relocate it into the fantastic imaginary.12 And so our troubles began. II. The Great War and Modern Memory I do not remember it so clearly after all. History remembers it, and I remember it as history. Thomas Hardy The Middle Ages – or at least the idea of a Middle Ages as part of lived, continuous, contemporary history – went over the top and suffered the wound from which it would shortly die while slogging through the sticky, cloying mud of the Somme. This is, I realize, quite a specific and somewhat unconventional claim, far outside the usual terminal dates of 1440, 1453, 1492, or 1517. It does not even relate to the end of the Ottoman (1921) or Russian (1917) Empires, both of which claimed translatio imperii from the Byzantines. Instead, it is a terminus based in the popular consciousness of those who fought and died in the Great War, a consciousness which was, as I have shown, resolutely medieval at the “History | The Higgins Armory Collection | Worcester Art Museum,” accessed November 19, 2020, www.worcesterart.org/collection/higgins-collection/history. html#armory-founding. 12 For more on the concept of the fantastic, see: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 11

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war’s beginning. For those who went to war, their perceptions of time, clothing, superstitions, literary and artistic interests, and the frameworks through which they interpreted events all reflected a learned continuity with their medieval past. And the depth of the psychological injury done to this ideal when it encountered trench warfare was, to put it mildly, severe. If “some future ‘medievalist’ [were] to probe into the origins of… the Matter of Flanders and Picardy,” Paul Fussell once wrote, they would find that, at least at the outset, “the certainties were intact… [it was] the last [war] to be conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from past to present to future.”13 Fussell’s insistence on the continuity of history up to World War One was perhaps first articulated by C.S. Lewis, who argued that the medieval period “must primarily appear as a specimen of something far larger, something which had already begun when the Illiad was composed and was still almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought.”14 The language of those who fought at the beginning of the First World War supports this idea of historical continuity. Thanks to Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, the works of Sir Walter Scott, and the romances of William Morris, the everyday language of war was “essentially feudal”. A friend was a “comrade”, a horse a “steed, or charger,” the enemy “the foe, or the host.”15 To the war-weary soldier, an encounter with medieval art was a deep mental relief; an officer by the name of Max Plowman was once overjoyed to receive “half a dozen small Medici prints” at the front.16 The Romantic medievalism of the preRaphaelites was a cultural touchstone, and so a shell-shocked soldier’s gaze might be compared to that of La Belle Dame sans Merci.17 And Dr. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xvi, 21. The following section draws heavily on Fussell, but I am at pains to note he almost never comments directly on any of these usages or memories of the medieval I describe here. In this sense, Fussell functions as a primary source with respect to the use and cultural understanding of the medieval during WWI. 14 C.S. Lewis, “De descriptione temporum” (Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1954). 15 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 22–23. 16 Fussell, 73. 17 Fussell, 182. For a discussion of the long impact of the pre-Raphaelites, see: Stephanie Downes and Helen Young, “The Maiden Fair: Nineteenth-Century Medievalist Art and the Gendered Aesthetics of Whiteness in HBO’s Game of Thrones,” Postmedieval 10, no. 2 (2019): 219–35. 13

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Bashford Dean’s steel helms were not the only medieval clothing thought to be present on the battlefield. The grey German uniforms “seemed always to call up the grey wolf of Nordic literature,” while the accompanying battle helmet made the German solder appear like a “Landsknecht” and an English soldier in a respirator might seem like “young Harry with his beaver on.”18 Even the course of the war has its medieval referent. The invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula followed the precedent set by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Each chapter of John Mansfield’s military history, Gallipoli, a description of the battle published in 1918, begins with a quotation from another story of crusading Christian forces massacred by a Muslim enemy, The Song of Roland.19 John Ball, leader of the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and titular character in William Morris’ 1888 A Dream of John Ball, becomes private John Ball, B Company, Royal Welch Fusiliers, in the work of David Jones.20 Just as language, art, and visual references followed a medieval model, so too did soldiers’ mental imaginaries. The constant dream throughout the war was to make a hole in the enemy lines so that a final, great knightly cavalry charge would punch through all the way to Paris or Berlin.21 Much like their medieval ancestors, soldiers often carried charms against death – usually small scraps of paper on which were written prophylactic scriptural verses – in a small bag around their necks.22 Gas, in the words of one soldier, was only judged an atrocity because it was deployed in “a world which condones abuses but detests innovations.”23 In that disdainful “innovations,” I can easily hear the echoes of the contempt inherent in the Latin novum as it appears in the vocabulary of Pope Innocent III: “A certain novelty, at which we marvel not a little, has recently wormed its way into our ear.”24 When Kaiser Wilhelm I made overtures to the Ottomans and affirmed Muslim Cf. Henry IV 1.4.1. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 84–85, 157. Fussell, 95. 20 Fussell, 159. 21 Fussell, 14. 22 Fussell, 134. For more on the medieval practice, see: Lisa H. Cooper, ed., Arma Christi: Objects, Representation, and Devotional Practice in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014). 23 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 11. 24 “Nova quaedam nuper, de quibus miramur non modicum, nostris sunt auribus intimata…” JeanPaul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina (Paris, 1890), 216.356A. 18 19

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hegemony over the Middle East, he echoed the actions and received much the same backlash as the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.25 At the front, British soldiers adopted a homosocial approach to masculinity which appears in striking parallel to that of the Gregorian reformers as described by Maureen Miller.26 The trenches were “an approximation of the psychological atmosphere of the Middle Ages” to no less a medieval historian than Marc Bloch.27 To travel to the front was, in the words of Siegfried Sassoon, to make an “ironic pilgrimage up the line.”28 The irony of Sassoon’s pilgrimage is the death shroud of the Middle Ages, for the assumption that reality is fundamentally ironic, an assumption which might be said to define Modernity, came from the trenches.29 Indeed, there are echoes of this legacy in the fact that modern scholars describing the nineteenth-century medieval tend to refer to it as “ironic,” though Horsford and his contemporaries would not have thought it so.30 Similarly, the impetus behind the cultural shift within the Anglophone West to view war as an ironic, rather than romantic, endeavor may be laid at the feet of the prominence of the medieval in the prewar imaginary. The Great War was, in other words, more ironic than those which followed it, because “its beginning was more innocent,” and that innocence was replaced by knowledge at the Somme.31 The four-and-a-half-month-long battle, from June to November 1916, resulted in over a million men killed or wounded, half of whom were British. This loss of manpower devastated Britain’s professional, volunteer army; to replenish their forces, the government passed the Military Service Act to create a conscript army, “an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.”32 The Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare 25 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 118. 26 Compare Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 232–33, 297 to Maureen C. Miller, “Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical Culture: Narratives of Episcopal Holiness in the Gregorian Era,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 72, no. 1 (2003): 25–52. 27 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 124–25. Cf. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Knopf, 1953), 102, 109. 28 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 103. 29 Fussell, 38. 30 Cf. Claire Simmons, “Romantic Medievalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 164. 31 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 19, 31. 32 Fussell, 12. 25

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most obvious and immediate medieval casualty of the Military Service Act was the “innocent” idea of chivalry, fundamentally based in voluntary service.33 The Somme also saw the end of visually-distinct officers’ dress, the clear visual differentiation of the meliores from the minores, which only served to help snipers choose the best targets more quickly.34 Similarly, the British military’s defeat at Gallipoli earlier in the year shattered the idea of the war as a crusade.35 But the greatest evidence for the impact of trench warfare on the medieval identity of those who participated in it is through language. The failure of language as it abuts descriptions of the First World War has little to do with the specific words, for there is, as Fussell puts it, “no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works.”36 Instead, the difficulty is in the failure of those words to have the necessary psychological impact. This was particularly true of what Stefan Goebel calls “big words” – honor, glory, chivalry – which seemed to many to be obscene if applied to the continuous, futile slaughter on the Western Front.37 Tellingly, “overblown chivalric rhetoric” became a primary means of expressing irony in the war’s aftermath.38 Those who had experienced the Great War found that the usual forms of epic expression no longer worked. It was impossible to use, for example, the forms and styles of Renaissance epic to describe the trenches; the “Matter of Flanders and Picardy” could never obtain the noble, historical status of the “Matter of Britain.”39 But the converse is also true: postwar memory of prewar events tended to put them into a medieval frame. After the war, Winston Churchill insisted that the 1898 Battle of Omdurman was won by a “medieval” cavalry charge rather than the carnage wrecked by modern British machine gunners.40 This prewar innocence, once lost, could be remembered but never retrieved, for “the

Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 16. 34 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 54. 35 Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 120. 36 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 184. 37 Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 11, 194. 38 Goebel, 194. 39 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 164. 40 Andrew Lynch, “Medievalism and the Ideology of War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 142. 33

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front is not King Pellam’s Land… it will not be restored and made whole, ever, by the expiatory magic of the Grail. It is too human for that.”41 III. The Fantastic Afterlife of the Middle Ages But now I’ve said good-bye to Galahad, And am no more the knight of show Siegfried Sassoon Those who survived the Great War sensed the temporal rupture it caused. In Britain, this rupture was demographically evident, with a mourning “lost generation” – a sentiment most prevalent among those intellectuals who had attended public school, Oxford, or Cambridge.42 But it was also a cultural break. The past was less present. Many Romantic pieces of public art, for example, which referenced a positive, unironic, historical medievalism faded into oblivion.43 Although C.S. Lewis did not hazard so fine a point of discontinuity as I have posited above, he still noted the medieval “barbarian poems” such as Beowulf were closer to their Greco-Roman predecessors than The Waste Land was to pre-war poetry, and that “if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil, though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than the fifth.”44 There was, in other words, a division of the present from “the age of Jane Austen and [Walter] Scott.”45 This is not to say that the Middle Ages vanished from postwar discourse, but there was a fundamental shift in how they were imagined and remembered, from lived culture to history. This is perhaps most evident in which objects were considered medieval and which became “medievalisms.” Before the Great War, original medieval materials, particularly fabrics, had often been ripped out and replaced by more “authentic” Gothic Revival creations.46 After, original medieval materials were preferred in the restoration of the medieval sites destroyed or Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 166–67. Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 55, 207. 43 Goebel, 162. 44 Lewis, “De descriptione temporum.” 45 Ibid. 46 Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 36. 41 42

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damaged by the war, even when no one would be able to tell the difference. To repair the war-damaged cathedral of York, for example, restorers used lead from Aelred’s old abbey of Rievaulx.47 In other words, it was no longer thought possible to build a medieval building; authenticity lay in history. Still, as Stefan Goebel has argued, the medieval period maintained a deep cultural importance, displayed in the physical commemorations of soldiers who died in the Great War which were constructed in its immediate aftermath. These monuments almost universally evoked the Middle Ages. Tombs were decorated with recumbent knights in peaceful slumber, while those commissioning memorials preferred to integrate them into extant medieval edifices rather than build them entirely from scratch.48 Goebel is quite right in his observation that this form of memorialization relocated the chaos of war into a symbolic order as a means of making its scale comprehensible and tolerable, allowing a retreat from an uncertain present to a stable past.49 But I do not agree that this relocation was therefore continuity with prewar culture, and that the true historical rupture only occurred with the Second World War. 50 This is for three reasons. First, as I have already said, new medieval-style construction was no longer considered authentic. Such a structure would be a copy, rather than a continuity, of history. Second, the memorials, though constructed by the living, were for the dead. They created a medievalism which did not represent the present, but the past. The postwar medievalist memorial stands in contrast to a lived prewar medieval which existed in, for example, unironic chivalry or in the painstakingly careful reconstructions of the tournament from Ivanhoe at Eglinton in 1839.51 Memorializing the dead through the medium of the Middle Ages thus relocated the medieval solidly into history. In a way, the death of the Middle Ages is similar to how historians have pointed to the reification and historicization of Latin under the Carolingians as the moment when it became a dead language.52 The Carolingian attempt to re-establish Classical grammar was also a declaration that what people Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 176. Goebel, 31, 158. 49 Goebel, 39, 202. 50 Goebel, 13, 301. 51 Simmons, “Romantic Medievalism,” 112. 52 Cf. Dag Ludvig Norberg, Manuel pratique de latin médiéval (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1968). 47 48

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commonly spoke was not Latin but a rustica romana lingua, that Latin was only authentic when it was properly historical; so too did the translation of the medieval to history signify its ossification and death. The final reason for locating this rupture in World War I is that, after the war, literature and popular culture moved from a “myth dominated” world to a “demythologized” one.53 The ironic carnage of trench warfare had made the medieval incommensurate with lived experience. Thus, for the idea of the medieval to still have a place, it needed to relocate fantasy – to medievalism – or cease to exist completely. For example, although the portrayal of the dead as slumbering knights certainly evoked the Middle Ages, the frequent portrayal of the dead as specific slumbering knights – the legendary figures of St. George and Richard Coeur de Lion – moved them out of reality and into the realm of myth and legend.54 This move to the fantastic becomes all the more pronounced as king Richard’s own historical foibles, on which the prewar medieval derived from Walter Scott put so much emphasis, were quietly forgotten thereafter, as the crusader king became an unproblematic icon of those who had perished.55 Memorials for the war dead outside of Britain, such as the Totenbergen (forts of the dead) which were popular in Germany, likewise relocated the memory of the Great War to a mythological, pseudohistorical Middle Age.56 But the figure who is perhaps most often overlooked in this relocation of the Middle Ages from reality to a very specific type of fantasy is J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien and his works have, of course, received significant attention (and not a few Kalamazoo panels) within medieval studies and among Tolkien scholars, but he has not figured strongly in discussions of the literary experience and response to the First World War. Paul Fussell, for example, though he surveys more or less every other member of the Oxbridge literati who went to war, does not mention him, even when discussing the war’s devastating erasure of the pastoral, pre-industrial, pre-modern England that forms one of the core motifs in Lord of the Rings.57 But Tolkien was not merely representative of his times. Alongside Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 142. Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 57. 55 Lynch, “Medievalism and the Ideology of War,” 139; Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 116. 56 Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 103. 57 Cf. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 291. 53 54

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C.S. Lewis, he was the primary vehicle by which the Middle Ages transitioned into that particular form of medievalism recently termed “neomedievalism,” the inspiration behind an enormous portion of today’s popular culture, from Dungeons & Dragons to George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire.58 Just as he himself bridged the “professional” and “popular” Middle Ages, Tolkien’s involvement in the transfer of the medieval to fantasy has had a profound, long-lasting effect on contemporary medievalisms of every variety. Following the cultural zeitgeist, Tolkien took the Middle Ages as depicted by Walter Scott and William Morris, inter alia, which had been so popular before the war, and relocated it into the fantastic – in this case, into the alternate prehistory of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.59 In his displacement of war trauma into fantasy, Tolkien was far from unique among his contemporaries.60 But, unlike the majority of his peers who survived the war, Tolkien possessed immaculate academic credentials, as well as the conscious “refusal to distinguish between the academic, public, personal, and political” that had defined the prewar approach to the medieval.61 By incorporating his scholarly interests into fantastic medievalism, Tolkien brought his linguistic and cultural authority as an academic into his fictional world.62 Tolkien’s fiction was therefore also a vehicle to transmit his professional, credentialed criticisms to a wider audience, and “the suggestion of medievalist authenticity” was a vital component in Lord of the Rings’ critique of modernity.63 Thus fusion is, in a word, neomedievalism.64 Tolkien’s timing helped the process. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published just after a transition within the study of the Middle Ages. The first decade following the Great War had seen a new push towards the professionalization within medieval studies and the academy KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019), 109. 59 Fitzpatrick, 40–41. 60 Fitzpatrick, 32. 61 Cord J. Whitaker and Matthew Gabriele, “Mountain Haints: Towards a Medieval Studies Exorcized,” Postmedieval 10, no. 2 (2019): 132; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London: HarperCollins, 2007). 62 Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy, 44. 63 Fitzpatrick, xix, 61. 64 The concept of neomedievalism was first fully articulated in Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 58

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more generally.65 The Medieval Academy of America, for example, was founded in 1925, and it is hardly an accident that many of the earliest texts given to doctoral students preparing for their historiographic exams – Huizinga, Bloch, Kantorowicz, Pirenne, Grundmann, Tellenbach – were written in the 1920s and 1930s.66 The appearance of Tolkien’s authoritative medievalist fiction, the product of a disenchanted, postmedieval, post-war world alongside an increasingly-professional discipline which was resolutely determined to keep “eager but uninformed amateurs out” was the formative moment for neomedievalism.67 If medievalism is the contemporary imagination of the Middle Ages, neomedievalism is the transfer of medievalism into an authoritatively fictional frame. Neomedievalism “severs itself from history, often with conscious irony and anachronism, producing works refracted through the lens of contemporary medievalisms rather than rooted in the real sense of the Middle Ages.”68 These roots in the historical medieval mean that despite neomedievalism being “self-aware” that it is not actual history, it nevertheless is still a kind of history, forming a rhetoric wherein fantastic medievalism can be reified into authoritative historical justifications.69 The Lord of the Rings, framed as a “feigned history” by Tolkien himself, is thus the first major work of neomedievalist fiction. In the works of authors following Tolkien, neomedievalism is perhaps most easily recognizable in the broad medieval-ish tropes and literary shorthands such authors use to efficiently create a recognizable, authentically “real” fantasy world.70 An old man in a robe is a wizard; everyone knows what Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 63. For example, see: Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 27 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (London: Routledge, 1973); Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York: Norton, 1939); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1927). 67 Whitaker and Gabriele, “Mountain Haints,” 133 n.5, quoting Jeremy Jerome Cohen. 68 My emphasis. Bruce Holsinger, “Neomedievalism and International Relations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 165. 69 Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy, 25–27, 69. 70 Downes and Young, “The Maiden Fair”; Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy, 101–2. 65 66

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a lord is; priests are not to be trusted; the one black man in the cast is an indigenous informant, the captain of the guard, or both. And although authenticity and accuracy are not equivalent concepts, fictional media nevertheless shapes public perception of what is accurate, as long as it “feels” authentic.71 Thus, George R.R. Martin, who frequently depicts violence and sexual assault within his Song of Ice and Fire series through language and tropes drawn straight from nineteenth-century medievalism, defends these depictions by saying, “An artist has an obligation to tell the truth.”72 And although neomedievalism in popular media has been the subject of at least some academic attention for at least a decade, the ways in which popular neomedievalism and postwar academic “new medievalism” reinforce each other have largely been overlooked. Just as neomedievalism is the result of the relocation of the Middle Ages into a fictional history, “new medievalism” is the product of the renewed post-World War One efforts to professionalize medieval studies within the academy. As Kathleen Biddick described it, new medievalism is the process by which the academy sought to distance itself from the nineteenth-century “fathers” of medieval studies by doubling down on a positivistic, “science”-based approach to the Middle Ages. Erecting a wall between “medieval” and “medievalism”, it would the academic approach to the Middle Ages from the 1920s onward.73 New medievalism has had several important effects on contemporary medieval studies. First, it has allowed those nineteenth-century fathers to still determine the field’s frame, if only by the “Trevor-Roper Trap” of scholars trying to disprove their assertions.74 Second, the renewed emphasis on positivism has resulted in the continued, uncritical use of ethnographic practices in medieval studies as theory-adverse scholars invoke the experimental or experimental authority of their “pre-colonial informant” and then erase their own presence through claims of Bettina Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 49–50. 72 Downes and Young, “The Maiden Fair,” 233; Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy, 121. 73 Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, 3–4. 74 Donna Beth Ellard, “Historical Hauntings: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and the Futures of Medieval Studies,” Postmedieval 10, no. 2 (2019): 236; Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, 1; Finn Fuglestad, “The Trevor-Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History,” History in Africa 19 (1992): 309–26. 71

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scientific neutrality.75 This positivistic aversion to theory may go some ways to explain why the study of medievalism and neomedievalism has remained the purview of medievalists in English departments while remaining relatively absent from those in the “purer” discipline of history.76 Third, the new medievalism of the academy continues to advocate for the conditions necessary to sustain neomedievalism. The new medievalist assertion that the Middle Ages are remote history, not (or only vaguely) related and relevant to current events, is one necessary for neomedievalism, since “for medievalism of any kind to exist, the Middle Ages need to be over.”77 Finally, the boundaries erected by new medievalism have made it almost impossible for academics to engage with the way the Middle Ages have been used in contemporary political discourse. IV. Conclusion In its title, this paper frames the transition between the prewar Middle Ages and the postwar division of memories of the medieval into new and neomedievalism as occurring in racialized space. The process I have described above is inherently bound up within the structures of race and racism, structures which are, as I have shown, deeply enmeshed in the memory of the medieval from at least the eighteenth century. As Kathleen Davis has noted, “periodization is juridical and it advances through struggles over the definition and location of sovereignty.”78 The Middle Ages, then, is not actually a historical category, but a means of establishing hierarchies and securing collective identity.79 The primary mode of that identity is nationalist, and the central component of nationalist identity is race: European nationalism has long depicted cultural diversity as the product of modernity and the medieval as both the property of the nation and the source of “pure whiteness.”80 A fact less well-recognized is that neomedieval genealogies of European states, Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, 92, 106, 134. Louise D’Arcens, “Medievalism: Scope and Complexity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1. 77 Chris Jones, “Medievalism in British Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 89. 78 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 6. 79 Davies, “The Middle Ages as Property,” 146. 80 Davies, 146; Downes and Young, “The Maiden Fair,” 221. 75 76

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alongside neomedieval memories of the Middle Ages, have picked up where the straightforward nationalisms extant before the World Wars left off, arguing for fundamental continuities between all of European history and the present.81 Thus, neomedieval works of contemporary fiction, from Game of Thrones to The Witcher, have continued to insist on White racial homogeneity in the worlds they construct rooted in the imagined White racial homogeneity of the Middle Ages.82 New medievalism, trumpeting its disconnected positivism and actively avoiding any engagement with the concept of race because of its supposed anachronism, has been unwilling to challenge neomedieval constructions of White identity and is thus complicit in their continued formation. Medieval historians in particular have long made use of the concept of race without engaging in the broader theoretical literature, making assertions about what race is, is not, and how it operates which are at odds with mainstream academic understandings of the word.83 Holsinger, “Neomedievalism and International Relations,” 167. See, for example: Les Chappell et al., “‘Heimdall Can’t Be Black!’ 14 Casting Decisions That Sparked Outrage,” September 9, 2013, http://www.avclub.com/article/heimdallcant-be-black-14-casting-decisions-that-s-102589. 83 Perhaps the greatest offender in this regard is chapter 8 of Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Following discussions originating in Judaic Studies, many have preferred to use the term ethnicity over race, finding “race” to be an anachronistic term; Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 39–56; William Chester Jordan, “Why ‘Race’?,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 165–73. The Kulturskernen approach in particular has been active in rehabilitating “ethnic” distinctions following the Second World War, although objections to this approach have recently been gaining ground; Florin Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, ca. 500-700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Andrew Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, v. 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). Moreover, the importance of the idea of “race” to the modern discourse cannot be understated, and treating race as a power relationship predicated on the selective essentialization of characteristics, physical or otherwise, offers substantial scholarly benefits; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 1–20; Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). This shift towards the use of race as a useful category of analysis has subsequently become quite popular in medieval language studies, but has been entirely passed over by historians; Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “Race,” in A Handbook of Middle English 81 82

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Survey courses of medieval history in both the United States and Great Britain continue to reify a moral order inherent in “Englishness under its familiar guise of Anglo-Saxonism.” That is, they reify European whiteness, for “the idea of the Anglosphere is always raced.”84 Just as Eben Horsford built the medieval past he wanted out of common New England stone, neo-nationalist, neo-Nazi, and other groups of the so-called “alt-right” pick and choose from new medievalisms to create their neomedievalist reality, unchallenged by new medievalist academics. At the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, right-wing protesters carried shields resplendent with a variety of medieval imagery. Republican Congressman Mike Kelly has referred to himself, without a hint of irony or historical awareness, as a White AngloSaxon from Ireland.85 In France, Marion Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement (olim Front) National, has repeatedly identified herself with Joan of Arc – a saint canonized in the immediate aftermath of the First World War as a quasi-mythical symbol of French nationalism. In Great Britain, as in the United States, Anglo-Saxonism has once again become a touchstone for White nationalists. The few new medievalist attempts to address the “errors” of such claims through education and to correct the record have missed the point: they are not errors. Nationalists and racists making use of the medieval do care about the veracity of the statements they make, and they are not, strictly speaking, ignorant of the past. They are, however, using an entirely different concept of truth, one grounded in the authentic reality of fantasy. The promulgation of positivistic, theory adverse scholarship thus does not merely fulfil an academic’s “duty to speak out, even if they are certain to be ignored.”86 It guarantees they will be ignored. A mass of facts and evidence were not an effective rebuttal to Norumbega Tower, and academic fact-checking will not stop the cries of “Deus vult!” at white nationalist rallies. A new – or perhaps old – approach is needed. According to Kathleen Biddick, to move forward Studies, ed. M. Turner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 108–22; Jeffery Jerome Cohen and Karl Steel, “Race, Travel, Time, Heritage,” Postmedieval 6, no. 1 (2015): 98–110. 84 Davies, “The Middle Ages as Property,” 144; Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, 59. 85 “Rep. Mike Kelly: ‘I’m an Anglo Saxon. People Say Things All the Time, but I Don’t Get Offended.,’” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-nation/2019/07/16/Mike-Kelly-racismTrump-resolution-condemn-the-squad/stories/201907160138. 86 Geary, The Myth of Nations, 9. 353

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requires an “affective moment,” the dissolution of those disciplinary and professional boundaries erected after the First World War and an approach which centers the role of the individual in the creation of the very thing they are trying to describe.87 It requires, in other words, the return of an idea of a Middle Ages which is continuous with the present time. In this essay, I have tried to put this into practice. On one hand, I have fronted my own presence as an interlocutor wherever I could. On the other, I have tried to lay out my own affective relationship with memories of the medieval past and to acknowledge that my interest here is far from disinterested, rational positivism. My memories of the medieval, memories bound up in race-thinking and race-making from that first childhood encounter with Horsford’s monument to the AngloSaxon race, are a core component of who I am as a person, and who I am as a person is necessarily foundational to who I am as a scholar. Such memories are an inseparable component of my academic work. Indeed, I find myself unable to exorcize Horsford’s particular ghost to this day. His factory for the manufacturing of Rumford Baking Powder is located just across the Seekonk River from where I teach and work, in the leafy town of Rumford, Rhode Island. The building is now home to a lovely little café with excellent baked goods, cool and quiet; I have found it an ideal location for writing. Much of this article was written there.

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