Description
From Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to Monty Python, an investigation into how eight key films have shaped our understanding of the medieval world.
“With The Middle Ages and the Movies: Eight Key Films, Bartlett provides an engaging study of some quite disparate movies, which often share little in common apart from a medieval setting. This intentionally heterogeneous group of films comes from several countries and was released over the course of more than seven decades. After a preface stressing the great extent to which the movies’ cultural origins and the film medium itself shape these movies, the book proceeds in reverse chronological order from the 1990s to the silent era.” ― Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
“Bartlett’s keen interpretive eye, not to mention his command of twentieth-century history, enables him to draw out the unspoken themes, often broadly political, to which an anxious director hoped an audience—or politician—might be alert. . . . Bartlett’s twin capacity both to judge, with sovereign authority, the historical authenticity of a film and to explicate the tacit meaning of a script sets his study apart from the considerable scholarship on film set in the Middle Ages, which Bartlett also commands. It is a testament to this volume to say that medievalists will learn much not only about the cultural representation of the medieval period but about the Middle Ages as well.” — Kevin Madigan, Harvard University ― Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
In The Middle Ages and the Movies, eminent historian Robert Bartlett takes a fresh, cogent look at how our view of medieval history has been shaped by eight significant films of the twentieth century. The book ranges from the concoction of sex and nationalism in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, to Fritz Lang’s silent epic Siegfried, the art-house classic The Seventh Seal, and the epic historical drama El Cid. Bartlett examines the historical accuracy of these films, as well as other salient aspects—how was Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose translated from page to screen? Why is Monty Python and the Holy Grail funny? And how was Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky shaped by the Stalinist tyranny under which it was filmed?
Robert Bartlett is the Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His many books include the Wolfson Prize–winning The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. He has also written and presented three television series for the BBC: Inside the Medieval Mind, The Normans, and The Plantagenets.
