Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience

Abstract

Alicia Spencer-Hall’s Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience is a work of impressive breadth and erudition that brings the study of hagiography in mediaeval scholarship into dialogue with contemporary issues of media materiality, ontology and embodiment in photography and film, as well as with the study of spectatorship, celebrity culture, fandoms and virtual environments. As such it is part of a growing corpus of recent neo-mediaevalist writings, which ranges from new readings of representations of gender and sexuality in mediaeval texts to explorations of a recently renewed and ongoing interest in mediaeval and early modern culture, evidenced, for instance, in the frequent mediaeval themes and references of contemporary television shows and videogames.1 Going further than classical mediaevalist scholarship, which from the 1980s onwards began to pay attention to such previously neglected areas of inquiry as the subjectivities, living conditions and contributions of mediaeval women, the neo-mediaevalist project emphasizes the direct link that connects the mediaeval era to the present moment. This is characterized in particular by contemporary understandings of gender and sexualities, as well as by the spread of social media, the rise of videogames and virtual environments, and attendant changes to the creation and consumption of media contents. Reminiscent of theories of the neo-baroque in the 1990s and 2000s, a salient aspect of neo-mediaevalist scholarship is that it is rooted in wilful anachronism: thus Virginia Burrus writes about ‘the queer life of Paul the Hermit’ and Pamela Clements discusses ‘the cinematic hyperreality of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales’.2 Similarly, Spencer-Hall deploys daringly anachronistic and often humorous metaphors that equate saints’ visions with film projections (‘Juliana [of Mont-Cornillon] is the only individual with a valid ticket to see the Lord’s film’ [p. 132]), with the experience of reality TV and internet stardom (‘Margery [Kempe] is the Ur-example of “ugly crying”, and her Book is the fifteenth-century equivalent of must-see car crash reality TV’ [p. 174]), and with communities of worship within virtual reality environments (‘Though saints can “log on” to God whenever they wish, they also conform to traditional Church hierarchies’ [p. 240]).