Sturtevant Paul B. - The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination

Paul B. Sturtevant is an audience research specialist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the very popular collaborative history web-magazine The Public Medievalist (http://www.publicmedievalist.com/).

Traditional medievalists have only scratched the surface of the broad and influential cultural phenomenon of medievalism. Paul Sturtevant's case study, instead of asking questions mainly important to professional historians, harnesses social-sciences theories and methodologies to help us comprehend how and why groups and individuals engage with representations of medieval culture around them. His book is an essential step towards providing scientifically valid information about the public's understanding of the medieval past.

Richard Utz, Chair & Professor, School of Literature,
Media and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology

Carefully researched and written in a lively and engaging style, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the use and abuse of the medieval past in contemporary popular culture. Sturtevant skilfully integrates cutting-edge qualitative methods for studying audience reception with insights from culturally informed medievalism studies. This book demonstrates not only the broad significance of the Middle Ages for a wide public but also confronts its urgency in shaping present-day understandings of race, gender, religion, histories of violence, and geopolitics. Chapters examine how audience perceptions of the medieval past are influenced by Game of Thrones and fantasy fiction, Arthurian myths, Crusade themes in video games and films, and the varied afterlives of Beowulf and Robin Hood. This book is an invaluable resource for enthusiasts, educators, journalists, students, historians, and anyone who cares about what the medieval past means for us today.

Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English at George
Washington University and blogger at In The Middle

The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination reveals the preconceptions todays students have about the Middle Ages thanks to their representation in popular film. Sturtevant takes a fresh approach to studying medievalism in a book that crosses disciplinary boundaries and interrogates the divide between academic and public medievalism.

Amy Kaufman, Director of Conferences,
International Society for the Study of Medievalism

New Directions in Medieval Studies

Series editors:

Andrew Elliott, University of Lincoln

Helen Young, University of Sydney

This wide-ranging series responds to emerging themes and interdisciplinary research methods in medieval scholarship, including the reception and reworking of the medieval in the post-medieval period. Particular concerns involve cataloguing the rich variety of experience of medieval people and exploring cultural transfer across different periods, places and groups. These are expressed in the many scholarly themes highlighted below and, taken together, seek to contribute to the future directions and debates of medieval studies.

KEY THEMES:

Medieval lives including marginal voices, variation and dissimilitude

Cultural exchange and interconnectedness across medieval Europe

The reception and re-use of the Middle Ages in later periods

Re-evaluating medieval history from a global perspective

We particularly welcome proposals from scholars working in the following areas:

religious and ethnic minorities

gender and queer history

emotional communities

postcolonial perspectives

travel, trade and migration

work that extends reception of the Middle Ages beyond the predominantly British perspectives of published work to date

digital and new media receptions

work responding to the idea of an ethical turn

For further information, or to submit a proposal, please contact:

Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2018 Paul B. Sturtevant

The right of Paul B. Sturtevant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

New Directions in Medieval Studies 1

ISBN: 978 1 78831 139 7

eISBN: 978 1 78672 357 4

ePDF: 978 1 78673 357 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

For Betty, who has seen this through from its very beginning.

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

Surveying complex national identities in the 2011 UK Census. Source: 2011 UK Census.

Demographic details of the research participants.

Responses to Medieval word-association exercises and frequency (3+).

Responses to Middle Ages word-association exercises and frequency (3+).

, (retrieved 16 May 2011).

Responses to Crusade word-association exercises and frequency (3+).

Dan's word-association exercise for Medieval.

Ceci n'est pas une moyen ge. Laurence Olivier in Henry V (Eagle-Lion Distributors Limited, 1944).

Two very different cinematic Middle Ages. John Boorman, Excalibur (Warner Brothers, 1981); Mel Gibson, Braveheart (Paramount, 1995).

Boris Vallejo, Dragon slayer, 1989. Reproduced with kind permission from the artist.

Frank Frazetta, Death dealer, 1973. Reproduced with kind permission from the rights holder.

Setting the historical scene in Zemeckis' Beowulf (Paramount Pictures, 2007).

Advertising poster for Ridley Scott's Robin Hood that makes a bold, if confusing, claim to historical truth (Universal Pictures, 2010).

Driving the point home; the final title card of Kingdom of Heaven. Source: Ridley Scott, Kingdom of Heaven Definitive Edition DVD (20th Century Fox, 2005).

King Beowulf, from Zemeckis' Beowulf (Paramount Pictures, 2007).

King Aragorn, from Jackson's The Return of the King (New Line Cinema, 2003).

King Theoden, from Jackson's The Return of the King (New Line Cinema, 2003).

Pseudo-king Balian, from Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 2005).

Queen Sibylla and King Guy from Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 2005).

Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley, graphed on axes of familiarity and lifelikeness. Source: Masahiro Mori, Bukimi no tani, [the uncanny valley], K. F. MacDorman and T. Minato (trans), Energy, 7 (1970), pp. 335. Used with kind permission from the author.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has had a long gestation, with several iterations; as such, in writing it I have had the assistance of a wide range of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank the nineteen participants from the student body of the University of Leeds for their thoughtfulness, their insight, and their willingness to subject themselves to hours of gentle interrogations by a curious medievalist. Without them, this simply would not exist.