From Medievalism to Early-Modernism

Adapting the English Past

Marina Gerzic, Aidan Norrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429683008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past is a collection of essays that both analyses the historical and cultural medieval and early modern past, and engages with the medievalism and early-modernism—a new term introduced in this collection—present in contemporary popular culture. By focusing on often overlooked uses of the past in contemporary culture—such as the allusions to John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623) in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, and the impact of intertextual references and internet fandom on the BBC's The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses —the contributors illustrate how cinematic, televisual, artistic, and literary depictions of the historical and cultural past not only re-purpose the past in varying ways, but also build on a history of adaptations that audiences have come to know and expect. From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past analyses the way that the medieval and early modern periods are used in modern adaptations, and how these adaptations both reflect contemporary concerns, and engage with a history of intertextuality and intervisuality.

1 Introduction

Medievalism and Early-Modernism in Adaptations of the English Past

Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie¹

Adaptation has a long history: the Epic of Gilgamesh likely inspired the Old Testament of the Bible;² Virgil’s Aeneid adapted and expanded Homer’s Iliad;³ Lady Eleanor Hull’s Meditations Upon the Seven Days of the Week drew on and adapted works by St Augustine, St Anselm, and St Bernard;⁴ and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida adapted and reinterpreted Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, itself a retelling of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, which was derived from Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie.⁵ Throughout history, then, humans have drawn on influential texts—generally literary or historical, but not always—to enhance their own artistic endeavours: sometimes in homage, sometimes to expand on, sometimes to satirise or subvert, and sometimes for all of these reasons. While technologies have changed from the tablets that the Epic of Gilgamesh were inscribed on, the same basic concept—to tell a story relevant to the creator’s audience using the stories, events, and accounts of the past—underpins most modern adaptations in whatever media form they take: from films and television series, to graphic novels and video games.

Medievalism and?

This collection began with the question: why is there not an equivalent term like medievalism for early modern historical and cultural afterlives? Medievalism—that is, “the reception, interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages in post-medieval cultures”—emerged some 30 years ago and has spawned a number of critical studies.⁶ The journals Studies in Medievalism (published since 1979), The Year’s Work in Medievalism (since 1990), and postmedieval (since 2010) publish articles on the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times.⁷ Other foundational studies of medievalism, which have informed our own thinking about the subject, include: Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, edited by Richard Utz and Tom Shippey; Angela J. Weisl’s The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture; Michael Alexander’s Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England; and Tison Pugh and Angela J. Weisl’s Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present.⁸ More recent works that demonstrate the field’s maturity, as well as its burgeoning place in the academy, include: Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz; Louise D’Arcens’s Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages; International Medievalism and Popular Culture, edited by Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch; David Matthews’s Medievalism: A Critical Reader; Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, edited by Gail Ashton; and The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, edited by Louise D’Arcens.⁹

While this is not an exhaustive list of studies in medievalism, it does demonstrate both the increasing popularity of the field, and that defining what constitutes medievalism is not a simple task.¹⁰ Studies in Medievalism devoted four consecutive volumes of scholarship to its definition (and that of the related concept of neo-medievalism, popularised by Umberto Eco in his 1973 essay “Dreaming in the Middle Ages”).¹¹ As D’Arcens observes, the Middle Ages spans a millennium (generally the fifth to fifteenth centuries), with expanding and contracting geographic boundaries.¹² Nevertheless, there is certainly a much more coherent—if nebulous—idea of what constitutes the medieval in both the academic and popular conscious: generally, the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation. In short, the lives of Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, and Joan of Arc, and the events of the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Wars of the Roses are all understood to be ‘medieval’; perhaps it is the nebulous nature of the period—both geographically and chronologically—that makes it easier for medieval afterlives to be collected under the umbrella term ‘medievalism.’

The same cannot be said, however, for the early modern period: no collective term exists for early modern cultural or historic afterlives. The concept of the ‘early modern’ is, arguably, far less established in the popular consciousness. This is partially because of the impact of the concept of the Renaissance (which we will turn to later) or even because of the problematic nature of the idea of ‘modern’—for some reason, the events of the British Civil Wars feel closer to us than the events of the Wars of the Roses, even though they are closer to each other than to us. The early modern period, too, is hampered by Western-centrism but the term is increasingly being applied globally. Unlike the Middle Ages, the European early modern period is constrained to a much smaller time span—generally from the sixteenth century (and the Protestant Reformation) until the French Revolution; it also has to vie with other period classifications (such as the Enlightenment and the so-called ‘Age of Discovery’), and has to contend with the complicating geographical shift caused by European colonisation and expansionism across the globe. Significantly, the survival of more literary and documentary evidence from the early modern period has also spurred the division of the period into smaller classifications; even more so than their medieval counterparts, these are often related to significant historical figures or dynasties, for example ‘Shakespearean’, and ‘Tudorism.’¹³ Afterlives of the early modern period thus have to contend with an unclear conception in popular culture, and indeed with a range of academic sub-disciplines that divide up periods or aspects of the period.

Early-Modernism

As a means to address this gap in classification, our collection offers the term early-modernism—defined as the reception, interpretation, or recreation of the early modern period in post-early modern cultures—as a means to address this gap in classification. The hyphen in the term ‘early-modernism’ is a calculated choice so that it is considered as a whole, not a sum of its parts, and to avoid confusion with the already existing term modernism. Another reason is that we do not view the terms early modern and Renaissance as interchangeable. ‘Renaissance,’ as a term in English, emerged in the 1830s and refers to a European cultural movement within the early modern period: specifically, the revival of the arts and high culture under the influence of classical models in specific geographical regions.¹⁴ While both ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early modern’ are anachronistic labels applied retrospectively, the concept of the Renaissance is bound up with ideas of European exceptionalism (or even superiority), and has a distinct focus on high culture at the expense of a more rounded and inclusive view of the people who lived then. By using the term early-modernism (rather than the problematic, and indeed tongue-twisting, ‘Renaissancism’), we hope this collection inspires scholars who interrogate important aspects such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability—and are working towards the decentralisation of medieval and early modern studies from a European focus—to investigate medievalism and early-modernism in non-European history and culture. While medievalism has generally been focused on the European Middle Ages, we hope that early-modernism will be embraced by scholars of the global early modern period, ensuring that the depictions of Edo Japan and the Tokugawa shogunate in manga, anime, and television shows are studied alongside comic book, graphic novel, and television series depictions of Shakespeare, his work, and Jacobean England generally.

Adaptations of the Medieval and Early Modern Past

This collection analyses medievalisms and early-modernisms present in modern adaptations of the cultural, literary, and historical English past—spanning from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. As such, the collection is concerned with the intersection of these three fields. The term “adaptation,” as Linda Hutcheon notes, may refer to either the process or the product of adaptation.¹⁵ At the core of all of the chapters in this collection is the implicit acknowledgement that remembering the past—in virtually any form—is an adaptation.¹⁶ For instance, Robert Stam reminds us—even if literary scholars might be inclined to disagree—that film, after all, “is a form of writing that borrows from other forms of writing.”¹⁷ Stam also points out the double standard that exists: “while filmic rewritings of novels are judged in terms of fidelity, literary rewritings of classical texts, such as Coetzee’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe are not so judged.”¹⁸ This understanding is central to this collection: the life of Elizabeth I of England is as worthy of academic study as her cinematic depictions; adaptations of the works of Chaucer are as important as the texts they adapt. Adaptations are not a lesser or an uncreative activity but are “about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible.”¹⁹

By building on the foundation that adaptation theory offers us—as recently and expertly discussed in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch—this collection is ideally placed to introduce early-modernism to the scholarship.²⁰ In doing so, however, the collection builds on the understanding of the interconnected nature of medievalism and adaptation found in collections such as Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, edited by Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, and more recently The Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation, edited by Andrew Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz.²¹ These collections demonstrate that the study of medievalism relies—in varying degrees—on adaptation, whether in re-telling a medieval tale, or simply in the taking of inspiration from the fantasy of the Middle Ages.

Unlike the fields of medievalism and adaptation, there is not a depth of studies that look at early-modernism and adaptation beyond Shakespeare. As Jennifer Clement highlights in her analysis of early modern adaptation studies, “the field remains largely limited to two areas: Shakespeare and film.”²² Recent works that expand on this limited scope of Shakespeare-centric adaptation studies include Richard Burt’s Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media; Pascale Aebischer’s Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare; the 2015 volume of the journal Shakespeare on “Adaptation and Early Modern Culture: Shakespeare and Beyond”; and Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers: Gender, Sex, and Power in Popular Culture, edited by Janice North, Karl Alvestad, and Elena Woodacre.²³ While our collection includes adaptations of Shakespeare, it also features studies of non-Shakespeare adaptations—such as the inspiration J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series took from John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi and the literary and televisual afterlives of Elizabeth Barton, ‘The Holy Maid of Kent’ and later ‘The Mad Maid of Kent.’ It therefore fills a gap in scholarship, and we hope it inspires further studies of non-Shakespeare-related early modern adaptations.

Why Adapt? Fidelity versus Evaluation

While recent scholarship continues to demonstrate the way that the past is constantly being re-used and re-purposed for the present, and in spite of the excellent works already cited, historians and literary scholars still often focus on how ‘accurately’ adaptations depict the events (or text) they are re-telling.²⁴ This reductive engagement with popular culture does not acknowledge the fact that modern depictions of the past, like older ones, often say more about the time in which they were produced than about the event they are depicting. Indeed, modern adaptations of the past often serve as “a barometer that measures our own value and place in the world,”²⁵ and are thus deserving of attention because they “intersect with, comment upon, and add something to the larger discourse of history out of which they grow and to which they speak.”²⁶

As Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan note, “While fictional texts and their feature film adaptations remain at the subject’s core, the study of adaptations has broadened to embrace ‘literature’ and the ‘screen’ in the broadest senses of each word.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Medievalism and Early-Modernism in Adaptations of the English Past
• Section I: Cultural Medievalism and Early-Modernism
• Section II: Historical Medievalism and Early-Modernism
• Index