Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture ed. by Gail Ashton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture ed. by Gail Ashton Kevin J. Harty Gail Ashton, ed., Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Pp. viii, 353. isbn: 978–1–4411–2960–4. £95/$172. John Dryden famously said of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales that ‘here is God’s Plenty.’ Without hesitation, I would readily offer the same accolade to Gail Ashton’s remarkable collection of essays on medievalism, which contains an introduction by the editor and twenty-nine essays by diverse hands that discuss the multiple manifestations of the medieval in contemporary society. The essays themselves are uniformly excellent, and the depth and breadth of coverage in the collection is encyclopedic. That the collection comes with its own website (www.bloomsbury.com/medieval-afterlives), now supplemented by (www.medievalafterlives.wordpress.com) only enhances its usefulness. The editor’s introduction strikes a personal note as she recounts what ‘living medieval’ has meant to her at various stages of her life and career (1–2). That introduction is followed by Jeff Massey and Brian Cogan’s marvelously madcap discussion of the Broadway musical Spamalot, which in some ways ‘out-Pythons’ the Pythons in its irreverently serious observations about the ways that the original film and the musical (‘a grail-shaped beacon of hopeful modern medievalism’ [20]) differ from each other in tone and intent. And as the Pythons themselves might say, the second essay in Ashton’s collection offers ‘something completely different’: Robert S. Sturges’s discussion of medievalism in contemporary opera, most notably Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, Sir Harrison Birtwhistle’s Gawain, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo, Kaija Saariaho’s L‘Amour de loin, James MacMillan’s The Sacrifice, George Benjamin’s Written on the Skin, Elliott Goldenthal’s Grendel, and Frank Schwemmer’s Robin Hood—all of which blur the line between high- and low-brow entertainment in contemporary culture (29). To the list of operas Sturges discusses, I would add Julian Philips’ 2010 Knight Crew, a masterful reimaging of the Arthuriad commissioned by, and performed at, England’s Glyndebourne Festival in 2010. In keeping with the pattern of shifting voices, approaches, genres, and texts that the essays in Ashton’s collection offer, Margaret Rogerson next discusses the afterlives and new lives of medieval religious plays in contemporary England thanks to community performances of the great cycles which, it is to be hoped, will add to continuing scholarly discussions and understanding of the texts and of their performativity. Another kind of staged performance is the subject of Sarah Peverley’s essay on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which because of its ‘sheer scope’ may be ‘the most successful stage adaptation of the tales to date’ (57). [End Page 146] Meriem Pagès switches to a more personal pedagogical note in an essay about the ways that she uses the rigorous study of medievalism to overcome her students’ reluctance to engage the medieval, students who may well become the next generation of medievalists, having arrived at such careers by a decidedly different path than those who now teach them. Elizabeth Emery concludes the first part of this collection of essays by moving outdoors to discuss tournaments and jousting in twenty-first century North America, activities that more than anything else evidence ‘contemporary preoccupations with issues of class, race, gender and commerce’ (76). The next six essays discuss additional contemporary manifestations of the medieval. Stewart Brookes surveys six film adaptations of Beowulf, which have taken the Old English heroic poem into the genres of ‘horror, action or science fiction’ (82), with decidedly mixed results. Daniel T. Kline offers an overview of contemporary neomedieval digital gaming which may offer the most ‘fantastic neomedievalism’ and the ‘most messed up’ contemporary Middle Ages (93). Lesley Coote follows with a survey of several kinds of twenty-first century ‘medieval’ film, while Philippa Semper reminds us of the continued presence of medievalism on the small-screen in a discussion of the conflict between fantasy and family in the BBC Merlin. Carol L. Robinson bridges the gap between Coote and Kline by turning to the ways in which characterization in film and video...