Silent Medievalisms: Reimagining the Middle Ages During Film’s Foundational Era: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Editat de Tison Pugh, Angela Jane Weislen Limba Engleză Hardback – 30 mar 2026
Silent Medievalisms investigates the prevalence of medieval narratives and tropes during cinema’s silent era and explores the ways that silent movies use the past to communicate political, national, propagandistic, and social meanings in their present moment. Groundbreaking films such as Joan the Woman (1916), Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and several others provide a rare opportunity to ponder the intersection of the newest technologies with narratives that predate them by many centuries. Narrative themes and tropes are distinct from the technologies that (re)create them, yet they are imbricated within complex networks of possibility and production. Contributors consider the persistent restaging and appeal (even when problematic) of medieval tropes, illuminating the essential nature of the medieval to early cinema across geographies, methodologies, and ideologies. They examine the relationship between the old and the new, made oblique when the new would seem to eclipse the old as emergent technologies seismically shifted the ways in which audiences consumed narratives. Ultimately, Silent Medievalisms demonstrates how those technologies enabled diverse visions of the Middle Ages—historical, fantastical, political—in ways that other media did not.
Contributors:
Kimberly Ball, Elizabeth Coggeshall, John Haines, Kevin J. Harty, Valerie B. Johnson, Tison Pugh, Sabina Rahman, Carol L. Robinson, Robert Squillace, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Alfred Thomas, Laura E. Wangerin, Angela Jane Weisl
Contributors:
Kimberly Ball, Elizabeth Coggeshall, John Haines, Kevin J. Harty, Valerie B. Johnson, Tison Pugh, Sabina Rahman, Carol L. Robinson, Robert Squillace, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Alfred Thomas, Laura E. Wangerin, Angela Jane Weisl
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814216118
ISBN-10: 0814216110
Pagini: 274
Ilustrații: 25 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 0814216110
Pagini: 274
Ilustrații: 25 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“Silent Medievalisms is a feat of interdisciplinarity, covering individual films and filmmakers, literary adaptations, documentaries, staged authenticity, cinema as a collaborative art, the relationship between narrative and spectacle in early film, historical context, and marketing and distribution. A sophisticated, informative work.” —Susan Aronstein, author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia
“Silent Medievalisms fills a longstanding gap between medieval studies and film studies. Pugh and Weisl do an excellent job of bridging what are sometimes disparate disciplines and remind us of experiments and achievements in silent film that have been forgotten over the past century.” —John M. Ganim, author of Chaucerian Theatricality
Notă biografică
Tison Pugh is Pegasus Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of numerous books, including Bad Chaucer: The Great Poet’s Greatest Mistakes in the “Canterbury Tales,”Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum’s Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender, and Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Angela Jane Weisl is Professor of English at Seton Hall University and author of The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture and Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer's Romance.
Extras
Toward the close of the nineteenth century and into the beginnings of the twentieth, as the Victorian era waned and the modern era emerged, the nascent wonders of cinema captured the public imagination, suggesting an epochal cultural shift. Eadweard Muybridge, James Williamson, Thomas Edison, and other early filmmakers proved the dynamism of this new medium, and audiences quickly flocked to their productions, including such watershed moments as Max and Emil Skladanowsky’s 1895 exhibition of their Bioscop at Berlin’s Wintergarten Theatre, followed a month later by Louis and Auguste Lumière’s exhibition of their Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris, and then in the United States with the premiere of Edison’s Vitascope at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York City in March 1986. As the Victorians devoured novels, so did the populations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries voraciously consume films. This is not to imply a sharp transition from novels to films—of course, novels continued to be read, written, and enjoyed—but to suggest that such transitions necessitate a steady and unsteady stream of remediations, of retailoring old tropes for new technologies, of an eclectic jumbling of modes and means of storytelling. Such is the case with the silent film era’s persistent interest in the Middle Ages as one of its defining inspirations, a transtemporal alliance between an emergent modernity and a simultaneously benighted yet beloved medieval era.
Whereas our collective interest lies in the intersection of medievalism and early cinema, we believe these efforts should be seen as complementary—and certainly not as antagonistic—to analyses of the very modernity of the cinematic era, to those studies that align early film with contemporary artistic and literary innovations of the early twentieth century that sharply veered from their predecessors in mood, theme, and structure. As Viva Paci rhapsodizes, “The emergence of cinema was part of the euphoria of modernity,” and numerous studies have detailed the intersection of early cinema with various modernist tropes, concerns, and innovations. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s volume Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life examines film and modernism as contemporaneous and mutually stimulating phenomena, arguing that they should be viewed “as points of reflection and convergence” and further explaining: “Cinema, therefore, must not be conceived simply as the outgrowth of such forms as melodramatic theater, serial narrative, and the nineteenth-century realist novel, although all of these modes influences its form. Nor can technological histories sufficiently explain the emergence of cinema. Rather, cinema must be reunderstood as a vital component of a broader culture of modern life which encompasses political, social, economic and cultural transformations.” The long-standing view that cinema and modernism mutually reinforced, even accelerated, each other has been well documented in their distinct and overlapping critical histories, and this volume’s interest in medievalisms does not seek to refute this viewpoint.
The rise of cinema nonetheless coincided with the ongoing popularity of medievalisms, and, along with their pursuit of the latest technological advancements in storytelling, many pioneering filmmakers availed themselves of familiar genres, images, and themes to speak to their contemporary moment, even if these tropes dated back centuries. On the intersection of the visual arts of painting and photography with the emergent cinema, Charles Musser ponders, “What did it mean for culturally knowledgeable or aspiring Americans to encounter reproductions of a painting in a book, magazine, or newspaper and then to go to the theater and see the painting reproduced again on the stage using performers, or on the screen using cinematography?” For example, as Juan Sebastián Ospina León demonstrates in his study of Latin American silent film and its interest in melodrama, this genre served as a means of communicating with viewers new to the cinematic experience, in that audiences engaging with an unfamiliar technology would more readily comprehend accustomed storylines: “In film, melodrama procured sites of intelligibility to both register and make sense of modern change.” Early filmmakers negotiated the novelty of their medium by availing themselves of melodrama and other such sites of intelligibility, repackaging long-standing tropes, visual conventions, narrative arcs, and cultural forms to speak to their audiences.
Whereas our collective interest lies in the intersection of medievalism and early cinema, we believe these efforts should be seen as complementary—and certainly not as antagonistic—to analyses of the very modernity of the cinematic era, to those studies that align early film with contemporary artistic and literary innovations of the early twentieth century that sharply veered from their predecessors in mood, theme, and structure. As Viva Paci rhapsodizes, “The emergence of cinema was part of the euphoria of modernity,” and numerous studies have detailed the intersection of early cinema with various modernist tropes, concerns, and innovations. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s volume Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life examines film and modernism as contemporaneous and mutually stimulating phenomena, arguing that they should be viewed “as points of reflection and convergence” and further explaining: “Cinema, therefore, must not be conceived simply as the outgrowth of such forms as melodramatic theater, serial narrative, and the nineteenth-century realist novel, although all of these modes influences its form. Nor can technological histories sufficiently explain the emergence of cinema. Rather, cinema must be reunderstood as a vital component of a broader culture of modern life which encompasses political, social, economic and cultural transformations.” The long-standing view that cinema and modernism mutually reinforced, even accelerated, each other has been well documented in their distinct and overlapping critical histories, and this volume’s interest in medievalisms does not seek to refute this viewpoint.
The rise of cinema nonetheless coincided with the ongoing popularity of medievalisms, and, along with their pursuit of the latest technological advancements in storytelling, many pioneering filmmakers availed themselves of familiar genres, images, and themes to speak to their contemporary moment, even if these tropes dated back centuries. On the intersection of the visual arts of painting and photography with the emergent cinema, Charles Musser ponders, “What did it mean for culturally knowledgeable or aspiring Americans to encounter reproductions of a painting in a book, magazine, or newspaper and then to go to the theater and see the painting reproduced again on the stage using performers, or on the screen using cinematography?” For example, as Juan Sebastián Ospina León demonstrates in his study of Latin American silent film and its interest in melodrama, this genre served as a means of communicating with viewers new to the cinematic experience, in that audiences engaging with an unfamiliar technology would more readily comprehend accustomed storylines: “In film, melodrama procured sites of intelligibility to both register and make sense of modern change.” Early filmmakers negotiated the novelty of their medium by availing themselves of melodrama and other such sites of intelligibility, repackaging long-standing tropes, visual conventions, narrative arcs, and cultural forms to speak to their audiences.
Cuprins
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction On Silent Films, Medieval Sites of Intelligibility, and the Thanhouser Company’s Oh, What a Knight! (1910)
Chapter 1 The Magic Mechanic: Georges Méliès’s Cinematic Medievalism
Chapter 2 Making Presence in Silence: Milano Films Adapts Dante’s Inferno (1911)
Chapter 3 Lucius Henderson’s Tannhäuser (1913), Richard Wagner, and Their Imagined Middle Ages
Chapter 4 “While Helpless Whites Looked On”: The Intersection of White Nationalism and Medievalism in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Chapter 5 Virginity, Allegory, and Orgiastic Visuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916)
Chapter 6 Medievalism, Generic Fluidity, and (Maybe Even) Proto-Feminism in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922)
Chapter 7 Bad Blood: The Spectral Jew and Mimetic Rivalry in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich
Chapter 8 Queen of Love and Beauty: Fictions of Marian’s Sovereignty in Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922)
Chapter 9 Medievalism, Trauma, and Vengeance in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)
Chapter 10 What’s Past Is Not Prologue: Temporal and Spatial Dislocation in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Chapter 11 Wilding the Tame: The Viking (1928) from Adaptation to Genre Archetype
Chapter 12 The Lost Music of Medieval Silents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
List of Illustrations
Introduction On Silent Films, Medieval Sites of Intelligibility, and the Thanhouser Company’s Oh, What a Knight! (1910)
Chapter 1 The Magic Mechanic: Georges Méliès’s Cinematic Medievalism
Chapter 2 Making Presence in Silence: Milano Films Adapts Dante’s Inferno (1911)
Chapter 3 Lucius Henderson’s Tannhäuser (1913), Richard Wagner, and Their Imagined Middle Ages
Chapter 4 “While Helpless Whites Looked On”: The Intersection of White Nationalism and Medievalism in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Chapter 5 Virginity, Allegory, and Orgiastic Visuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916)
Chapter 6 Medievalism, Generic Fluidity, and (Maybe Even) Proto-Feminism in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922)
Chapter 7 Bad Blood: The Spectral Jew and Mimetic Rivalry in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich
Chapter 8 Queen of Love and Beauty: Fictions of Marian’s Sovereignty in Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922)
Chapter 9 Medievalism, Trauma, and Vengeance in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)
Chapter 10 What’s Past Is Not Prologue: Temporal and Spatial Dislocation in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Chapter 11 Wilding the Tame: The Viking (1928) from Adaptation to Genre Archetype
Chapter 12 The Lost Music of Medieval Silents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
Descriere
Examines how early films used medieval stories and tropes to propagate contemporary political, national, and social messages at a time of technology-driven seismic shifts in the creation and consumption of narratives.