Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series by James Chapman, and: The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays ed. by Meriem Pagès and Karolyn Kinane, and: Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones ed. by Helen Young, and: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre ed. by Helen Young

Abstract

THE FAIR FIELD OF MEDIEVALISM-THE RECENT HARVESTJAMES CHAPMAN, Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 279 (with 27 stills). isbn: 978-0-7190- 8881-0. $110.00.MERIEM PAGES and KAROLYN KINANE, eds., The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. Pp. vi, 219. isbn: 978-0-7864-7941-2. $40.00.HELEN YOUNG, ed., Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to 'A Game of Thrones.' Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 230. isbn: 978-1-60497-896-4. $104.99.HELEN YOUNG, ed., The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 231. isbn: 978-1-60947-897-1. $109.99.Helen Young is indefatigable. She has published, almost simultaneously, two excellent complementary edited collections of essays that discuss many of the subfields of medievalism. The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre offers nine essays that engage what Young calls 'the multiple Middle Ages' (1). Young eschews dividing this collection into discrete sections-she calls each essay a 'chapter'-better to reflect the 'impossibility of neatly categorizing contemporary medievalisms as well as the tendency of genres to bleed into each other' (4). Chapters are clustered to reveal overlaps rather than boundaries.The first four chapters cluster around issues of gender roles and agency. Clare Bradford and Rebecca Hutton look at the ways in which recent film and television retellings of the Arthuriad have used female protagonists, though that use is neatly circumscribed in a way that denies the protagonists real agency. Judy Ann Ford sees a similar restriction on agency for the protagonists in the films Red Riding Hood and Brave. Geneva Diamond argues that this pattern-a sort of one step forward, two steps backward approach that results in unrealized agency-continues offscreen in the romances of Julie Garwood, where a medieval setting 'allows a hypermasculinization of courtship' (5) not found in Garwood's non-medieval romances. In contrast, Robin Anne Reid notes how Nicola Griffith's 2013 historical novel Hild offers an eponymous hero who successfully counters 'popular neo-medieval fantasies of the twenty-first century' (84). The novel is at its heart a political statement determined to re-envision the distant past in terms of contemporary notions of gender-neutral activism.Alana Bennett's essay changes genre once again as the chapters in this volume move from the big and small screens to print and now to music, specifically the ways that neo-medieval music raises questions about cultural identity. Accuracy of performance is not essential to such music-it is in some ways antithetical to it. Neo-medieval music 'deliberately re-creates and repurposes' medieval music and instruments, coupling them with spectacular stage effects 'to signal and enable an escape from the mundane world into the reclaimed past' (6).Similarly, the video game Assassin's Creed, as Elisabeth Herbst Buzay and Emmanuel Buzay demonstrate, while bearing all the trappings of the medieval, uses those trappings as a backdrop for discussing a variety of contemporary issues, specifically present-day tensions between Christianity and Islam.Carol Robinson surveys issues of gender and sexuality in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and the Matrix film franchise of the brothers Wachowski. Anne McKendry pairs the quest of the modern detective with that of the medieval knight by looking at the medievalist crime fiction of Ellis Peters, Peter Tremayne, and Bernard Knight and finds that both medieval and post-medieval questers seek a common ground-the establishment of social order.The final essay brings this collection back full circle to the Arthuriad, as Molly Brown examines how the art of telling a story, not nostalgia, informs Kevin Crossley- Holland's 2001-2003 Arthurian trilogy and Catherine Fisher's 2002 novel Corbenic. …