Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
that past situations are relevant to current problems, but critics must often
draw short of delivering on their promises, citing or implying postmodern
concerns with presentism, or projecting our own values on the past: a
qualm not shared by the directors of most medieval films. For example,
exciting work by medievalists on postmodern concepts of the relationship
between colonizer and colonized has significantly impacted medieval studies,
as recent books and essay collections attest.5 However, the postmodern
focus on the particular inherently conflicts with any attempt to draw parallels
between the Middle Ages and our own society, the clear concern for the
directors of the films analyzed here. While medievalists are justified in
understanding the Middle Ages on their own terms, the very use of the
Middle Ages as pretext implies presentism, and only by exposing and
examining presentism can these dynamics be understood. For this reason,
the chapters in this book directly address the big three contemporary
concerns that are most likely to provoke charges of presentism: race, class,
and gender.
If for W.E.B. Dubois the central problem of the twentieth century was
race6, questions of class and gender hold equal sway as we progress into the
twenty-first century. When modern preoccupations with race, class, and
gender are inserted into medieval films, a debate particularly pertinent to
those who study the Middle Ages as an academic discipline is raised: what
concepts of race, class, and gender did medieval people have, if any? To
what extent should todays films that raise these issues be held accountable
to the actual historical situations that pertained in medieval societies?
Medievalists energetically debate the degree to which modern notions of
race, class, and gender existed in the Middle Ages. In regard to race, The
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies hosted a series of articles on the
topic in 2001, but the findings of the six essayists were counterbalanced by
William Chester Jordans compelling plea to leave the question of race out
of discussion of the Middle Ages altogether:
I have my doubts about the utility of race (an allegedly fixed category) as
an analytic concept in the modern world. These doubts are compounded
when race is applied to the Middle Ages. I cannot prove, but I do not
believe that readers will sufficiently shed their modern notions of race sim-
ply because scholars redefine the concept against the modern grain.7
Notes
1. An extant copy of Mliss 1900 short film, and a fragment of an even earlier
film on Joan by Georges Hatot, can be found at the Joan of Arc Center in
New Orleans. For more clips and information on early adaptations of Joans
story, see the media and film section of the International Joan of Arc Society,
http://www.smu.edu/IJAS/index.html.
2. Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the
Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 5. See also Philip Rosen,
Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001); Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use
and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996);
and Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
3. Norris J. Lacy, The Documentary Arthur: Reflections of a Talking Head,
King Arthur in Popular Culture, eds., Elizabeth sklar and Donald Hoffman
(London: McFarland, 2002), p. 84.
4. Umberto Eco, The Return of the Middle Ages, Travels in Hyperreality:
Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986), pp. 5985, at p. 68.
5. Such studies include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages
(New York: St. Martins, 2000); John M. Ganim, Medievalism and
Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R.
Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne
Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating
Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
6. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago:
A. C. McClurg, 1903).
7. William Chester Jordan, Why Race? Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 31.1 (2001): 16573, at p. 169. The other chapters in this special issue
include Thomas Hahn, The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and
Race before the Modern World, pp. 137; Robert Bartlett, Medieval
and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity, pp. 3956; Dorothy Hoogland
Verkerk, Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham
Pentateuch, pp. 5777; Sharon Kinoshita, Pagans Are Wrong and Christians
Are Right: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland,
pp. 79111; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies
of Race in Late Medieval France and England, pp. 11346; and Linda
Lomperis, Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race, pp. 14764.
8. For a summary of recent studies of the effects of conversion, see Jordan,
Why Race? p. 166.
9. The State of Virginias Racial Integrity Act of 1924 disallowed intermarriage
of nonwhites and whites based on the one-drop classification.
10 TISON PUGH AND LYNN T. RAMEY
10. For representative studies of literature and class, see Class and Gender in Early
English Literature: Intersections, eds. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R.
Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), which includes
such studies as David Aers, Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers
Plowman, pp. 5975; Harriet E. Hudson, Construction of Class, Family,
and Gender in Some Middle English Popular Romances, pp. 7694;
Britton J. Harwood, Building Class and Gender into Chaucers Hous,
pp. 95111; and Clare A. Lees, Gender and Exchange in Piers Plowman,
pp. 11230. Additional studies include John W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in
Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil,
11901230 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms
in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
11. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Experience Reinterpreted
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; reissued 2001). Reynolds takes her
inspiration from an earlier article, Elizabeth Brown, The Tyranny of a
Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe, American
Historical Review 79 (1974): 106388.
12. For example, the debate about the audience and authorship of the fabliaux,
artfully presented by Per Nykrog in Les fabliaux: tude dhistoire littraire et
de stylistique mdivale (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1957), continues to
this day.
13. Studies of medieval sexuality include Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken,
and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie
Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997);
and Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New
York: Routledge, 1996). Studies of medieval homosexuality include
William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature:
France and England, 10501230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); Anna Klosowka, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave,
2005); Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave, 2004),
esp. pp. 715; Glenn Burger, Chaucers Queer Nation (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism
and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century
(New York: Palgrave, 2003); Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, eds.,
Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-
and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Mark
Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997).
14. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in
Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Same-Sex Unions in
Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994); Camille Paglia, Plighting
INTRODUCTION 11
and Samuel J. Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From
Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996).
22. A more simplistic organizational schema for this volume might have
entailed three units, one each addressing race, class, and gender. We decided
against such an organizational principle due to the virtually inherent overlap
between and among these categories. Issues of race, class, and gender are
often inextricably interlinked, and assigning a film such as The Thirteenth
Warrior to the category of gender (for its depictions of masculinities in
contact and in contrast with one another) might occlude the ways in which
the film addresses ethnic interplay (in its depiction of encounters between
East and West).
23. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(New York: Norton, 1976), p. 15.