The Middle Ages and the Movies: Eight Key Films

by Robert Bartlett

Overview

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.
 
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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789145526
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface: Medieval History on the Screen 7

1 Sex and Nationalism: Braveheart (1995) 21

2 From the Page to the Screen: The Name of the Rose (1986) 49

3 Now for Something Completely Different: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) 77

4 The Artist and the State: Andrei Rublev (1966) 105

5 Good and Bad Muslims: El Cid (1961) 131

6 Playing Chess with Death: The Seventh Seal (1957) 161

7 Heroic Leadership: Alexander Nevsky (1938) 187

8 A Silent Epic: Die Nibelungen I: Siegfried (1924) 215

Wrapping Up 243

Further Reading 266

Photo Acknowledgements 273

Index 274

Editorial Reviews

"Bartlett here trains his medieval historian’s eye on eight iconic films, pointing to historical accuracies and inaccuracies, and telling readers why these matter. One major recurring theme is how filmmakers can create a persuasive and engaging movie set in a distant era for modern viewers. Rich in anecdotes, this well-written and beautifully illustrated volume is chockablock with film, literary, and cultural references, not only to those in the past but to other historical periods right up to the present. Bartlett’s book will appeal to fans, students, and teachers, but for scholars already familiar with these films, there is still plenty to be learned."

Martha W. Driver

"The Middle Ages and the Movies is an excellent analysis for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between cinema and the medieval period, both semiotically and philosophically, while also giving a substantive glimpse of the socio-political space of medieval history."

Comitatus

Informed criticism where these films inevitably fall factually short. . . . Bartlett’s knowledge of the Middle Ages is beyond reproach. He focuses on one film at a time, though deftly interlacing and comparing them when it reinforces his point. An intriguing and detailed discussion."

Library Journal

"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."

Radio and Television Historical Journal of Film

"This book will entertain and intrigue historians and film buffs alike. In a wide-ranging critical study of the creative process that tackles head-on the exchange between historical fact and artistic license, Bartlett shows how twentieth-century cinema’s variously imagined Middle Ages speak as much to modern sensibilities as to any reconstructed past."

Christopher Tyerman

"Images of another sort are central to this book, which considers Braveheart (1995), The Name of the Rose (1986), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Andrei Rublev (1966), El Cid (1961), The Seventh Seal (1957), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924). If you are part of a small group, you could propose a reading of the book and a viewing of the films over several months."

First Things, "A Bookish Christmas Gift Guide" - John Wilson

"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."

Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies - Kevin Madigan

"This global political history of modern recreational drug prohibition begins with Qing China's early 19th-century attempt to suppress opium and ends with the US attempt to suppress opioids developed by pharmaceutical firms. Encompassing the Opium Wars of the 19th century; the development of the international legal regime for opiates, cocaine, and cannabis in the early 20th century; the eruption of psychedelics in the 1960s; and the clandestine relationship between Western intelligence agencies and drug lords in the Global South, the narrative ends with the erosion of prohibition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Among the book’s most interesting challenges to conventional thinking are the estimates of regular opium smokers
in China in 1905-06—15 million people, or 3.3 percent of the population which are lower than described in nationalist denunciations of the century of humiliation by imperialist powers. One overarching theme is the ultimately futile, often counterproductive policy of suppressing drug sources by interdicting transnational trade, which decision-makers in most countries have pursued for two centuries. Caquet (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) has written an engaging account meriting both scholarly and popular readers."

Choice Connect - J. C. Hickman

"In detailing the developments of Maya scholarship from the earliest explorers through the most recent advances in archaeology, epigraphy, and ethnography, O’Neil demonstrates the inseparability of modern approaches to and understandings of the past from economic, political, and ideological considerations in the present."

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture

"Images of another sort are central to this book, which considers Braveheart (1995), The Name of the Rose (1986), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Andrei Rublev (1966), El Cid (1961), The Seventh Seal (1957), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924). If you are part of a small group, you could propose a reading of the book and a viewing of the films over several months."

First Things